Biography

Strategic Investor | Systems Architect | Founder, Sustainable Innovation Council | Author of Imagine Next

Julia Daviy  is a systems strategist, investor, and innovation architect shaping regenerative infrastructures across energy, materials, and design. She is the Founder and Chair of the Sustainable Innovation Council, a global initiative accelerating climate technologies and sustainable systems in emerging and underserved markets.

Julia also serves as an advisor to climate tech founders and mentor at Berkeley SkyDeck, where she supports early-stage founders in climate and deep tech. As a member of the selection committee, she helps evaluate applications and guide startups through fundraising, pilot development, and systems-level strategy. Her work at SkyDeck reflects her continued commitment to building bridges between capital, innovation, and long-term planetary value.

Julia is also a Venture Partner at Courtyard Ventures, a founder-focused fund supporting early-stage companies emerging from the UC Berkeley ecosystem. Her investment work focuses on climate tech, deep systems innovation, and solutions aligned with long-term regenerative value.

Julia’s work sits at the intersection of capital design, deep tech, and ecological transformation. She is the author of Imagine Next: The Atlas of 365 Innovation Concepts for a Regenerative World, a forthcoming book based on her original challenge to create one sustainable innovation concept per day for a year. She also created the Sustainable Innovation Challenge, Innovation Arbitrage pilot model, and Sustainable Innovation Day, now the largest climate innovation summit in the East Bay.

She began her career as an award-winning economic journalist and TV presenter, reporting on energy markets and macroeconomics. This gave her early access to policymakers and helped shape her ability to translate complexity into public understanding—a skill she now applies to climate tech, systems investing, and governance.

Julia co-founded and led Ibcentre, a platform that facilitated over $4B in clean energy transactions and helped shape renewable energy markets across Europe. She played a key role in establishing Ukraine’s household solar policy and co-founded both the Ukrainian Renewable Energy Association (APEU) and the Institute of Green Economics of Ukraine. She also launched the European Energy Security Forum in Brussels to convene EU policymakers and climate leaders around the role of decentralized energy for safety in Europe (2014).

In parallel, Julia became a recognized pioneer in sustainable 3D printing and circular manufacturing. She co-founded New Age Lab, developed one of the first large-format 3D printers for flexible clothing, and created the first commercially available 3D-printed garments in the U.S. 

She later founded Imageneria, a distributed additive manufacturing platform that enabled low-emission production and reduced CO₂ by up to 90%. She was also a co-founder of the first manufacturer of portable solar chargers of extraordinary capacity in Eastern Europe as co-founder of Compact Energy.

Her foundation in science and engineering is both deep and interdisciplinary. Julia studied energy engineering before graduating summa cum laude in Environmental Science from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, and also holds BA and MA degrees in International Economics and Finance from Taras Shevchenko National University. She studied at a physics and mathematics gymnasium (a competitive high school focused on advanced sciences), and was accepted into the preparatory program of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 8th grade. Later she completed executive programs in Design Thinking (UVA Darden), Additive Manufacturing (MIT), and AI/ML Strategies (UC Berkeley).

Julia earned her MBA from UC Berkeley Haas, where she co-founded the Female Founders and Funders of Berkeley, served as VP of Sustainability, and contributed to venture capital and impact investing initiatives including Courtyard Ventures, the Haas Impact Fund, and the Climate Solutions Fund.

Her work has been recognized with the Edison Gold Award, a Guinness World Record, and the Green Product Award, and she has spoken at leading institutions and forums including NATO, UC Berkeley, FASHINNOVATION.

“We’re not here to scale the past.
We’re here to compose futures more intelligent, more just, and more alive than what we inherited.”