Biography

Founder, Sustainable Innovation Council | Inventor & Author of Imagine Next 

Julia Daviy is an inventor, serial founder, and author. Over nearly two decades, she has built ventures and organizations across renewable energy and broader cleantech, advanced manufacturing, distributed production, and sustainable innovation.

Julia created Imagine Next, an initiative spanning a global innovation challenge, a summit in the San Francisco Bay Area, and her forthcoming book, Imagine Next: The Atlas and Method of Planetary Innovation. The work grew from her sustained practice of invention, during which she developed 365 innovation concepts over 616 days, and explores how inventiveness can be developed as a human capacity.

Building Renewable-Energy Markets

Julia’s early work in renewable energy extended across entrepreneurship, industry development, policy, education, and infrastructure. She co-founded Ibcentre, which helped build Ukraine’s emerging renewable-energy ecosystem while operating across international markets. The company created industry platforms including CISOLAR, SEF, EuroSEF, IBES, and Solar Academy, alongside consulting and engineering activities.

Alongside building Ibcentre, Julia was directly involved in shaping the institutional and regulatory foundations of Ukraine’s renewable-energy market. She was one of the initiators of the Association of Alternative Fuel and Energy Market Participants of Ukraine (APEU) and served on its board from 2009 to 2016. At its height, the association represented more than 75% of Ukraine’s renewable-energy market and became the industry’s principal collective voice.

Julia also served as Vice-Chair of the Public Council of the State Agency on Energy Efficiency and Energy Saving of Ukraine, participated in governmental expert groups, including at Ukraine’s Ministry of Environment, and in 2013 joined the Eastern European Committee of the World Wind Energy Association. That same year, she co-founded the Institute of Green Economics of Ukraine, a nonprofit organization focused on the emerging green economy.

At an early stage in the development of Ukraine’s solar market, Julia co-initiated regulatory changes that gave private households access to the renewable-energy market, allowing homeowners for the first time to generate solar electricity and sell surplus power to the grid. She also worked through industry and government bodies on legislation that expanded access to renewable-energy project development for independent market participants, at a time when the sector was heavily concentrated among a small number of large financial-industrial groups.

Until 2014, Julia also led international consulting engagements with government organizations and major corporations across Europe and the Middle East.

Invention & Entrepreneurship

In 2012, Julia co-founded Compact Energy, one of the first manufacturers in Eastern Europe producing high-capacity portable solar chargers. Later, she became an internationally recognized innovator in sustainable digital manufacturing, developing new applications of large-format 3D printing for wearable clothing and fashion and a near-zero-waste manufacturing method, for which she filed a provisional patent application in 2018. Her collections — created on machines she co-engineered — earned multiple awards  and global exhibitions, from New York Fashion Week to the Boston Center for the Arts and FIDM Los Angeles, as well as inclusion in leading books on Industry 4.0 and fashion futures. She also earned a Guinness World Record  (2020) for co-creating the world’s first 3D-printed flag made from flexible TPE — the first flag that behaved like textile and could weave naturally in the wind.

Her later venture, Imageneria, introduced the concept of digital delivery of physical goods — a distributed manufacturing platform enabling consumers to produce objects locally on demand, cutting carbon emissions by up to 90%. In 2021, NASDAQ named Imageneria among the revolutionary platforms in consumer tech of that time.

Academic & Ecosystem Roles

Julia holds an MBA from UC Berkeley Haas, a Master’s in International Economics (Finance and Diplomacy), and a BA in Ecology.
At Berkeley, she served as Venture Partner of the Haas Impact Fund and Berkeley Climate Solutions Fund, later joining Berkeley Ventures.

Julia is an Advisor and Mentor at Berkeley SkyDeck, where she guides founders in climate tech and sustainable innovation.
She co-founded and served as a Founding  Co-Chair of Female Founders and Funders of Berkeley, recognized among the most impactful organizations created at Haas in the past decade, and the Ukrainian Club of Berkeley, the university’s first official organization dedicated to Ukraine. She also served as Vice-Chair for Sustainability at the Berkeley Haas EWMBAA.
Julia is also a Founding Member of the Ukrainian Valley, a Silicon Valley science and tech community uniting innovators, researchers, and investors of Ukrainian origin across leading universities, labs, corporations, and startups.

Julia began her career as an economic analyst, journalist, and television presenter.

She worked at Inter TV, the country’s leading national channel, and later served as a TV presenter and on-air analyst at the Ukrainian Business Channel, where she hosted and produced programs focused on markets and industries.
During this period, she was recognized among the Top 3 Economic Journalists on Ukrainian television by PressZvanie, a national professional ranking.

Her years in media honed her ability to translate complex systems into accessible narratives, a foundation that later shaped her approach to innovation, systemic design, and global communication.

Ibcentre

Its platforms included CISOLAR, which over 13 years became a major meeting and deal-making platform for the solar industry across emerging European markets. Global and regional companies used it to enter new markets, build distribution networks, and sign contracts representing hundreds of megawatts of solar capacity. SEF (Sustainable Energy Forum) connected renewable-energy and energy-efficiency market players across Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia from 2009 to 2025. In 2014, Ibcentre launched EuroSEF (European Energy Security Forum) in Brussels, the first platform focused on strengthening energy security along the EU’s eastern border and across Central and Eastern Europe through renewable energy. Ibcentre later created IBES, the first dedicated battery-energy-storage expos and forums in Ukraine and Romania.

Its Solar Academy, active from 2009 to 2022, trained more than 3,000 entrepreneurs and industry professionals, including teams from major energy companies.

Ibcentre also maintained an international consulting practice serving corporations and public-sector organizations, while its engineering branch developed renewable-energy infrastructure, including bioenergy heating plants. One such plant, built for MAUP, Ukraine’s largest private university, remained Kyiv’s largest privately developed project of its kind for years.

Civic Initiatives

In 2007, Julia founded and self-funded Animals.in.ua, Ukraine’s first online platform for finding lost pets and helping shelter animals find homes; the project operated until 2013.

Julia’s technical foundation began at a physics and mathematics gymnasium and continued through studies in ecology and energy engineering. She earned a BS in Ecology from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and studied energy engineering at Vinnytsia National Technical University. She later completed executive education in Additive Manufacturing and Innovative Design at MIT and Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at UC Berkeley.