Emma Gavala has over 9 years of experience in Product Marketing and Go-to-Market across global ventures in TravelTech, Sustainable Tourism, and Impact/Public Benefit organisations. In recent years, she has focused her work on ClimateTech in response to the climate and decarbonisation emergency.
Emma is currently Chief of Staff at Arkion, a Stockholm-based AI/Computer Vision scale-up for power grid inspections. Previously, she led Product Marketing at VC-backed startups in the US and Europe, with media features in TIME Best Inventions 2020, The New York Times, and Financial Times, working directly with C-suite executives.

She began her career in policy and investment advisory, drawing on her background in economics, and later founded a consultancy focused on alternative tourism, glamping, and outdoor hospitality. During this time, she advised the Hellenic Chamber of Hotels and the Greek Ministry of Tourism on the creation of the Greek Glamping sector, earning a Tourism Award in 2019 for her contributions. She also maintains close ties to Greece through her ongoing involvement in Marepi, her family's 40+ year-old, female-led business in elderly care and hospitality.

Emma has proudly mentored Capsule!@T@! startups for 6 years, including past winners Campsaround and Unlimited Adrenaline. She is an alumna of the London School of Economics, ESADE Business School, and Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, where she pursued short-term executive studies.
She loves to work with founders who prioritise realism over relentless growth, who are down to earth and humble while maintaining a healthy level of ambition, and who maintain their nerdiness around their product even as they grow and scale; founders who put product excellence above all else and always choose to showcase their tangible proof of traction over glorified marketing images; founders who are relentless in short-term execution and have a bias for action, while never losing sight of the long-term horizon — and who can speak in a straightforward, clean-cut way about what they do, even when solving multi-layered problems.

She also deeply values ventures that help distribute tourism’s economic benefits more equitably — across regions, communities, and seasons — while promoting a tourism model in Greece that is sustainable, balanced, and thoughtful; one that avoids resource overuse and actively respects local communities.