Scouting for Growth

• Sara Simeone: NoCodeLab Vibe Coding or Launching AI Startups with No-Code

  On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Sara Simeone, an award-winning entrepreneur behind NoCodeLab.ai, the First Vibe Coding Launchpad that helps non-technical dreamers ship AI-powered products in just five weeks—no keyboard sorcery required. Whether you’re a Gen Z founder sketching ideas on a dorm whiteboard, an investor scouting the next scalable platform, or a corporate leader hunting for fresh growth engines, Sara’s story is your front-row seat to how Vibe Coding is about to change the way we build. KEY TAKEAWAYS Vibe coding is defined as creating something using your natural language and vibe with the code to try to understand how the product in front of you is changing as you add more prompts/features. It’s an evolution of the drag-and-drop of no-code platforms but allows you to express yourself in a clear, specific and tangible way to translate visions into products. When I stepped into the startup founder world, I realised that there was a very big problem: There are a lot of subject matter experts who had a lot of dreams, but they couldn’t make these into tangible products. A lot of accelerator programmes only teach you how to launch a product rather than create one because they take for granted that you have a technical co-founder or you can create it yourself, this excludes non-technical founders from a big portion of the entrepreneurial world. Founders don’t need to become techies, but they need a new process to make tch work for them. That’s when I realised AI can help. My goal is to give non-technical founders the creative freedom to move fast but with the discipline of the corporate world. We guide them to develop something new, that wouldn’t have been able to have been developed before. It’s now possible to create, realise and build that idea, it’s a mindset shift where we can become our own CPOs, CEOs, CMO, COOs, etc, we just need the right community around us. I want founders to be aware that they can solve their own problems and they can build something in plain English. When you’re building something, ask yourself who are the customers? What do they need? How much am I going to charge for this? Once there you can start generating technical foundations and product requirements – front/back end, database, APIs, etc in order to create that product. BEST MOMENTS ‘Vibe coding was coined in 2025, so it’s brand new, but I’d been doing it before the term was created.’ ‘AI gives us a lot of tools but we need to know how to use them.’ ‘The beauty of AI platforms is that if you see that something is going wrong you can question the code, understand what’s wrong and ask the AI to fix it for you.’ ‘With vibe coding and NoCodeLab you can build your ideas in days, weeks, or months depending on your technical expertise or background.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Sara Simeone is a multi-award-winning entrepreneur and product strategist who has spent the past two decades turning frontier technologies into real-world growth engines. Today she wears several cutting-edge hats: Founder of NoCodeLab.ai, the first vibe-driven coding accelerator for non-technical founders; CEO & Co-founder of Niftyz.io, the Web3 token-factory that lets brands transform data and IP into tradable digital assets; and lecturer in Blockchain For Business at the MedieInstitutet in Sweden. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Facebook TikTok Email Website

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• Ivan and Olha Pylypchuk: Unlocking the Power of Agentic AI

  On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Ivan Pylypchuk, the CEO of Softblues, and Olha Pylypchuk, the company’s COO. In today’s discussion, we’ll explore: What Agentic AI is and why it’s poised to disrupt traditional business processes, how Ivan and Olha are leveraging multi-agent systems to solve domain-specific challenges and deliver business transformation, and the future of AI agents and their role in shaping the workplace of tomorrow. KEY TAKEAWAYS If you talk about traditional AI systems, they can handle one simple, specific task, such as image recognition, data classification, content generation. Agentic AI is more autonomous and capable of complex decision making across multiple steps. Our approach is focussed on controlled, multi-agent systems. The biggest challenge companies face is collecting data and putting it together. Often, companies have their valuable data spread across different systems and departments, like customer databases, email records, business software. These don’t always talk to each other. To have an effective AI implementation, you must make sure that all this data is collected neatly and accurately. Surprisingly, some companies don’t know how their people work. When you observe their processes sometimes, they miss important details about their daily operations which can create a lot of wasted investment when we rectify these mistakes afterwards. That’s why we invest a lot of time work with and talking to the businesses about how their workflows move from point A to B. Then we can enhance them with the help of AI. How team members embrace this technology is very important. Even a perfect solution will fail it teams don’t use it. We create simple interfaces and make sure our systems explain their recommendations in plain language. This approach improves the understanding of how AI works dramatically and build trust. BEST MOMENTS ‘Agentic AI gives us scalability in different domains, explainability to understand what it’s doing, so we can provide the exact information that is needed across an organisation.’ ‘It’s important to start very small, on a piece of a project so the AI can show clearly its quick results. After the goal has been demonstrated, then we scale the solution.’ ‘Our recruitment solution help reduced time to hire by 60% and provided an increase in the quality of hires by 40%.’ ‘It gives you more time to do strategic work that brings more value to the business than managing this data.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Ivan Pylypchuk is the CEO and AI Solution Architect at Softblues, a company specializing in building multi-agent AI systems to tackle real-world business challenges. LinkedIn Olha Pylypchuk is the Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Softblues, where she drives operational excellence and spearheads AI-driven business automation initiatives. LinkedIn ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Facebook TikTok Email Website

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  52:54
• Areiel Wolanow On Unleashing AI, Quantum, and Emerging Tech

  On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine meets Areiel Wolanow, the managing director of Finserv Experts, who discusses his journey from IBM to founding FinServ Experts, emphasising the importance of focusing on business models enabled by technology rather than the technology itself. Areiel delves into the challenges and opportunities presented by artificial intelligence, responsible AI practices, and the implications of quantum computing for data security, highlighting the need for organisations to adapt their approaches to digital transformation, advocating for a migration strategy over traditional transformation methods KEY TAKEAWAYS Emerging tech should be leveraged to create new business models rather than just re-engineering existing ones. Understanding the business implications of technology is crucial for delivering value. When harnessing artificial intelligence, it's essential to identify the real underlying problems within an organisation, assess its maturity, and build self-awareness before applying maturity models and gap analyses. The EU AI Act serves as a comprehensive guideline for responsible AI use, offering risk categories and controls that can benefit companies outside the EU by providing a framework for ethical AI practices without the burden of compliance. Organisations should prepare for the future of quantum computing by ensuring their data is protected against potential vulnerabilities. This involves adopting quantum-resilient algorithms and planning for the transition well in advance. Leaders should place significant responsibility on younger team members who are more familiar with emerging technologies. Providing them with autonomy and support can lead to innovative solutions and successful business outcomes. BEST MOMENTS 'We focus not on the technology itself, but on the business models the tech enables.' 'The first thing you have to do... is to say, OK, is the proximate cause the real problem?' 'The best AI regulations out there is the EU AI Act... it actually benefits AI companies outside the EU more than it benefits within.' 'Digital transformations have two things in common. One is they're expensive, and two is they always fail.' ABOUT THE GUEST Areiel Wolanow is the managing director of Finserv Experts. He is an experienced business leader with over 25 years of experience in business transformation solutioning, sales, and execution. He served as one of IBM’s key thought leaders in blockchain, machine learning, and financial inclusion. Areiel has deep experience leading large, globally distributed teams; he has led programs of over 100 people through the full delivery life cycle, and has managed budgets in the tens of millions of dollars. In addition to his delivery experience, Areiel also serves as a senior advisor on blockchain, machine learning, and technology adoption; he has worked with central banks and financial regulators around the world, and is currently serving as the insurance industry advisor for the UK Parliament’s working group on blockchain. LinkedIn ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Facebook TikTok Email Website

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  49:08
• Lisa Bechtold: From AI Governance to AI Transformation

  On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Lisa Bechtold, global executive and strategic leader in technology and law who currently serves at the head of AI governance from a transformative viewpoint at Zurich Insurance Group. In this episode, we explore the challenges and opportunities of the current AI transformation, what it takes to drive innovation in insurance while minimizing potential risks about AI, the role of digital trust and sustainability in leveraging AI for long-term growth, and how leaders can prepare their teams for the digital transformation ahead of us. KEY TAKEAWAYS AI governance is about how we use AI, which already affects all areas of our private and business lives. The acceptance and potential success of AI applications, tools and use cases correlate with the respect of legal systems and the culture of the country or region. With the tools, systems and platforms we’ve built at Zurich, we’ve driven and scaled AI adoption, including the reuse of solutions which have proven extremely successful. In parallel, we drive AI literacy to foster adoption, but also to ensure AI tools are being used in an optimal way. For example, setting the right prompts is crucial for generating the most valuable output from GenAI tools. On one hand, we invest in the education of our workforce, with digital upscaling and AI literacy in particular. On the other hand, it’s crucial to allow for experimentation in a safe sandbox environment so that everyone is embrace the technological opportunities. Insurance has always been a data-driven industry, so the adoption of AI techniques is very well founded in insurance, from risk modelling to all phases of the insurance business value chain. Looking ahead, with the AI revolution taking place this year, both opportunities and risks will be taken to another level. Today,AI systems are beginning to autonomously interact with one another and adapt their behaviours accordingly. I expect, as things increase within both the interaction of individual AI agents as well as in the creation of high-performance, multi-agent systems. Such multi-agent systems bring a multitude of business opportunities but also trigger challenges, such as potential information asymmetries and miscoordination, all of which need to be understood and managed. BEST MOMENTS ‘The goal of deploying AI solutions must be to optimise the benefits of the technology while effectively minimising the risks.’‘AI governance is the foundation of being a catalyst of AI innovation and ensures high-quality outcomes and inspires trust in customers.’‘Today we’re focusing on the scalability and further optimisation of our AI capabilities.’‘Managing the complexity of multi-agent systems in a safe and lean way while optimising business value will be one of the key priorities for 2025.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Lisa Bechtold: As a Global Executive and Strategic Leader and Leader in Technology & Law, I have profound expertise and experience in Data, AI, Governance, Digital Risk and Regulatory Affairs to protect corporate assets and optimise business performance. In my current role as Head of AI Governance at Zurich Insurance Group, I have pioneered and led the operationalisation of a framework for AI Quality & Safety to oversee the development and deployment of AI solutions globally. My multifaceted background positions me perfectly to provide strategic advice on data, digital solutions, and technology topics, integrating legal & risk considerations, to generate sustainable business value and digital trust as a competitive edge. LinkedIn ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Facebook TikTok Email Website

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  29:28
• Alex Schmelkin: Transforming Insurance Underwriting with GenAI and AI Agents

  On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Alex Schmelkin, a visionary entrepreneur who's reshaping the future of insurance operations. Alex is the Founder and CEO of Sixfold, a company at the forefront of harnessing Generative AI to empower insurance underwriters with groundbreaking tools and capabilities. Today, we'll explore how Sixfold is leveraging Generative AI to transform underwriting practices, the challenges and opportunities in implementing AI at scale, and Alex's vision for the future of insurance operations. KEY TAKEAWAYS There’s close to $7 trillion of premium written around the globe every year. That equals 7% of global GDP, it’s an enormous amount of premium that’s needed for the world to function and for people and businesses to take risks. The most underserved population are the underwriters, the people making decisions day in day out on that $7 trillion worth of business trying to figure out the good and bad risks and why. There’s so little support for these unsung heroes. The typical underwriter is reading the equivalent of a novel every 2-3 days in documentation. These are not interesting fiction novels, they’re information-dense losses, statements of values of property and exposures. We’ve expected them to consume more and more but it’s information overload. Enter language models and AI, in the first time in human history we have the ability to take in a nearly limitless volume of data and help the underwriter to see through that to find the patterns without having to read every single word on every single page and free them to do the extra research at the end to find the best result for the end customer. Regulators understand that AI is here and have already embraced it. They’re not as ahead of it as we would like them to be, as an industry, and they’re not getting everything right. But by putting a few fence posts around the problem we’re trying to solve they’ve forced the conversation and the industry to respond to it and to start rolling out the way we are with some of these AI transparency partner models. The single challenge we run into everywhere is underwriter trust. The underwriters, despite being overworked, there not being enough of them, and despite it being a challenging job, are really good at what they do. The reason is they’ve been trained over the years to do everything they can to get the right answer. They’re the front line protecting insurance companies from bringing on bad risks. The hardest thing is to convince them is that AI is accurate. If they have a bad experience with AI first time they may not go back ever. BEST MOMENTS ‘I found insurance – or it found me – almost 20 years ago and I’ve never looked back, and it’s all underwriting all the time.’‘The biggest use of GenAI today is helping underwriters to find more accuracy, be more effective, and more transparent in their underwriting efforts.’‘We attempt to arm the human with a bevy of different things for the that are the less value-producing part of their jobs.’‘The human is so much more effective when they’re working beside a robot that helps them be more accurate and more efficient at their job.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Alex Schmelkin is the Founder and CEO of Sixfold and is at the forefront of revolutionizing how insurance underwriters operate through Generative AI—a game-changing approach that not only enhances decision-making but also streamlines processes for a more efficient future. His knack for identifying industry pain points and transforming them into innovative solutions has been the backbone of his success. With a deep-rooted belief in the power of technology to drive growth, Alex has consistently pushed the envelope, challenging norms and inspiring those around him. Beyond his entrepreneurial endeavors, Alex is a dynamic speaker who captivates audiences with insights on SaaS, customer experience, and technology ethics. His passion for responsible innovation shines through in every conversation, as he advocates for solutions that not only meet business needs but also uphold ethical standards. LinkedIn ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Facebook TikTok Email Website

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  45:42

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