About

Annelies is the founding Executive Director of WaterSpark.  For more than a decade Annelies has leveraged her passion for bringing people and markets together to accelerate water innovation and create social and environmental impact by means of strategic partnerships and programs that strengthen the innovation ecosystem of water. Annelies has held strategic management and marketing positions in an international landscape within the water industry and startup ecosystem, including, most recently, Techleap.NL, Isle Utilities and Aquatech Global Events. Annelies decided to join the 98 Sparks family in 2018 and she has been leading 98 Sparks (including Pureterra Ventures) impact and brand strategy.

This resulted in the recent establishment of WaterSpark, an initiative to achieve the broader mission of addressing the water crisis through awareness, education, support and finance of innovations in water and accelerating technologies and businesses that can bring those innovations to market. PureTerra Ventures and 98 Sparks are core supporters of the WaterSpark initiative.

Annelies is fluent in Dutch and English and resides with her family in the suburbs of Amsterdam. She holds a MSc in Business Administration (Marketing and Innovation) from University in Amsterdam (Uva) and also studies at Georgia Tech (Atlanta, USA) and Pretoria, SA. She is based in China and the Netherlands.