YTILI Fellows from

previous years.

Filipa Marušić is the founder and CEO of Sol Travel Croatia, a tourist agency that offers unique and customized experiences to clients that demonstrate the local traditions, heritage, and culture in the Dalmatia region of Croatia. Filipa serves niche clients with a primary focus on experiencing culture and cuisine, while also operating as the General Manager of Hotel Peristil in Split. With a specific target market and select partners, Filipa uses her marketing expertise of food tours, wine tastings, day trips to hidden gem locations, and other small businesses to create tailor-made vacation plans. Through her YTILI experience, Filipa aims to grow her business network but also improve her personal skillset by broadening her views of the American entrepreneurship mindset. While she has some familiarity with how U.S.-based companies operate, Filipa hopes to observe in closer detail how businesses in the tourism industry conduct their operations. 

Mari Davishtili is the founder of Mygallery, a platform that seeks to support independent artists with communication and promotion tools to connect them with prospective customers. By facilitating the marketing and logistics of purchasing art, Mari unites the art community by establishing customers as the owners of their own private galleries to create a unique and positive exchange of art and emotion. By easing the pathways to acquire artwork through an open, free, and online platform, Mari seeks to expand the audience of the talented artists in Georgia. Through the YTILI program, Mari aims to acquire a new perspective of her everyday process and use the experience of participating in a diverse team to push the limits of the impact she can make. 

Fani Sourla is co-founder and Operations Manager at Dataphoria, an organization that developed an analytics-as-a-service platform that helps sustainability-driven enterprises to automatically track, improve, and communicate their Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) performance. Through her environmental engineering and legislative experience, she focuses on the improvement of environmental issues, carbon footprint calculations, and sustainability metrics methodologies in the green data integration of management. Through her YTILI experience, Fani seeks to discover how businesses operate in the United States’ ecosystem through sustainable business transitions as a way to further her own understanding of environmental ideas and solutions.

Nadica Jovanovik is a Program Director at Together Advancing Common Trust (TAKT), a non-governmental organization that seeks to bridge cultures and combat gender inequalities through sports-based initiatives. Nadica focuses on empowering youth and communities through leadership training for young girls, the development of youth leaders, and other services that foster an inclusive and sustainable environment for female athletes. Nadica’s goals for the YTILI Fellowship are to extend her network with new partnerships, and to improve her business and leadership skills in order to better advocate for local youth in North Macedonia.

Yvonne Knap is the founder of the StarKid Universe project, a brand of primarily digital media storytelling products that lead children through the world of meditation and mindfulness in order to combat emotional distress, anxiety, and socialization issues. Yvonne helps develop in-depth programming and a TV series that aims to provide meaningful educational content for children through the virtues of inner peace and compassion in order to reach their full potential. As a part of her YTILI experience, Yvonne aims to be inspired creatively and professionally through connections with fellow entrepreneurs and immersion in American culture.

CEO and co-founder of FuVeX Carlos Matilla Codesal defines himself as an entrepreneur and engineer. Carlos prides himself on the fact that FuVeX, a start-up that automates aerial data capture through long-range industrial drones, is the only company to have received Spanish authorization to perform long-range infrastructure inspections with drones. By participating in the YTILI program, he seeks to gain new insight into the operations and scaling of deep-tech companies around the world and meet inspiring entrepreneurs who drive change.

Júlia is the founder and CEO of Sunsmith, her own print design studio with a freelance design team made up of women from around the world who focus on creating expressive print designs for fashion and textiles. Sunsmith creates and sells exclusive print designs to brands, primarily focusing on swimwear, activewear, and ready-to-wear products. Júlia’s vision for design embraces a balance of sensitivity and pragmatism in order to use design as a powerful brand positioning tool.

At Urbane Dörfer Genossenschaft, Benjamin Ammann is a venture developer who aims for the systematic development of self-managed urban villages by flipping development plans to build communities first, and then buildings around them in order to instill their values and concepts in the area. Such development reflects a community’s interests and promotes the desired behavioral practices they would like to see. From his YTILI experience, Benjamin intends to learn from others about housing initiatives and see how they can profit from each other.