Paul Niel is a Hong Kong based social entrepreneur, future thinker and adventurer.
Paul’s passion is the exploration of the unknown – the borders of technology and the last white spots of this planet. He supports and sponsors enterprises that use exponential technologies to solve grand challenges. He is co-founder of Peared, a lifestyle company for older adults and helped start Luxarity, a Hong Kong based enterprise with a mission to up cycle luxury fashion. He is also an active angel investor supporting small and innovative businesses in Europe and Asia. In addition Paul works with charities in Nepal, Hong Kong and Kenya to address social integration and rural development. He is an ambassador for the Exponential Organisations (ExO) Program and an alumni of Singularity University.
Singularity University was founded by inventor, futurist and AI expert Ray Kurzweil under the support of Google and NASA. Every year a small group of outstanding global talent gets selected to attend its lectures on future, non linear technologies to solve mankind’s largest issues. Over the last year it has launched ground breaking innovative companies like Made in Space, Matternet and Modern Meadows. Paul is Singularity’s ambassador in Hong Kong and director of the Global Impact Competition: Smart Cities. The ExO Program focuses on the application of latest technologies to leverage openness, transparency and abundance within an organisational structure in order to create faster and more efficient structure equipped for the opportunities and challenges of the next decades.
After graduating from University of Vienna, where he read statistic and was early developer in machine learning, Paul worked for more than a decade in finance which took him to New York, London and led him ultimately to Hong Kong. His passion to explore the planet led him into adventures and expeditions around the globe and into more than 85 countries. In 2013 he claimed the top of Mt Everest, the highest mountain in the world, as well as Lhotse, a day later, becoming one of only ten climbers ever having achieved this. He has also successfully climbed the highest mountain on every continent, the seven summits. Most recently he was exploring a yet undiscovered, remote corner of Eastern Tibet.
