Official ADE Lab Hackathon

Colin Benders is a Dutch musician who came up as a trumpeter and bandleader — as Kyteman, and with the Kyteman Orchestra — before turning to modular synthesis and building one of the largest Eurorack systems in the world, running to several hundred modules.

He performs live on hardware, patching in real time rather than arranging on a screen, and has streamed his patching sessions publicly for years, inviting the audience into the process as it happens.

He sets the Escape the Grid challenge (see Challenges & Prizes) and presents it to the teams on the morning of Wednesday 21 October.

Born in Boxtel and based in Amsterdam, Sam Feldt has spent a decade building one of the most recognisable sounds in dance music. His 2015 reimagining of Robin S.’s “Show Me Love” turned a house classic into a global breakthrough — #4 in the UK and BPI Platinum — and the melodic, sun-warmed signature behind it has carried through everything since, to 6.16 billion career streams and 100+ shows a year at Tomorrowland, Ultra, EDC and Coachella.

He founded Heartfeldt Records in 2020 as a home for that sound, alongside Heartfeldt Publishing, Radio and Events and the UN-backed Heartfeldt Foundation. Ten years on from “Show Me Love” he is drawing a line under the sound he helped start: Future Tropical is the next chapter, a named genre with its own rules.

Running that business first-hand is where his challenge comes from: he has built his own internal tooling for contracts, payouts and royalty auditing, and asks teams to build the AI co-pilot that runs a label.

Jean-Baptiste “JB” Thiebaut is CEO of Music Hackspace and Chordline Ventures. He holds a PhD in computer music from Queen Mary University of London and built a career bridging R&D, product, and community in music technology.

He has led programmes and teams focused on creative coding and music technology education, supporting thousands of artists and developers to ship new tools, prototypes, and products. His work sits at the intersection of research, hands-on making, and ecosystem building across the global music tech community.

Jesper Skibsby is a music tech entrepreneur and the Founder and CEO of WARM, a global radio airplay analytics platform headquartered in Copenhagen. Since founding the company in 2017, Jesper has built WARM into a leading data infrastructure provider for the global music industry, tracking airplay across more than 21,000 stations in 150 countries, with strong reach into the dance music sector.

He is also Co-founder and head of vision of Lisbon Dance Summit (LDS), an international electronic music conference and city-wide festival held in Lisbon, connecting artists, labels, and industry professionals within the global dance music scene.

A hands-on tech builder and strategic advisor across music and tech, Jesper brings an entrepreneur’s eye for product and data to the live music and radio space. A frequent speaker at international conferences, he combines an operator’s perspective with a genuine passion for dance music.

Jesper leads operations across multiple entities spanning Denmark and Portugal, and is based in Lisbon.

Meike Nolte is a Berlin-based music industry executive and consultant with more than 20 years of experience across electronic music, music technology and the wider digital music business. Her expertise spans business development, strategic partnerships, artist and label relations, digital distribution, marketing and international growth.

Most recently, Meike served as Director of Business Development at music and culture agency Circulate, leading business development and strategic partnerships across the music and music-tech sectors. Previously, as Senior Global Business Development Manager at Believe, she developed and implemented global sourcing and acquisition strategies for electronic music labels and artists.

Before joining Believe, Meike spent seven years at Beatport, progressing from Label Manager to Director of Global Artist Services. She played a central role in developing Beatport’s Artist Services department and worked closely with artists, managers, labels and industry partners around the world, creating marketing collaborations and international opportunities for both established and emerging talent.

Earlier in her career, Meike was Head of Marketing and Country Manager Germany for WiMP Music, now TIDAL. She also held senior international marketing and promotion roles at BPitch Control, M-nus and Plus 8, working with artists including Richie Hawtin, Moderat, Paul Kalkbrenner, Ellen Allien and Dillon.

Today, Meike is Head of A&R and Partnerships at Music Hackspace, and advises music and music-tech companies on business development, partnerships and growth. She is also a regular speaker, moderator, jury member and mentor at international industry events and initiatives, including ADE, IMS, Reeperbahn Festival, Keychange and VUT MEWEM.

Romain Pouillon is a music tech entrepreneur, DJ / Producer, and Chief Strategy Officer at Algoriddim, the company behind djay Pro. Bridging underground club culture with cutting-edge technology, he’s spent over a decade working at the intersection of DJ performance, hardware, and software innovation at Native Instruments, Beatport, and Algoriddim djay.

As DJ ROM 303, he brings a deep love of electronic music and hands-on DJ experience to conversations about the future of DJing, creative tools, and artist-driven tech. His unique vantage point — spanning underground club culture, enterprise music software, and hardware innovation — makes him an invaluable voice in evaluating hacks at this event.

Jordi Pons is a researcher at Stability AI working on generative models for audio and music. Previously he was a staff researcher at Dolby Laboratories.

He received a PhD in music technology, large-scale audio collections, and deep learning at the Music Technology Group (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona), following an MSc in sound and music computing at the same institution and a BSc in telecommunications engineering at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Barcelona).

He has also interned at IRCAM (Paris), the German Hearing Center (Hannover), Pandora Radio (Bay Area, USA), and Telefónica Research (Barcelona).

Josiah Taylor is an Audio Model QA on the research team at Stability AI, and has spent the last four years evaluating generative models for audio and music.

Josiah holds a master’s degree in music production from Staffordshire University.

Aël leads operations at Soundcharts, where he has spent the last six years building custom data tools and reports for music professionals. A board member of Music Tech France and a former radio professional, he focuses on making industry data more accessible and actionable.

Outside of work, he performs operettas in Paris and enjoys spearfishing in Brittany.