Dr. Maria Terzi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Malloc, an AI-driven cybersecurity startup focused on mobile security and the first Cypriot company to join Y Combinator. She holds a BSc in Computer Science Innovation and a PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Lancaster. Maria worked as a Software Engineer at Google and as a Lecturer and Research Associate at leading Cypriot institutions. She is a two-time Google hackathon winner and a Facebook AI Scholar. In 2020, she left academia to lead Malloc. Under her leadership, Malloc secured almost $2 million in investments and launched a mobile security app with over 1 million downloads worldwide. Maria has been recognized among Europe’s “35 under 35” by the European Commission, named a “Face of Europe” by the European Parliament,  and won multiple awards including the MF Woman of the Year Award (Innovation Track) and Forbes Cyprus Women in Tech Award. Beyond Malloc, she is a passionate advocate for privacy, cybersecurity, and AI, and actively supports Cyprus’s tech ecosystem as part of the hack{Cyprus} organizing team.