Maria Founta is Google’s Head of Marketing for South East Europe. She focuses on establishing strategic partnerships and launching Google services and initiatives that support consumers and help businesses grow online. She is also the founder of Grow Greek Tourism Online, a Google initiative that has supported over 250K people in the tourism sector to develop their digital skills and grow their business; the program has scaled to Japan and more countries. She first joined Google in 2006, as a Google Customer Solutions Manager, leading the teams in 8 markets in EMEA. Before Google, Maria held an engineering management position at Rhetorical Systems Ltd., a world-leading Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems developer in Edinburgh, Scotland. She joined the company in 2002 and led the design and development of its speech products for South Europe. Maria holds a degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from NTUA and recently graduated from INSEAD’s Marketing Academy in France. She was born and raised in Greece and has worked in the UK, Ireland, Greece and Japan.