Draft:Rasmus Bech Hansen

Rasmus Bech Hansen is a Danish businessperson, who is the founder and CEO of the disease forecasting and data analytics company, Airfinity.

Early life and education
Hansen was born in December 1975. When he was 13, he founded a newspaper. He holds a BSc in Political science from the University of Copenhagen and an MPA from Harvard University in 2001. He received the Crown Prince Frederic award for excellent scholarship.

When he was 21, he was appointed as a special advisor to Ole Vig Jensen, the Danish Minister of Education after his impressive speech at the Ministry's annual Sorø meeting.

Career
Hansen has worked for several companies and as an independent writer and consultant,  including Fast Company and Kontrapunkt. He left Kontrapunkt in early 2011, where he was brand partner and strategy director for seven years.

In 2011, he joined London-based consultancy Venturethree as a strategy director. He co-wrote a book Tilbage til virkeligheden with Jens Martin Skibsted, arguing for the integration of marketing and product development and several influential pieces for Harvard Business Review.

Hansen later joined the Danish daily newspaper group Information.dk as a board member.

In 2015, he founded Airfinity with Sacha Carton. After the loss of his mother to cancer, he attributed the growth of Airfinity to a greater sense of urgency and focus. It became one of the companies in which the UK government's Future Fund retains equity. Airfinity became one of the most quoted data companies in the media for its COVID-19 reports, having been described as doing "the best modelling of the pandemic data" by professor Sir John Bell. The company became the Financial Times' Tech Champion of the Year in the health category in 2023.

Public appearances
He emerged as one of the leading voices on the COVID-19-related subjects, appearing regularly in Bloomberg, BBC, The Telegraph, and CNN, and has gotten attention across other media channels around the world.

In April 2023, Hansen was one of the key speakers at the Rhodes Policy Summit, creating a positive legacy from the COVID-19 pandemic.

He has spoken with the president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen on BBC Four and argued to expand the ongoing global vaccine development facilities to accelerate response times to future pandemic risks.