Primary Job Title Co-founder & CEO Primary Organization Airfinity
Location London, England, United Kingdom Regions Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Gender Male
Website www.airfinity.com LinkedIn View on LinkedIn X (Twitter) View on X
Early life and education The son of two academics, Hansen grew up in Jutland, Denmark. He founded a newspaper at 13 and, whilst at high school, received national attention as the writer of a prize-winning essay on Denmark’s response to the Second World War.
He went on to study Political Science at Copenhagen University. In the early years of
these studies, he wrote an acclaimed book entry on democracy and consequently was invited to become special advisor to the Danish Minister of Education. He was the youngest person to date to have taken up this role. Rasmus’s Bachelor thesis on “The Real Public Sphere vs. the Habermas Ideal” was later published as a booklet and led to him being awarded the Crown Prince Frederic Scholarship to Harvard University. He graduated with an MPA from the Harvard School of Government in 2001.
Career Hansen briefly worked for Forrester Research as a consultant before moving back to Denmark, where he worked as a writer and co-founded a strategy consultancy – a professional decision he has described as an expedient way to get paid to disucss big ideas with decision makers . During this time, he had a regular column at Berlingske Tidende.
In 2012 he was recruited by the London based consultancy Venturethree as a strategy director. He wrote a book arguing for the integration of marketing and product development and several influential pieces for Harvard Business Review .
He later worked as an independent advisor to a number of multinationals while founding Airfinity in 2015 with Sacha Carton. Initially focused on scientific conference data, Airfinity has evolved into a broader new science intelligence and analytics platform - a shift Hansen has partly attributed to the loss of his mother to cancer in 2018 and his own struggle to identify emerging treatments for her condition.
COVID-19 During the COVID-19 pandemic Airfinity has become an authoritative source of scientific information and Hansen has emerged as one of the leading voices on the subject. He appears regularly on Bloomberg, BBC, Sky News and CNN and been quoted across multiple other media channels around the world. Hansen has been quoted in the Lancet and Nature multiple times, with Airfinity receiving over 20,000 media mentions in 2021.
Hansen and Airfinity notably correctly predicted the C-19 vaccine trial readout dates for Pfizer&BioNTech and Moderna’s candidates and was the first company to highlight global production shortages. Airfinity was the first organisation to showcase the global inequality of vaccine purchases which helped secure more support for COVAX. Hansen later got embroiled in controversy arguing that the EU was underinvesting in vaccines and hence would inoculate its population later than the UK and USA, criticism the president of the EU commission Ursula von der Leyen later conceded was correct. Hansen has, on multiple occasions, argued for expanding ongoing global vaccine development capacity to accelerate response times to future pandemic risks.
