The Swiss ICT Investor Club (SICTIC) connects smart money investors to Swiss seed and early-stage tech startups.
The SICTIC Board provides leadership for achieving SICTIC’s mission to connect Swiss early-stage deep tech startups with smart money investors and is committed to ensuring the association’s impact on the Swiss tech startup ecosystem, with close collaboration with their partners and angel investors.
SICTIC is overseen by several pro-bono Board Members, who are actively involved in the ecosystem by participating in industry events, mentoring startups and supporting organisations, and bringing their experience to help build successful companies.
SICTIC is a non-profit association, which has a strong angel investor community and organises the deal flow and matchmaking of startups and investors online and at pitching events. We have offices in Zürich, Lausanne, and Ticino.
Board
Dr. Thomas Dübendorfer
Thomas Dübendorfer holds a Ph.D. and master in computer science with honors with distinction from ETH Zurich. He worked as software engineer in Silicon Valley and seven years as Tech Lead on security and privacy projects at Google in Zürich, receiving three Google OC awards.
Dr. Bolko Hohaus
Vice President
Director Investors Romandy
Bolko Hohaus holds a Ph.D. in economics as well as a master in statistics and computer science from LMU München. He is founder of HCP, a company focussed on fintech innovation, and is active as business angel, startup coach and serving as a board member in an early stage start-up.
Ralph Mogicato
Vice President
Director Investors German-Speaking Switzerland
Ralph Mogicato has over 25 years of experience in the financial industry in Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Singapore. He is now an active investor, board member or advisor for startup companies in the technology field (e.g. Starmind, unblu, Contovista) and guest lecturer at several universities of applied sciences as well as a lecturer at the University of Zurich.
Magdalena Tarasinska
Magdalena Tarasinska has over 15 years of corporate finance experience in Fortune 500 companies and currently serves as CFO in a fast growing Swiss ICT startup. She represents Switzerland at World Business Angels Investor Forum as a VP Startup Committee.
Anca Albu
Board Member
Director Community
Anca has actively contributed for the past 12 years to the growth of the global tech startup ecosystem. She was one of the first to join the core Startup Weekend team in 2010, and support the company into becoming the biggest entrepreneurial education organization worldwide. She had an instrumental role in growing and connecting the European entrepreneurial community with her own organization CEE Changers, and also connecting VC’s with tech startups from NYC to London and Amsterdam.
Dr. Thomas Billeter
Board Member
Director Ticino Investors
Thomas Billeter holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Zurich and a Master of Science Degree in Electrotechnical Engineering from ETH Zurich. He started his career as an engineer with IBM, then moving on to set up and manage a data communications business for Ascom.
Dr. Alain Dargham
Board Member
Director Dealflow
Alain Dargham holds a Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in partnership with HEC Paris and ENSAM ParisTech and an Executive MBA from IMD Business School. He is the founder of DAA Capital Partners SA, an independent investment advisory firm focused on Real Estate, Financial Services and Technology investments.
Marcel Egger
Board Member
Director Investors Romandy
Corporate Finance Executive in Pharmaceuticals / Watches / Jewellery / Fashion / E-commerce. Expertise in appraisal of projects, business cases, financial plans. Functional experience in strategic planning, forecasting, BI/ data warehouse / ERP process implementation and optimisation / Digital Transformation. Buy side M&A, business integrations, merger targets, performance indicators.Active smart money investor having pleasure in supporting and coaching in new / disruptive areas.
Nicola Fantini
Board Member
Director Jury
Nicola Fantini has founded and built up software companies such as Sciant AG (Software development services, 150 employees, exit to VMware in 2006, now more than 500 employees in Sofia, BG), Aviaso AG (turned into the globally leading provider of fuel efficiency, exit to Honeywell in 2015), Spectas, CloudBroker and ScaleTools.
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Dr. Cornelia Gut-Villa
Board Member
Director Education
Cornelia Gut-Villa holds a Ph.D. and master in business administration from the University of Zurich. She has over 20 years’ experience in financial services, strategy consulting and startup coaching.
Michel Kertai
Michel is a registered attorney in Switzerland and the USA (California), who started his career as a corporate lawyer. He moved to California in 2015 to study U.S. law at UC Berkeley School of Law and work with Silicon Valley startups. After returning to Switzerland in late 2016, he founded EMBARK.LAW to fully dedicate his time to his favorite subject areas: startup law and cross-border activities of expanding businesses.
Ruediger Petrikowski
Ruediger Petrikowski is an entrepreneurial CFO with M&A and capital market expertise in fast-paced businesses and rapidly changing environments. His experiences bridge the start-up and corporate world by combining strategy, finance, M&A and technology.
Special Thanks
The first ICT Investor’s Day happened on 15.11.2010. It was organized by Jan Fülscher and others as part of their activities in the special interest group (Fachgruppe) “Innovation” of the association SwissICT. In 2014, Alexander Büch, Thomas Dübendorfer (President), Jan Fülscher, Dania Gerhardt, Myke Näf, and Oliver Staffelbach founded the association Swiss ICT Investor Club (SICTIC). After discussions in the board of SwissICT and SICTIC it was agreed to run this event by SICTIC starting 27.10.2014 and to rebrand it from “Swiss ICT Investor’s Day” to “SICTIC Investor Day”.
Jan Fülscher
Jan Fülscher is an entrepreneur, start-up activist and member of the board in several start-ups. He works with start-ups helping them making the first steps from prototype to commercial product offer. He’s also member of the board, juror or expert in several start-up support organizations. Jan is a lecturer at the Universities of Zürich and Bern and several universities of applied sciences. He’s also speaker for start-up financing topics and has a good network to business angels and venture capitalists in Switzerland. Jan holds a Master of Arts degree from the University of Zurich.
Sébastien Flury
Sébastien Flury was the driving force to expand the investor events of the Swiss ICT Investor Club (SICTIC) to Western Switzerland and to establish SICTIC as strong brand for angel investors that fund early-stage deep tech startups in Switzerland.
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Thomas Kern
Thomas has been instrumental in launching the Swiss Fintech Angels initiative with SICTIC’s annual Swiss Fintech Investor Day established back in 2016 as the go-to event for Swiss seed and early-stage fintech startups looking for funding. With funding success rates of often more than 50% for those 12 startups that pitched, it has been well established as an excellent matchmaking event for startups and angel investors.
Tatjana de Kerros
Tatjana, who is also active at Ricola, the radical innovation lab of the Swiss SME Ricola, brought in valuable inputs from family offices.
Nina Reinhart
Nina connected SICTIC to young entrepreneurs and key people in the ecosystem, contributed to SICTIC’s diversity efforts, shaped the board’s strategy, and engaged as a startup board member. She will continue to support SICTIC as an advisor.
Dr. Oliver Staffelbach
Oliver, lawyer and a SICTIC co-founding member active in the board since 2014, gave guidance in legal questions and helped to ensure SICTIC is fully FINMA compliant and has a solid legal basis in everything SICTIC engages in.