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.
The Swiss ICT Investor Club (SICTIC) connects smart money investors to Swiss seed and early-stage tech startups. 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.
As president he shaped the Information Security Society Switzerland ISSS for five years, during which the number of members more than doubled to over a thousand. He is a lecturer at ETH Zürich and has co-founded several Internet technology based product centric startups in Switzerland, among them Spontacts (exit to Scout24 Group), Contovista (big data for finance) and Frontify (collaborative web design).
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.
He has more than twenty years of investment experience in the global technology sector. He co-founded an investment vehicle focusing on smaller technology companies which got listed on the Swiss stock exchange, and has worked as head of the technology team at Lombard Odier Investment Managers and Allianz Global Investors.
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.
He is co-founder and used to be CEO at the Swiss consultancy Synpulse (formerly known as Solution Providers) with over 150 employees mainly focusing on banking and insurance. He has expertise in strategy building, defining business plans and cases, make-or-buy decisions, evaluation support of packaged software, quality assurance for large projects and composition of „greenfield units“.
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.
He spent 6 years as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company helping clients to build technology-based businesses and to improve capabilities and performance of their IT functions. For 20 years he has been an active member of the Swiss startup ecosystem, where he has co-founded several companies. He is today an active board member, advisor, coach, and angel investor. His engagements include Zattoo, Squirro, Nomoko, Bitsaboutme, and Workspace2go.
Dr. Alain Dargham
Board Member
Deputy Director Investors Romandy
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.
He is serving as a board member in several early stage technology start-ups. He is energized by creating ideas and concepts that address the impact of technological transformations taking place in the evolving landscape of finance. Alain Dargham has extensive experience in managing and investing in Financial Services, Real Estate and Technology sectors.
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.
He has published papers in magazines such Expertfocus, IEEE and Future Generation Computer Systems and is actively participating in H2020 research projects. He is leading the SICTIC jury and is investing in startup companies.
Dr. Cornelia Gut-Villa
Board Member
Director Partners
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.
She is active as an independent entrepreneur and private investor with her own consulting firm in addition to her activities as part of the incubator Startfeld in St. Gallen.
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.
His background in elite sports is one of the reasons he feels at home in the startup community with its adventurous, challenge-driven spirit. Recently, he also started building his startup investment portfolio.
Rüdiger Petrikowski
Rüdiger Petrikowski is a partner at Leverage Experts for the CFO & M&A Advisory Practice. He started his career as bank professional. Afterward, he studied in Germany, Sweden and China, and holds a Master’s degree in Business Engineering & Management from the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany.
He has more than 20 years experiences in the telecommunication, media, technology, payment and collection industry as CFO, M&A and Business Development professional in senior leadership roles in Germany (Thyssen Telecom) and Switzerland (Swisscom, PubliGroupe/Publicitas). He is experienced in transforming business in different life cycles (startup, growth and turn around) and advises companies in the digital transformation. In addition, he is a lecturer of Mergers & Acquisitions at the Kalaidos University of applied science in 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.
The WBAF is an organisation committed to collaborate globally to empower the economic development of the world by fostering innovative financial instruments for SMEs, innovators and startups. Magdalena hold MS degree in Economics and is a member of professional finance body ACCA.
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.
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.