Experienced members on startups' board

The Board of directors brings experience and their network to support startups on their journey. Four Fintech and Biotech startups have expanded their board team as they look toward further growth and expansion.

Fintech startup Tresio is a financial planning platform in the area of liquidity planning and multi-banking. Several hundred companies already use Tresio daily. To support its next steps, Tresio has appointed Angelo Quabba (group CFO of RUAG) to its board. Angelo Quabba, who has been Group CFO at RUAG International for two years, looks back on a long management career in the financial sector of internationally oriented companies. Prior to his current position, he worked for plastics manufacturer Gurit and biotech company Bruker BioSpin, among others. Before that, he was Chief Financial Officer of the SR Technics Group for many years. He also held other positions in finance and controlling at Honeywell and Zwellweger Analytics. Since August 2020, the 57-year-old dual Italian-Swiss citizen has served as Chairman of the Board of Directors at Bontique, an HR tech scale-up.

Accounto
Zurich-based startup Accounto automates accounting, enabling fiduciary companies to increase efficiency while benefiting from data-based insights about their clients. The startup has welcomed Thomas Koller, former long-standing Chairman of the Board of Directors of OBT AG and General Manager of the Fiduciary & Business Consulting Division at ExpertSuisse. He is also a member of various committees dealing with the fiduciary industry's digitalisation. In mid-2022, he also founded his own consultancy, KollerNext AG.

lleve optics AG
Based in Bern, ILeve District develops Swiss-made cycling glasses that combine high functionality, minimalist design and long-lasting quality. The startup has appointed two board members: Urs Berger, an existing investor in lleve and Chairman of the Board of Swiss Mobiliar and André Roth, the chief digital officer at bicycle manufacturer BMC Switzerland.

The expansion of the board of directors also marked the change of name from Lars Brillen to Ileve Optics AG as the startup positions itself in the optics market. In the next phase, Ileve Optics also wants to concentrate on implementing its sustainability strategy and on international growth with a focus on Germany, England and Scandinavia.

Anjarium Biosciences
Anjarium Biosciences, a biotech company focused on creating and delivering a new class of non-viral gene therapies has expanded its Board of Directors with the appointments of Gaurav Shah and Douglas Fambrough, as independent Non-executive Directors. Gaurav Shah is also named as Chairperson of the Board. Shah is an experienced gene therapy leader with over 15 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry. He is the founding Chief Executive Officer of Rocket Pharma, which is developing gene therapies for rare inherited diseases incorporating both adeno-associated viral vector (AAV) and lentiviral vector (LVV) approaches. Prior to Rocket Pharma, he served as Global Program Head in the Cell & Gene Therapies Unit at Novartis, where he led the pivotal CAR-T studies for patients with leukaemia and lymphoma.

Fambrough co-founded Dicerna, a company developing medicines to silence disease-causing genes using RNA interference (RNAi) selectively. He served as Dicerna’s President and Chief Executive Officer for almost 12 years, successfully leading the company through a highly successful IPO, multiple major corporate collaborations, and ultimately through its $3.3 billion acquisition by Novo Nordisk in 2021. Prior to Dicerna, Doug was a General Partner at Oxford Bioscience Partners, where he had a strong track record leading investments in life science technology companies.  His investments include first-generation RNAi pioneer Sirna Therapeutics, which Merck acquired, and Solexa, inventor of the world’s dominant DNA sequencing platform, which Illumina acquired.(Press release/RAN)