Our board of directors is the strategic driving force behind the Swiss Ventures Group. It is responsible for steering the whole organisation in the right direction and making sure it keeps evolving.
Mike Baur is a Swiss venture investor and entrepreneur. He worked in private banking for almost 20 years before starting his entrepreneurial journey in 2015 by co-founding the Swiss Startup Factory with Max Meister and Oliver Walzer. Mike is one of the top 100 «Digital Shapers» in Switzerland. He holds an MBA from the University of Rochester New York as well as an Executive MBA from the University of Berne.
Eric Sarasin boasts over 30 years of banking experience gained at Morgan Stanley, Pictet & Cie, Citibank and, most notably, Bank J. Safra Sarasin. He helped the family-owned bank become one of Switzerland’s leading private banks. Since 2019, he has been Chairman of the Board of directors of Singularity Group SA and a board member of several other companies.
J.D. Michael Widmer is the Swiss Ventures Group’s Legal Counsel and manager of the Brino Group AG. After his Doctor of Law and a master’s degree in business administration, he worked as an associate and lawyer, was part of the management at Eurex, managed the Cat Group for four years and later the Gutenberg Group. For seven years, he regularly took off as a freelance pilot for Cat Aviation.
As Co-founder of the group, Oliver Walzer is the COO of our investment arm Serpentine Ventures. His degrees in engineering and computer science first led him to be CTO of Switzerland’s most popular community platform and then to found an online marketplace for services. In 2012 he co-founded Incuray, an early stage incubator that later became the Swiss Startup Factory accelerator.