Andrea Schlapbach Email & Phone Number

Zürich, Zh, Ch

ZWEI Wealth Experts provides independent financial consulting services, a selection of the best asset managers and custodians, and research for affluent people worldwide, quickly growing into one of the bigger players in Switzerland. I support the company in developing and executing a strategy for international growth and operational excellence.

Zurich, Ch

Securosys designs secure communication technologies for commercial applications including Layer-2 encryptors, HSM & VPN appliances and cloud access. Its HSM protects the Swiss banking system SIC and stock market SIX, various blockchain, crypto assets, and PKI frameworks. I support the company in defining and executing the strategy, funding, and international growth.

Supporting entrepreneurs and the Swiss start-up ecosystem with hands-on advice and experience to successfully build, fund, run, and scale businesses, covering all aspects of the value-chain and operations. Plus financial, market, and technical assessments for buy-side M&A.

Cham, Ch

FLARM is the radio data-link used by any size of GA aircraft to provide live traffic, collision avoidance, tracking and remote identification used as base layer for e-conspicuity, ADS-L, and UTM-frameworks. FLARM is commercially available as end-user or OEM hardware, and IP design licenses. I co-founded and bootstrapped FLARM in a virally-marketed crowdfunding campaign, designed the initial algorithms, acted as a key evangelist and biz dev, and built a robust company (call it COO+CFO) including the spin-out of SAFEmine. My involvement today focuses on Board matters, and occasional SAR emergencies.

Zurich, Ch

Zurich, Ch

Daedalean designs systems to safely pilot autonomous aircraft, applying computer vision with neural networks, and paving the way for certification. The company has grown to a team of 100 and funding in excess of 60M$. I built commercial traction, and various partnerships with prospective customers and suppliers on NRE, future products, and IP. I drove the product definition and roadmap, advised the company on market reality and needs, contributed to successful fundraising, and helped the organization to become more efficient, focused, and successful.

Zurich, Zh, Ch

Perspective Robotics (aka Fotokite) helps public safety teams (e.g. firefighters, police) save lives with elevated and actionable intelligence built around self-designed tethered UAV. As a Board member, I supported the managers to solve the usual challenges young companies are exposed to including finding an appropriate product-market fit, pivoting the product offering, maturing the team and structure, getting funding, and much more.

Tucson, Arizona, Us

Mining depends on precision, accuracy, and safety. Mines must find ways to integrate, automate, and optimize critical workflows for a competitive edge. Hexagon Mining, with a team of 700 and revenues near 200M$, is the only company to solve surface and underground challenges by integrating design, planning, and operations technologies for safer, more productive mines. I managed SAFEmine's integration into the Leica mining organization (processes, SAP, HR, contracting, IPR, IT), learned a lot about cultural challenges, and consolidated HxMining's global customer support team of nearly 250.

Baar, Zg, Ch

SAFEmine deployed FLARM's aircraft technology into open-pit mining vehicles, offering a new level of vehicle and pedestrian safety. The product suite was quickly enlarged to include asset tracking, fleet management, and driver fatigue monitoring, using a broad range of technologies around digital radio-links, satellite navigation, GIS, radar, IR, image processing, and AI. SAFEmine quickly became the global standard and grew to 6 locations, a team of 65, and revenues around 20M$. I co-founded the company and built and led the organization as COO/CFO, and managed the sell-side M&A process with CS + Bär&Karrer into a successful acquisition by Leica Geosystems (Hexagon) in 2014.

Zurich, Zurich, Ch

Swiss Re is one of the world's largest reinsurance companies. I led the cross-domain consolidation of tools, models, databases, and related processes in Group Risk Management towards higher efficiency, reliability, and faster development cycles to meet the demands of SST, Solvency II, underwriting, and occasional liquidity events. Organized external massive computing resources when required in times when cloud-computing was in an infant stage.

Zurich, Ch

Supporting the CEOs of the group and subsidiaries on strategic projects, preparing briefing and decision documents, project plans, and meetings, and running the strategic planning and risk management processes. As part of my work, I worked on the merger of the key Swiss financial infrastructure providers (SWX, SIS SEGA Intersettle, Telekurs) that was then rejected but happened in 2008 (after SWX's president left to Deutsche Börse), on a cost-saving program, and on corporate governance. The activities included frequent exchanges with various regulators and authorities (i.e. FINMA, BaFin, FSA), banks, and international exchanges.

Small strategy consulting boutique created with 2 friends enjoying high margins in the financial services industry. The largest project I acquired and led was the 2nd wave of the Swiss Stock Exchange's (now SIX Group) digitalization initiatives, moving the entire options trading admission into a new regime, thus massively boosting trading volume. This eventually resulted in me and another partner being insourced into SIX's corporate development. Oh, and Zurich Insurance successfully enforced a name change to Gilgen & Company AG.

Short, intense, and painful work in a young company with a high-profile Board, starting shortly after the hyped IPO (one of the last ones prior to the dot-com crash). Joined as a project executive, supporting Holcim, Ringier, SGS on corporate strategy and defining a robo-advisor framework for Vontobel, I took over investor and media relations when group management left (enjoying 4 CEO's in a short time) while media and analysts went crazy, and organized the AGM and the annual report, mitigating tense conflicts among Board members. The most awkward moment was when I served a cold coffee to Thomas Schmidheiny, unaware that the coffee machine had not heated up.

Zurich, Ch

Created statistical evidence, procedures and training material about the stock-price impact from sensitive company news to prevent market manipulations, and ran a help-desk for stock-listed companies on such matters, e.g. receiving a call from SBG's CEO announcing the merger to UBS. Was involved in the creation of new stock markets for young companies, and got the stock trader license.

Neuchâtel, Ch

Opto-electronic research on multi-wavelength lasers and interferometer systems, intended as a PhD supervised by René Dändliker (Applied Optics, Institute of Microtechnology, University of Neuchatel). I learned that academic research is not the best fit for me.

Dipl. Natw. Eth, Physics And Chemistry

Physics And Electrical Engineering

Matura Typ B