GUV Powerlist 2018: #22 Koenraad Debackere

Koenraad Debackere has been a professor of technology and innovation management and policy at KU Leuven since 1995 but it is perhaps as the managing director of KU Leuven Research and Development (LRD) and chairman of the its seed fund, Gemma Frisius Fund (GFF), that he has had most tangible impact on entrepreneurs.

LRD was established in 1972 as one of the first technology transfer offices in Europe to help researchers to protect their intellectual property and devise appropriate strategies for transferring the intellectual property from the university to industry.

One of KU Leuven’s spinouts, and portfolio company of Gemma Frisius, is Tusk IC, a millimetre wave chips developer. These chips are used for the new generation of radars for self-driving cars and for the new 5G standard and its ultra-fast data communication.

KU Leuven was founded in 1425 and, in addition to being one of the oldest, has been one of the most active in spinning off intellectual property – Tusk IC is LRD’s 126th spinout.

GFF is a seed-stage vehicle set up in 1997 as a joint venture between KU Leuven with financial services firms KBC and BNP Paribas. The fund’s scope is not restricted to a specific technology domain and while it mainly focuses on first round financing in order to support a spinout’s growth during the initial years, the fund also provides second round financing, if necessary, in co-operation with other external partners.

As an evergreen fund, Gemma Frisius Seed Fund acts as a long-term shareholder and currently has more than 50 portfolio companies. Recent investments include Loci Orthopaedics, a medical device maker that closed a €2.75m ($3.2m) seed round in July this year to develop the InDx Implant, which can fully mimic the natural but complex motions of the thumb joint providing a more physiologically correct surgical outcome.

Another spinout that received cash from Gemma Frisius earlier this year is Ugentec, a developer of automated DNA diagnostics software, that closed a $9.3m series A round.

In January, Rewind Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical spinout from KU Leuven, closed a €15.2m series A round co-led by Gemma Frisius Fund and another university-owned investment fund, Centre for Drug Design and Discovery.

Debackere is also co-founder and chairman of Leuven.Inc, the innovation network of Leuven high-tech entrepreneurs and in 2015 was appointed to a two-year mandate as chairman of EIT Health, a knowledge and innovation community of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology.

He was also an expert on the 2014 Boosting Open Innovation and Knowledge Transfer in the EU Independent Expert Group Report on Open Innovation and Knowledge Transfer. In 2006 he was awarded the Prize for Scientific Excellence of the Belgian Entreprise Foundation.