Eric Buatois

Partner, Sofinnova Ventures

Eric joined Sofinnova Ventures as a General Partner in 2001 with more than 20 years of experience in the wireless industry. Prior to becoming a venture capitalist, he held several senior management and operational roles at Texas Instruments, Hewlett-Packard and Ericsson, also having negotiated, created and managed a joint venture in Sweden between H-P and Ericsson. In his corporate roles, Eric pioneered and developed several very successful products such as Texas Instruments’ digital signal processors for the cellular market, Hewlett-Packard’s telecommunications products Opencall and Openview, and Ericsson’s operational support systems for telecom networks. Eric has also driven several acquisitions and major partnering activities. 
At Sofinnova Ventures, Eric specializes in investment in the wireless ecosystem. He is a lead investor who truly enjoys building global companies and has demonstrated experience in executing spin-outs from large companies. He actively serves on the boards of companies in the US and in Europe, including Cortina Systems, Crestatech, Crocus Technology, Hellosoft (acquired by Imagination Technologies, LSE: IMG), Laszlo Systems, Upek (Acquired by AuthenTec, Nasdaq: AUTH) and Volubill. Eric served as Chairman of the Board of Upek from inception until 2009, Chairman of Crocus Technology from inception until Janaury 2010, and is currently Chairman of Laszlo systems. 
Eric received his MS In computer Science and Communications Engineering From Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications in France. He is a board member of the International School of the Peninsula. Eric is also a charter member of TIE and is involved in various European activities to grow and stimulate innovation.

What They Say About Us

"The wonderful thing about entrepreneurs is that their passion for starting new companies transcends languages and geographic boundaries."

Ron Conway, Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds, early stage investor in Google and PayPal

"Networking is very important for start-ups. The challenge for them is often not money: it is mentoring and finding people who can give good advice from experience."

Esther Dyson, Founder, EDventure Holdings

"This conference is clearly a labor of love for a group of dedicated professionals who care deeply about the Eastern European entrepreneurs. From the value-packed educational panels, to the star-studded key note speakers' line up, to an amazing quantity of venture capitalists – this is a not to be missed event for any high tech entrepreneur,"

Richard Guha, President of the Marketing Executives Network and Managing Partner at MaxBrandEquity

"As Stanford MBA students, we were exposed to a lot of VC firms both from the Valley and abroad. It is at Stanford that we met Anna Dvornikova, an absolutely amazing business leader and (by our big luck) our friend, who was the center of the Russian Silicon Valley professional community, and was doing a huge work to connect Russia and the Valley. Anna helped us a lot with kick-starting Wikimart, put us to our first-ever conference, introduced us to most of Russian VCs. And all that happened in a very short time span! It was the beginning of a six-month journey that despite the particularly tough times resulted in an extraordinarily group of investors backing our start-up."

Maxim Faldin and Kamil Kurmakayev,
co-CEOs, Wikimart