Helge Seetzen
Biography
Helge Seetzen is a successful multi-media technology entrepreneur with deep experience in the university tech transfer space. He currently serves as the CEO of TandemLaunch – a unique venture fund that scouts, accelerates, and commercializes early-stage technologies from the world’s top universities in close partnership with major Consumer Electronic brands and world-class entrepreneurs.
Prior to TandemLaunch, Helge co-founded Sunnybrook Technologies and later BrightSide Technologies to commercialize display technologies developed at the University of British Columbia. BrightSide was successfully sold to Dolby Laboratories at high return to shareholders after receiving accolades such as the Best Buzz Award at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show and a “Top 100 Technologies in 2006” rank by Popular Science Magazine. At Dolby he led all cross-functional development activities for Dolby’s first two consumer video products. In this capacity he built research and engineering departments in Canada and the US, and was closely involved in licensing negotiations with many major consumer electronics manufacturers.
Helge’s leadership in the technology transfer, innovation and entrepreneurial space has been widely recognized through awards such as Business in Vancouver’s 40 under Forty award for business accomplishment, the NSERC Innovation Challenge Award for university technology transfer, and a Special Recognition Award from the Society for Information Display for the pioneering of LED TV technology. Helge is a Fellow of the McGill Dobson Center for Entrepreneurship, board member of the Parcours Entrepreneurial Rémi-Marcoux at HEC Montreal, and frequent supporter of many other organisations encouraging entrepreneurship. As a technical leader, he served as the General Chair for Display Week, the largest technical conference on displays, as well as currently on the Executive Board of the Society for Information Display. He has published over 20 journal articles, writes a regular column on venture capital innovation in the Information Display Magazine, and holds over 80 patents with an additional 50 pending US applications. Helge received a B.Sc. in physics and a Ph.D. in interdisciplinary imaging technology (physics & computer science) from the University of British Columbia.
Helge was a speaker at IEEE N3XT® 2016 Toronto.