Taha Ben Mrad

Taha Ben Mrad is a Tunisian-born, Switzerland-based serial entrepreneur and investor. He studied for two years at the École Supérieure de Commerce de Tunis before moving to HEC Lausanne, where he earned a Bachelor in Economics, a Master in Management, and a Master in Information Systems. He began his career in telecommunications, spending roughly seven years at Orange Communications (the Orange group) in IT and information-systems leadership, where he ran the Enterprise Services department with responsibility for billing, portal, and CRM activities from both business and technical angles.

In August 2006 he left Orange to found Simalaya Holding, a Swiss group whose subsidiaries span strategic consulting, telecom application development, digital marketing, renewable energy, mobility, and offshore software development. As part of Simalaya he set up "Simalaya Technology Office," a Tunisian offshore-services subsidiary launched as a joint venture with Progress Engineering. He served as Chairman, CEO, and Managing Partner of Simalaya SA. His entrepreneurial work has been recognized publicly, including a Swiss grand prize for business creation reported in Tunisian press.

Building on that operating experience, Ben Mrad founded Seed4Equity, a Swiss investment boutique dedicated to social-impact investing. He describes himself as an investor in more than 30 startups, and holds a range of board roles across his portfolio: Chairman/President and advisor at Gamaya, and board member at Senbiosys, Toktoktok, and Cosseco. He is also the founder and chairman of Tooxme, a real-time collaborative-mobility platform he built to address short-distance, on-demand travel (distinct from traditional carpooling).

• Invests at seed and early-growth stages in technology ventures, largely in Switzerland and the broader European market.
• Runs Seed4Equity as an impact-first "investment boutique," driven by a stated philosophy to *"maximize profits to generate maximum impact,"* with a notable emphasis on helping vulnerable children become autonomous through education.
• Sector interests span agtech, biosensors/medtech, enterprise and application software, and mobility — reflected in his personal board and investment activity.
• Takes an active, operator-investor role, frequently joining portfolio-company boards as chairman or director rather than acting as a passive check-writer.
• On the kind of company he backs, in the Gamaya round he framed his interest around mission plus technical substance: *"There is a clear imperative to address the food challenge in a sustainable manner… Gamaya has all the ingredients to become an instrumental actor of this change by combining state-of-the-art technological building blocks at the service of Mother Nature."*