Gunnar Florus – Chair person
Gunnar Florus is an investor and board director with experience in scaling technology companies internationally. He has more than 25 years of international leadership experience, including senior roles at Cisco across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. His background spans strategy, emerging technologies, and corporate acquisitions, and he serves on the boards of several growth companies.
Max Wu – Board member
Max Wu is the founder and general partner of Birch Venture Capital. He has over 40 years of experience in the ICT industry and venture fund investment. Prior to Birch Max was managing partner at InveStar Capital and chairman of Hua Nan Venture Capital. He has experience from more than 30 positions as Chair person and board member of Taiwan based IT-companies.
Prior to venture capital, he served the Acer group over 20 years as head of R&D, marketing, purchasing and customers service department etc. He was the president of Acer America.
Ralph Høibakk – Board member
Ralph Ralph Høibakk holds a Masters Degree in Physics and a Ph.D. in mathematics. He served for 20 years as CEO in Nor Data AS and in Tandberg Data ASA. He has been a longtime board member in Norwegian hightech companies like Tomra ASA, Tandberg ASA and Nordic Semiconductor ASA. For two decades he served as a visiting professor at University of Tromsø lecturing entrepreneurship and leadership.
Tore Etholm-Idsøe – Board member
Tore the APPSCARD Group founder and CEO is a serial entrepreneur now on his 4th major project. Prior to APPSCARD Tore was the founder and CEO of stock exchange listed NEXT Biometrics (2004-2018). During this phase Tore built the biometrics industry experience and networks that paved the way for the inception of APPSCARD in May 2020. Prior to NEXT Biometrics Tore founded and built the office superstores chain Binders Norge AS (today known as Lyreco). Before Binders, Tore co-started UNIC-Gruppen, a major importer of PC’s and payment terminals.
He holds a MBA from Oslo School of management.
Håkon Bryhni – Board member
Håkon holds a PhD in high speed communication and multiprocessor server systems from University of Oslo and a MSc from Norwegian Institute of Technology in telecom systems. Bryhni co-founded two venture companies in 2001, investing in early-stage
technology ventures related to ICT including Elliptic Laboratories, Fabriscale Technologies, Troll Housing and Tydal Data Center. Bryhni served as COO and CTO in Elliptic Labs from 2012-16 developing ultrasound touchless sensing from research to shipping product. Bryhni is currently Research Professor at Simula Metropolitan Centre for Digital Engineering and board member in several portfolio companies.
