In a venture-backed company the board is usually dominated by investor directors. New investor directors will join after every financing round. The board largely reflects your capital structure.
But as your company moves from scientific validation to platform build-out, pipeline prioritization, and increasingly complex capital decisions, one or more independent counterweights become increasingly important - ideally you should appoint an independent Chair even before your first big round.
Who to onboard as a Non-Executive Director or independent Chair is one of your most important decisions you, as the founder CEO, have to make. It is a choice that must be made deliberately, not reactively.
Kärt Tomberg, Co-Founder and CEO of Cambridge-based ExpressionEdits, will share how she built her board, including how, where and when she found her Chairman.
We will discuss amongst other things:
When do you start looking for an NED / Chair?
What profile should your first board chair have?
How do you approach the search so that you end up with a truly independent board chair?
And how do you develop the Chair–CEO relationship so that it genuinely supports you as the CEO and the company?
Over the past four years, Kärt has successfully led ExEd as CEO, guiding the company’s growth to a team of 17 people and overseeing key strategic initiatives. She has secured multiple rounds of funding to support the ongoing development of the company’s technology. Kärt remains focused on driving innovation and expanding ExEd’s capabilities, building on her original invention to further its impact within the biotechnology industry.
Kärt received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Tartu in her native Estonia, where she also spent three years working as a product manager in a biotechnology company Solis BioDyne. In 2010, she joined Prof. David Ginsburg’s lab at the University of Michigan as a Fulbright Fellow to work on her PhD thesis. After completing her PhD, Kärt joined Prof. Allan Bradley’s lab at the University of Cambridge in 2017 as a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow. She has received many prestigious fellowships and grants and has published various scientific papers throughout her academic career.
Under her leadership, ExpressionEdits raised £10.5 mio venture capital in 2024 from Octopus Ventures and Redalpine, BlueYard Capital, Wilbe Capital, Acequia Capital, Amino Collective, Hawktail. A collaboration and licensing agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim was announced in Q1 2025.