Meet the nextGEN member
Nico Weigand - Symphera
Who or what called you to lead?
A high school reunion and a surgeon’s frustration led me to co-found a startup.
I never set out to be an entrepreneur in life sciences. In fact, for most of my career, I wasn’t even in the field. My journey started in mechanical engineering – first in Germany, then across different countries as I pursued my studies.
But even then, I knew the rigid structure of the field that didn’t quite fit me. I was more drawn to building things, rather than designing them. So, after finishing my degree, I enrolled in an MBA programme in Paris, designed specifically for engineers and scientists.
That decision wasn’t about chasing a traditional business career – it was about broadening my perspective and learning how things get built beyond the technical side. It gave me my first exposure to the entrepreneurial world. Soon, I was working in consulting and then in tech startups in Munich, taking on sales and partnership roles.
But the turning point – the moment that set me on the path to life sciences – came unexpectedly. It was at a high school reunion, of all places.
Conrad, an old friend I’d known since we were twelve, had become a surgeon. Over drinks, he started telling me about a problem in his field. There was a fundamental inefficiency in laparoscopic surgery – something that every surgeon just accepted as the norm. It slowed them down, added risk, and wasted precious time.
That conversation stuck with me. We kept in touch, revisiting our ideas again and again. At first, it was just an interesting challenge – a side project we chipped away at in our spare time. But as we spoke to more surgeons, and as we tested our ideas, we started to realise this wasn’t just a small frustration – it was a real, industry-wide problem. And if we were serious about solving it, we couldn’t do it part-time.
So, after years of refining the concept, investing our own money to build early prototypes and assembling a team, we took the leap together. We left our jobs. We raised capital. We built a company.
Nico’s full profile is available for our members inside the community.