Gunnar Graef is Affiliate Professor at ESCP lecturing Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Design Thinking on the Paris and in the Berlin campus. He is Managing Partner of Deutsche Ventures and Founding Chairman of Gräf & Company.
Gunnar Graef co-founded and invested in more than 20 tech companies. With Deutsche Ventures, a Berlin based company builder, he starts, scales and reshapes companies with industry partners such as Airbus, Axel Springer, Danfoss, Deutsche Telekom and Total. He as a personal passion for “Deeptech” ventures and Urban Mobility.
In 2001, Gunnar Graef co-founded Haiku, the first European aggregator for mobile multimedia content. The company was acquired by the Japanese Index Corporation in 2003. Then, he co-founded DHL Global Mail with Deutsche Post Group in France. Under his leadership, the company became the #1 worldwide in international e-Commerce logistics and grew up to a 2bn€ in revenues with operations in more than 200 countries. Later, Gunnar Graef co-founded of AIRTAG, a company providing mobile payment solutions. The company was acquired by Safran Group in 2016.
Currently, Gunnar Graef is Affiliate Professor at ESCP Business School. Since 2000, Gunnar Graef is lecturing Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the School’s Paris campus. In 2006, he co-initiated the Chair for Entrepreneurship, today’s ‘Jean-Baptise Say Institute’. Since 2010, Prof. Gräf is also lecturing on the Berlin campus where he initiated the Chair for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He also designed entrepreneurship programs such as U-School (Unternehmerschule) and the Master for Digital Leadership and Entrepreneurship. Gunnar Graef is also a Visiting Professor at CFVG lecturing Entrepreneurial Finance to Executives in Asia.
Professor Graef acts as a mentor to several entrepreneurs, business leaders and politicians. He serves as non-executive director and board advisor to companies such as Neorizon (Munich, Germany), qedit (Tel Aviv, Israel), Local Motors (Phoenix, US), Orbital (Malmö, Sweden). Gunnar Graef is also an advisory board member of the social internet platform Betterplace.org and active member of the Responsible Leader network of the BMW Foundation. He was named a FrenchTech Ambassador in 2016.
Gunnar Graef started his career as a management and strategy consultant at Arthur D. Little. He studied mechanical engineering, robotics, business and public administration and politics in Oxford, Paris, Strasburg, Shanghai and Berlin. He graduated from Technische Universität Berlin and ESCP. Gunner Graef also studied at ENA Ecole Nationale d’Administration (Promotion Marc Bloch) in France.