On a Sunday, Anna-Luisa Schaffgotsch went to her office to collect some documents. She had forgotten her key card. Fetching it would cost her a two-hour round trip. There are many reasonable responses to this predicament, most of them unprintable. Hers was to start investigating whether there might be a better way to get through the door.
The search brought her to implantable technology. It also took her beyond the original inconvenience. A system that could establish identity suggested other possibilities; the building entrance was only the beginning. The episode became part of the origin of Impli, the company she founded in April 2019 and continues to lead as chief executive.
It is an appealingly modest beginning for a business. No stage lights, no ceremonial revelation. A woman wanted her documents. Yet the interesting part is what happened after the irritation: she kept following the question. That habit gives her career its shape, from scientific study to commercial work, and from a British startup to a company with a Swiss manufacturing connection.
A business course interrupts the syllabus
Schaffgotsch did not arrive at university with a settled ambition to become an entrepreneur. Her studies were in biosciences, and she has said she did not come from an entrepreneurial family. A business-related module changed the direction of her attention. The pleasure was in imagining something, then working out how to bring it into existence.
She studied at the University of Nottingham before taking an MSc in Biotechnology at Imperial College London. Her postgraduate focus included synthetic biology and biophysics. That combination placed her close to both the mechanisms of living systems and the tools for doing something useful with them. A scientific education gave her a vocabulary for possibility; commercial work would supply a vocabulary for getting things done.
Her professional biography includes responsibility for major portfolios at a chemical trader in London, followed by work on the commercial strategy of a German bioinformatics startup. Later, she helped scale the European business of an American supply-chain company. Across those roles, the recurring task was bringing technical work into contact with customers and markets.
This is an apprenticeship with fewer cinematic moments than the usual startup mythology allows. There are portfolios to manage, relationships to establish, and reasons why a prospective customer might decline. It helps explain the practical emphasis in her later advice: understand the business case, know which problem you are addressing, and check that the proposed solution actually answers it.
The company becomes a geography lesson
Founding Impli in 2019 gave Schaffgotsch responsibility for the whole enterprise. The commercial work she had done for other businesses now belonged to her own. A useful idea needed colleagues, money, manufacturing and a place to work. Each of those requirements brought another set of people into the story.
Switzerland became part of the answer. Impli joined Biopôle in 2021 to take part in its Vanguard programme and build connections in the country. Its manufacturer was based in Switzerland, so the move had a practical purpose from the start. Lausanne offered a place to make things and a network in which the company could find its footing.
She has described the value of the arrangement in terms of complementary strengths: early innovation in the UK, with Swiss expertise alongside it. The attraction was concrete. Introductions could become working relationships. Local knowledge could make an unfamiliar business environment easier to navigate. For a founder, those are small reductions in friction that accumulate over years.
In a later account of Impli's international plans, she credited the Vaud region with helping the company develop its manufacturing capability and find both ideas and funding. EPFL and Biopôle featured in that account as useful parts of the local environment. Her description gives institutions a human scale: they matter because of the conversations and work they make possible.
Impli founded, 2019
Swiss manufacturing
Boston, with a purpose
By September 2024, Schaffgotsch was part of the ten-person Swiss National Team selected for Venture Leaders Medtech. The programme's November destination was Boston. The trip was designed around business development and introductions to investors, a familiar enough itinerary for someone already building across national borders.
Her stated ambition for the roadshow was specific: broaden the network and meet investors and strategic partners who could help the venture move forward. There is a useful restraint in that answer. Travel itself is easy to mistake for progress. She described the people she hoped to meet and the work those relationships might enable.
The programme profile recorded $1.2 million raised at that point. Treat that as a dated milestone in the company's development, rather than a running total. For a founder, a financing number is also a measure of obligations: resources secured must become work completed. Schaffgotsch's career increasingly involved making that conversion happen across a team and across countries.
Raised by Impli as reported in her September 2024 Venture Leaders profile.
A historical company milestoneThe hours before everybody else arrives
Ask a founder about productivity and there is always a chance of receiving an elaborate software recommendation. Schaffgotsch's answer in 2024 was a time slot: 6:30 to 8:30 in the morning, reserved for work that required thinking. The calendar was doing a job that another application might struggle to perform.
A year earlier, she had described a working day that started at Scale Space in White City around eight. Coffee accompanied an hour of reading scientific reviews. Meetings then took over. The two accounts belong to different years, but they share a preference: give concentrated work some room before the demands of other people fill the day.
That 2023 description also laid out the less visible parts of being chief executive. She checked in with the laboratory team, dealt with urgent matters, raised investment, looked after people, recruited and directed the business. The range is worth pausing over. In a small company, the person setting the destination may also be sorting out whatever is preventing tomorrow's work.
White City appealed for practical reasons. Imperial was nearby. Heathrow was within reach. The facilities at Scale Space helped. She also found room in her explanation for Westfield, the shopping centre. A location decision can contain research connections, airport access and somewhere to buy things. Founders are allowed ordinary errands.
“There is no company without a team.”
Anna-Luisa Schaffgotsch, 2023
The people who stay in the picture
When asked what made her proud, Schaffgotsch pointed to her team and its ability to pull together. That answer sits comfortably beside her emphasis on networks. People inside and outside the company have different roles, but her accounts consistently give them a place in the outcome.
In May 2026, she appeared in an episode of Endurance Capital alongside triathlete Craig Alexander, hosted by Ignacio Garcia. The episode, titled Powered by the Pack, examined the support around people who sustain demanding work over time. Its subject had a clear connection to the way she had already described building Impli.
The connection is useful because it takes some pressure off the founder as a solitary figure. Manufacturing requires specialists. Fundraising requires other people to make a decision. Working in another country requires introductions and trust. Schaffgotsch's story contains individual persistence, certainly, but it also contains a growing list of people with whom persistence becomes practical.
Back in the university’s orbit
Imperial also provided another connection between her student years and her life as a founder. The university listed her as a panellist for Scaling Science, an event concerned with the practical work of turning research into businesses. Other listed participants included Glen Gowers, co-founder of Basecamp Research. The setting placed Schaffgotsch among people working through related commercial questions with different kinds of technology.
There is a satisfying circularity to that invitation. A business course had once caught the attention of a science student. Now the founder was being invited into a conversation for people considering how their own research might reach the world. The questions on either side of the lectern are closely related: who will use this, what will it take to make it, and how do you organise the work? Her years in commercial roles gave her experience to bring back into that conversation.
A trumpet gets its turn
Her life outside the company offers a welcome change of instrument. In 2022, Schaffgotsch described learning the trumpet, an item on a bucket list she liked working through. She also mentioned a triathlon completed the previous year and a forthcoming ski tour in the Dolomites. Each detail belongs to that moment, rather than an imaginary account of her weekends today.
The trumpet is especially pleasing. It puts a beginner's task beside a chief executive's title. Somewhere between having an ambition and producing a recognisable tune lies the work, and no business plan can do the practising for you. It is a small reminder that a person's interests can remain cheerfully independent of a job description.
In 2026, she added a public writing outlet through Substack, sharing the thinking behind Impli's decisions. Her announcement promised discussion of trade-offs, market choices and the routes the company had passed over. A July essay, State of the Signal, continued that effort to explain the direction of the business in her own voice.
For someone whose working life began to turn during a university business module, writing about decisions is an apt continuation. The original Sunday problem had an immediate solution: go back for the card. Schaffgotsch chose to investigate the problem as well. Years later, she is still doing the slower, more demanding part: turning a question into a company other people can help build.