The board of directors of seed investor and accelerator Techstars has appointed Maëlle Gavet as chief executive officer effective Jan. 11.
Gavet was previously chief operating officer of real estate platform Compass and served as executive vice president of operations of the Priceline Group, parent company of travel and hospitality brands including OpenTable, Kayak, and Booking.com.
She also held leadership positions at the Boston Consulting Group and was CEO of OZON.ru, Russia’s largest e-commerce site.
“The success of the Techstars accelerator model and the velocity of its investing create so much potential to help even more entrepreneurs, explore new approaches to venture capitalism and help the tech industry become more human-centered and more diverse,” Gavet said.
In 2020, Techstars ran two accelerator programs in Minnesota. It partnered with UnitedHealth Group Inc. on the UnitedHealthcare Accelerator Powered by Techstars in Minneapolis and with Cargill Inc. and Ecolab Inc. on the Farm to Fork Accelerator in St. Paul. The programs provide participant companies with a curriculum for growing their startups, mentorship from local business leaders and, in the case of the Farm to Fork Accelerator, seed funding.
Outgoing CEO and co-founder David Brown will continue to serve on the Techstars board. David Cohen, the company’s co-founder, will assume the new role of chairman of the board.
Cohen said Gavet, “who has overseen growth of more than 10 times our scale,” will lead the company “through this next phase of our journey.”
Techstars said it has invested in more than 2,300 companies and has a portfolio of thousands of companies is worth more than $185 billion.
Gavet, also the author of "Trampled by Unicorns: Big Tech’s Empathy Problem and How to Fix It," Gavet will be based in New York City.
