GILLES NKANA

Prior to Columbia Business School, Gilles was Vice President at Alta Semper Capital, a London-based private equity fund focused on consumer and healthcare buyouts and growth equity investments in emerging markets. The firm is backed by Ronald Lauder (Chairman of Estée Lauder Companies), Richard Parsons (Chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation) and international institutional investors such as the IFC (World Bank). Gilles joined Alta Semper in the early and start-up stage of the firm, helping raise and deploy over $200m of institutional capital across its portfolio companies and representing the fund at Boards of Directors of two of these companies during his tenure. Prior to joining Alta Semper, Gilles worked at Goldman Sachs in the Investment Banking Division where he focused on European Industrial and Technology, Media and Telecom companies. He worked on M&A, Equity and Debt financing transactions. Prior to Goldman Sachs, Gilles gained experience in venture capital in Africa at Rocket Internet and helped roll-out a leading real-estate marketplace in Tanzania. Gilles also gained operational experience at Zalando, Europe’s largest online fashion retailer. Today, he is an investor in several star-ups across various industries including Human Resources Tech (HR Tech), Entertainment and FinTech. In 2018, Gilles also founded a business specialized in sourcing and distributing specialty African food products across a network of retailers in Germany.

Gilles has an MSc in Management from EM Lyon Business School (France) and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Germany). He grew up in Cameroon and Germany and is fluent in French, German and English. In his free time, you will find him playing on a basketball or tennis court, hanging out at a jazz club or an art exhibition, or learning a new music instrument (lately picking up electronic bass guitar).