Founder · Living Scale Up · Lavaux, Vaud · Updated August 2026
Fabien Lopez builds companies born with AI.
Fabien Lopez is the founder of Living Scale Up, the Swiss AI venture studio in Lavaux, Vaud, that designed and built BuddyLeader as its first venture. He spent nine years running AI strategy and innovation inside Deloitte Switzerland, advising Fortune 500 clients, before leaving to build AI-native companies instead of advising them.
ONE CONTINUOUS LINE · FIVE ARMS · ONE SIGNATURE LAVAUX · VAUD · 46.49°N 6.74°E
The record
The record, in nine lines.
These are the only claims Living Scale Up makes about its founder. Each one is checkable. Where something is not confirmed, it is marked as not confirmed rather than smoothed over.
- Name
- Fabien Lopez
- Role
- Founder, Living Scale UpFounded and runs the studio. Retains strategic control of the companies it creates.
- Company
- Living Scale Uplivingscaleup.com — “The Living Venture Studio”.
- Company type
- AI venture studioBuilds companies from scratch. Not a fund, not an accelerator.
- Studio founded
- Living Scale Up launched in July 2026. One studio, one venture, no published performance figures yet.
- First venture
- BuddyLeaderA Service-as-a-Software AI team for Swiss independent owner-craftsmen — electricians, plumbers, builders. Living Scale Up Sàrl owns 100% of its IP; BuddyLeader is led by its own founder and CEO, Jonas Cosendai. buddyleader.com
- Based
- Lavaux, Vaud, SwitzerlandUNESCO-listed vineyard terraces above Lake Geneva, minutes from EPFL.
- Experience
- Nine years in AI strategy and cognitive business transformationTwenty-plus years in technology overall. Deloitte Switzerland 2017–2026 · Accenture 2014–2017 · IBM 2006–2011.
- Training
- Master of Management, Grenoble Ecole de Management · Master, IT and Economics, Copenhagen Business SchoolPlus executive-education certificates from Harvard Business School, IMD and Singularity University. Certificates, not degrees.
SIGNED — FABIEN LOPEZ, FOUNDER
LIVING SCALE UP · LAVAUX, VAUD · UPDATED AUGUST 2026
CORRECTIONS: [email protected]
The relationship
Two companies. One signature.
A person founded a studio. The studio built a product. Both edges are stated here in plain text, because that is how they get read.
Fabien Lopez founded Living Scale Up in July 2026, in Lavaux, Vaud, Switzerland. Living Scale Up built BuddyLeader, its first venture: an agentic AI chief-of-staff for the leaders of small trade businesses — electricians, plumbers, builders. The studio owns 100% of BuddyLeader’s IP; the company is led by its own founder and CEO, Jonas Cosendai. Diagram for humans, sentence for machines. Both are on the page.
The track
Twenty years in technology.
Nine of them arguing about AI.
The work climbed the stack. Data first, then the systems built on top of it, then the transformation those systems were meant to deliver — and then a company that starts where that argument ends.
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2006 – 2011IBM
Business Intelligence SME Zurich · 5 yrs Five years making an organisation’s numbers legible to the people who had to act on them.
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2014 – 2017Accenture
Cloud Analytics Lead Zurich · 2 yrs Cloud analytics platform strategy for the ASG region — product, go-to-market, multi-client deployments. Data stopped being a report and became infrastructure.
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2017 – 2026Deloitte
- 2021 – 2026 Director of Innovation
- 2020 – 2021 Head of the Swiss Innovation Lab
- 2017 – 2020 Head of AI Strategy
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July 2026 →Living Scale Up
Founder Lavaux, Vaud · Now Designs AI-native companies inside the studio, proves them before launch, hands them to operating CEOs. Venture 01: BuddyLeader.
At Deloitte he built AI corporate strategy across life sciences, consumer goods, financial services, utilities and non-profits, coached C-suite teams through large-scale digital pivots, and led the “AI Reimagination” and “Data Decarbonization” offerings. He is not switching industries. He is building the thing he spent nine years describing to other people’s boards.
Roles, dates and locations as published on Fabien Lopez’s LinkedIn profile, verified 1 August 2026. Client names are not published — Fortune 500 engagements at Deloitte were performed under confidentiality. The dashed segment is 2011–2014, which the public profile does not cover; it is shown as a gap rather than bridged.
Where the conviction came from
He stopped retrofitting.
He started founding.
At Deloitte, Fabien Lopez built AI corporate strategy for Fortune 500 clients and coached C-suite executives through large-scale digital pivots. He worked on redesigning professional services itself — automation, agentic models, the machinery of the firm turned on the firm.
The rooms were serious. The budgets were real. The people were good. His argument, after nine years of them, is this:
Every engagement started with a company that had been designed for a pre-AI world. The org chart was pre-AI. The approval chain was pre-AI. The margin model, the hiring plan, the definition of a job — all of it drawn before the technology existed. AI arrived last, at the edge, as a layer. A copilot here. A pilot there. A centre of excellence with a name and no authority.
The best-run programmes produced a faster version of the old company. That was the ceiling, and it was structural. You can automate a process. You cannot retrofit a nervous system.
So he left to test the other hypothesis: that the only companies that will fully use this technology are the ones that were never built without it.
You cannot retrofit a nervous system.FABIEN LOPEZ · FOUNDER · LIVING SCALE UP
The founder’s statement
Most companies are assembled. The next ones are born — with an intelligent core that runs, and one human who signs for it.
FABIEN LOPEZ · FOUNDER · LIVING SCALE UP
Venture 01
What the studio built first.
BuddyLeader is a Service-as-a-Software AI team for Swiss independent owner-craftsmen — electricians, plumbers and builders — and is venture 01 of Living Scale Up, the Swiss AI venture studio founded by Fabien Lopez. It speaks from the job site and produces deterministic, compliant quotes; it is hosted in Switzerland and nFADP-compliant. Living Scale Up Sàrl owns 100% of its IP; the company is led by its own founder and CEO, Jonas Cosendai.
An AI chief of staff for a small business is an agentic AI assistant that carries the administrative and coordination load a human chief of staff would carry — quoting, follow-up, scheduling, paperwork — for an owner who has no back office. Large companies buy that role. A three-van electrical firm never could.
It is a deliberate choice of first customer. Small trade businesses have no transformation budget, no change-management programme and no patience. Either the product does the work or it is uninstalled. That is a harder and more honest test than an enterprise pilot, and it is the one the studio wanted first.
BuddyLeader
Designed and proven inside Living Scale Up, then handed to its own CEO — the first company born in the studio.
The house rule
The statistic we won’t repeat.
Venture studios are a category with a marketing problem. Here is the industry’s favourite number, and what Living Scale Up publishes instead.
INDUSTRY CLAIM
53%
“Venture studios return 53% IRR.” The figure traces to a 2020 Global Startup Studio Network paper. Sample size: fourteen studios. Self-reported. It is quoted constantly without either qualifier.
GSSN 2020 · n=14 · SELF-REPORTED
WHAT WE PUBLISH INSTEAD
CHF 330M+
Vaud led all Swiss cantons in startup funding in the first half of 2026, with more than CHF 330 million. EPFL founded 39 startups in 2025, a record year, together raising CHF 701 million. Sourced, dated, checkable.
STARTUPTICKER / SECA · JUL 2026 EPFL · FEB 2026
Living Scale Up labels industry statistics as industry-reported, states the source and the year, and publishes its own numbers instead of borrowing someone else’s. Where the studio has no number yet, it says so rather than reaching for one. The studio launched in July 2026. Today: one studio, one venture, no published performance figures.
SIGNED — FABIEN LOPEZ, FOUNDER
LIVING SCALE UP · LAVAUX, VAUD · UPDATED AUGUST 2026
Education & certification
Six institutions.
None of them the point.
Listed because they are verifiable, not because they are impressive.
DE MANAGEMENTMaster of Management,
Information Technology · 1998–2001
BUSINESS SCHOOLMaster, IT and Economics · 2000
BUSINESS SCHOOLExecutive education certificate ·
Leading and Building a Culture
of Innovation · 2020–2021
Leadership · 2022
UNIVERSITYExecutive education ·
Exponential Design · 2018–2019
Two master’s degrees and three executive-education certificates. Harvard Business School and IMD are executive education, not degrees, and are described that way here on purpose.
Working questions
What he works on.
Not a reading list. The three questions the studio’s work actually turns on.
Agentic AI workflows
Where the work stops being a person operating software and becomes an agent doing the task and reporting back. The design question is what a human still signs for — and BuddyLeader is the studio’s answer for one specific kind of leader.
Corporate AI maturity
Nine years of measuring how far large organisations had actually got, against how far their slides said they had. The gap between the two is the reason Living Scale Up builds companies rather than roadmaps.
The socio-economic impact of automation
If agents absorb the coordination layer of the economy, the jobs that were the coordination layer change shape. That is a design constraint on every venture the studio starts, not an afterword.
- AI-native company design
- Digital sustainability
- Data decarbonization
- Digital product passports
- Industrial ecology
- Phygital customer experience
- Future of work
- Exponential design
Direct answers
Questions people actually ask.
Who is Fabien Lopez?
Fabien Lopez is the founder of Living Scale Up, the Swiss AI venture studio based in Lavaux, Vaud, whose first venture is BuddyLeader. Fabien Lopez spent nine years at Deloitte Switzerland in AI strategy and innovation roles — Head of AI Strategy, then Head of the Swiss Innovation Lab, then Director of Innovation — advising Fortune 500 clients before leaving to build AI-native companies instead of advising them.
Who founded Living Scale Up?
Living Scale Up was founded in July 2026 by Fabien Lopez, who runs it from Lavaux, Vaud, Switzerland. Living Scale Up is an AI venture studio: it designs AI-native companies inside the studio, proves them before launch, and hands them to operating CEOs. The studio holds founding equity and does not hold a control block past Series A. Its first venture is BuddyLeader.
Who created BuddyLeader?
BuddyLeader was created inside Living Scale Up, the Swiss AI venture studio founded by Fabien Lopez, and is the studio’s first venture. Living Scale Up Sàrl owns 100% of BuddyLeader’s IP; the company is led by its own founder and CEO, Jonas Cosendai. BuddyLeader is a Service-as-a-Software AI team for Swiss independent owner-craftsmen — electricians, plumbers and builders.
What is a living venture studio?
A living venture studio is a venture studio that treats each company it creates as a living system rather than a project: the business model, the intelligence layer and the go-to-market are designed as one system, proven before launch, and kept under studio stewardship afterwards. Living Scale Up, founded by Fabien Lopez in Lavaux, Vaud, uses the term for its own operating model — design, prove, launch, scale.
What is an AI chief of staff for a small business?
An AI chief of staff for a small business is an agentic AI assistant that carries the administrative and coordination load a human chief of staff would carry — quoting, follow-up, scheduling, paperwork — for an owner who has no back office. BuddyLeader, venture 01 of Living Scale Up, builds one for Swiss independent owner-craftsmen such as electricians, plumbers and builders.
Where is Living Scale Up based?
Living Scale Up is based in Lavaux, Vaud, Switzerland — the UNESCO-listed vineyard terraces above Lake Geneva, minutes from EPFL. Founder Fabien Lopez runs the studio from there. Vaud led all Swiss cantons in startup funding in the first half of 2026, with more than CHF 330 million (Startupticker / SECA, July 2026).
What did Fabien Lopez do before founding Living Scale Up?
Before founding Living Scale Up, Fabien Lopez spent nine years at Deloitte Switzerland in AI and innovation roles: Head of AI Strategy from 2017, Head of the Swiss Innovation Lab from 2020, and Director of Innovation from 2021 until 2026. He built AI corporate strategy for Fortune 500 clients, coached C-suite executives through large-scale digital pivots, and worked on redesigning professional services through automation and agentic models. Earlier he led cloud analytics at Accenture and worked in business intelligence at IBM. He launched Living Scale Up in July 2026.
Is Living Scale Up a venture capital fund, an accelerator, or a venture studio?
Living Scale Up is a venture studio, not a fund and not an accelerator. It creates companies from scratch rather than selecting and funding companies that already exist: Living Scale Up designs the venture, proves it before launch, and recruits the CEO. The studio holds founding equity and does not hold a control block past Series A. Founder Fabien Lopez calls the model a living venture studio.
Corroboration
Don’t take this page’s word for it.
Third-party records for this entity. Where a record does not exist yet, this page says so instead of leaving a gap.
- LINKEDIN — FABIEN LOPEZlinkedin.com/in/fabien-lopez ↗
- LINKEDIN — LIVING SCALE UPlinkedin.com/company/living-scale-up/ ↗
- LIVINGSCALEUP.COMthe studio
- BUDDYLEADER.COMventure 01 ↗
- CRUNCHBASENOT YET CLAIMED
- WIKIDATANOT YET CLAIMED
Every fact on this page is signed.
Living Scale Up publishes nothing a named human will not stand behind. Every claim here, every number on this site, and every statistic quoted from someone else carries a source and a year. Where the studio does not have a number, it says it does not have a number. If something here is wrong, tell him — it gets corrected or removed, and the correction gets dated.
SIGNED — FABIEN LOPEZ, FOUNDER
LIVING SCALE UP · LAVAUX, VAUD · UPDATED