Riccardo Cannaviello is the founder of Symmetry Advisors. He brings over 20 years of international and U.S. experience in merchant banking, dealmaking, deal origination, high technology & life science commercialization, and entrepreneurship.
As an international merchant banker, Riccardo led deal origination in Hong Kong and China for Millennium Capital Partners, a boutique firm specializing in cross-border advisory work. He initiated proprietary opportunities representing nearly $1 billion in enterprise value, including Chinadotcom which went on to be one of the most successful IPOs on NASDAQ, and he advised a leading Chinese state-owned brewing company on matters of privatization and defense from an unsolicited acquisition offer.
Riccardo currently leads business development efforts for Sonic Arts Research and Development, the world's leading provider of applied R&D for advanced audio solutions, located in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego. He also leads business development activities at Zvonar Digital, a digital media technology company. Previously, Riccardo originated and led the corporate restructuring of Immersive Media Research which resulted in the spin-out of Zvonar from IMR.
As a technology commercialization advisor, Riccardo played a key role in the spinouts of a pediatric device and a cardiac device developed by the Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles.
On behalf of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Riccardo has brought commercialization expertise to over a dozen emerging companies in the life science sector. Representative publicly traded company engagements include Nanogen (point of care molecular diagnostics), Vical (plasmid DNA delivery of vaccines), and Illumina (custom peptide synthesis).
As an entrepreneur, Riccardo co-founded Zybernetix, a San Diego based neurotechnology company. Riccardo focused Zybernetix's platform technology, brain-computer interfaces, on carefully selected target markets: homeland security, healthcare, and videogames.
As interim executive, Riccardo led business development efforts at Parity Computing, an unstructured data management company where Riccardo focused on customer development in life sciences and IP law, as well as in Parity's legacy market, electronic publishing.
Riccardo holds an MBA from UCLA's Anderson Graduate School of Management, and a Bachelor's degree in Economics from Stanford University. He was born in Rome, Italy.
He brings a proven reputation for thought leadership; adaptability in the field; an appetite for strategic negotiations; decisive action under conditions of sustained uncertainty; and creative, out-of-the-box thinking.