Switzerland’s Wingman Ventures rebrands to Founderful, goals for a $120M fund

Wingman Ventures is in search of the most effective of Switzerland’s startups and its various portfolio already ranges from cellular commerce to robotics. The Zurich-based enterprise capital agency, which focuses on pre-seed startups, introduced right this moment it’s rebranding as Founderful and has already raised $85 million for its new Fund II, with a goal of closing $120 million within the subsequent few months.

The fund’s backers embrace institutional traders, household places of work and founders from unicorns like Duolingo, Climeworks, GetYourGuide, Supply Hero and Scandit. Up to now it has had two exits: Insightness, a imaginative and prescient chip startup acquired by Sony, and Convey! Labs, a cellular commerce startup acquired by Swiss Put up. There are two different exits in Founderful’s pipeline, each within the B2B software program area, which are anticipated to be within the double-digit thousands and thousands.

Founding companion Alex Stöckl tells TechCrunch that when Founderful completed elevating its first $90 million fund in 2020, it was Switzerland’s first devoted impartial enterprise capital agency, investing solely on the pre-seed stage.

“With this, from day one to the opposite we disrupted old school enterprise angels, accelerator and incubator applications and household places of work that might hand founders unfavorable phrases, trigger early over-dilution and tone down ambition ranges to cater to their conservative risk-return profiles,” he says.

Founderful was launched in 2019 by Pascal Mathis, the co-founder of GetYourGuide, an area journey market that hit unicorn standing in 2023, and Eat.ch co-founder Lukas Weder.

During the last 4 years, Founderful has made virtually 50 investments, together with eight Swiss investments in 2023. Its Fund I invested $60 million into 40 startups, encompassing 109 founders who created 1,093 jobs. In complete, Fund I’s portfolio raised further funding of over $350 million in three years.

Fund II’s typical examine measurement will probably be $1 million for pre-seed stage startups and as much as $2 million for seed-stage ones.

Founderful seems for startups within the B2B software program and industrial areas, and invests of their first funding rounds. Its portfolio contains corporations from sectors like robotics and industrial automation, synthetic intelligence and machine studying, pc imaginative and prescient applied sciences and materials sciences like clear tech, local weather tech and development tech.

Lots of its portfolio founders come from universities and analysis establishments like ETH Zurich, by the Founderful Campus program. It says about two-thirds of its entrepreneurs are graduates, doctorates or researchers from Switzerland’s high educational establishments and one-third are former founders or staff of profitable startups.

Founderful has already began investing capital from Fund II, together with different silicon chips maker Chiral Nano, ESG reporting platform Nala Earth, safety robotics startup Ascento, manufacturing robotics firm Saeki, office expertise platform Anthropos, bimolecular evaluation firm Isospec Analytics, lithium-ion battery developer Eightinks and humanoid robotics creator Faive Robotics.

A few of Founderful’s different portfolio corporations embrace survey drone startup Wingtra, with annual income of over $20 million, plastics recycling firm DePoly and sustainable computing-focused Corintis, a sustainable computing that works with tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Nvidia.

Stöckl says Founderful advantages startups as a result of it invests over and over within the nation on the identical stage and has optimized its help features and processes “like Swiss clockwork, pun meant.” Because it has the identical accounting requirements, service suppliers and expertise pool, it is ready to standardize the value-add it provides to founders and their corporations, serving to them seize market lead. Founderful additionally connects the Swiss ecosystem and worldwide enterprise capital neighborhood, introducing founder groups to next-round traders.

Sooner or later, Stöckl says Founderful will proceed to double down “on Switzerland, investing within the 10 most bold founder groups every year as their lead investor for his or her first financing spherical.”

In a quote about why he went into Founderful’s Fund II as a restricted companion, Duolingo CTO and co-founder Severin Hacker mentioned, “Constructing Duolingo, I’ve seen my very own fair proportion of VC companies and it’s uncommon to collaborate with an investor who’s as meticulous and relentless towards creating a worth to the founders they backed, because the group at Founderful.”