Zurich startup financier takes off under a new name. The venture capital firm Wingman Ventures has given itself a new name and is launching a new fund.
Under the new name «Founderful», venture capitalists, led by founders Pascal Mathis, Lukas Weder, and Alex Stöckl, aim to invest in Swiss startups. Their target goal is to reach a volume of $120 million.
So far, 85 million dollars have already been raised and the rest is to be raised by July 2024, according to a post on LinkedIn. The venture capitalists want to invest the funds in particular in companies that are active in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and technology, as the news agencyBloombergwrites.
According to Stöckl, Switzerland, with its universities and research institutions, is a hub for start-ups. Around two thirds of Founderful's portfolio companies are led by researchers and founders from Swiss universities and institutions. The fund's backers include institutions, family offices and founders of companies such as Duolingo, Delivery Hero and Scandit.
As «Techcrunch» writes, there have been two exits from the company's first fund, which was launched in 2020 with around 90 million Swiss francs. Insightness, a vision chip startup acquired by Sony, and Bring! and Labs, a mobile commerce start-up that was acquired by Swiss Post. There are two further exits in the pipeline, both in the B2B software sector, which are expected to amount to a double-digit million euro sum. The fund made eight investments last year, including in several robotics start-ups. The total number of companies in the portfolio is 48. "Switzerland is one of the fastest growing venture capital markets in the world," said Stöckl in a video interview.