Fast Portfolio Growth in 2024
Kickfund grew from 2 to 69 portfolio companies during the first full calendar year; by now we’ve already reached 80. We joined many financing rounds led by reputable investors.
We launched our first fund, Kickfund Ventures Fund I, in December 2023 with two investments. The year 2024 was dedicated to heavy portfolio growth, and we were proud to support 67 further companies from among the Venture Kick winners before the year finished. This earned us the title of the 7th most active venture capital investor in Europe, according to Sifted.
Our portfolio is highly diversified across different deep tech areas, with a strong footprint in Switzerland’s particular strength, life sciences. The majority of our companies have their roots in academia, and all important academic institutions in Switzerland are represented in our portfolio – with ETH Zurich and EPFL in Lausanne in the lead.
Throughout the year, we co-invested in many financing rounds with reputable lead investors. We joined High-Tech Gründerfonds to support CustomSurg’s AI-guided trauma surgery, and we are helping Luya Foods together with Redalpine and Lisa Schmidheiny to ferment plant-based proteins. We were proud to join QBIT to finance DPhi Space to enable shared access to space for both hardware and software payloads, and we are thrilled to fund Borobotics together with Underground Ventures to develop a geothermal drilling system for urban heat pumps. In a round led by Positron Ventures, we also got to invest in CellX’s PFAS degradation solution.
