Kickfund

Kickfund's primary origination channel is the Venture Kick philanthropic initiative, which Beat Schillig co-founded. Venture Kick screens over 1,000 Swiss university projects annually through a three-stage evaluation process, awarding non-dilutive grants to the most promising teams. Kickfund then evaluates the top-tier graduates of this pipeline for equity investment, giving the firm early structural access to academic spin-offs from ETH Zurich, EPFL, and the University of St. Gallen.

Venture Kick is a separate philanthropic foundation that provides staged, non-dilutive grants to Swiss university spin-offs. Kickfund is a for-profit venture capital firm that invests equity in startups emerging from that ecosystem. Managing Partner Beat Schillig chairs both entities, creating a proprietary pipeline where Venture Kick acts as a talent filter and Kickfund deploys equity into the most commercially viable graduates.

Managing Partner Beat Schillig leads the investment committee. He is a central figure in Swiss entrepreneurship, serving as chairman of the IFJ Institute for Young Entrepreneurs and co-founder of Venture Kick. Partner Andreas Goeldi, a former Google executive and Stanford University alumnus, brings operational and technology expertise to deal evaluation and portfolio support.

Kickfund focuses on pre-seed, seed, and Series A rounds, with an emphasis on the structured seed-to-Series A bridge. The firm targets companies commercializing university research, often writing the first institutional equity check and preparing founders for downstream institutional venture rounds.

The firm concentrates on enterprise software, artificial intelligence and machine learning, digital health, fintech, and industrial technology. The sector mix reflects the research strengths of Swiss federal institutes of technology and the commercial priorities of the Swiss innovation ecosystem.