Zeno Ventures

Zeno Ventures

Founded in 2016 in Geneva, Zeno Ventures structures its investment activity through closed-ended funds raised from institutional clients. The firm maintains offices in Zurich and San Francisco, reinforcing a transatlantic deal pipeline that spans Switzerland, the broader European market, and the United States. Its portfolio reveals an explicit tilt toward companies embedding artificial intelligence into sector-specific workflows — a posture distinct from generalist early-stage funds — with the majority of its listed holdings founded within the past six years. Zeno's deployment model blends direct venture capital with a growing private equity practice that emphasizes proprietary deal origination and operational value creation. The portfolio, numbering over 80 active companies, assembles names across enterprise software, financial technology, health-tech, mobility, space-tech, and robotics. Confirmed positions include Mercury, a US-based bank for startups; Applied Intuition, a provider of simulation software for autonomous vehicle development; the Swiss financial group Tellco; Heart Aerospace, a Swedish electric airplane manufacturer; Rain Neuromorphics, a brain-inspired AI processor company; Beyond Aero, a French hydrogen-electric business aircraft developer; and Andromeda Surgical, which builds autonomous surgical robots. Geographically, Zeno sources from more than a dozen countries, including the United States, Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden, Brazil, Singapore, South Korea, Nigeria, and Australia. Zeno operates with a lean disclosed footprint: three offices anchor its distribution and sourcing, with the Geneva headquarters complemented by a Zurich presence and a San Francisco outpost that provides direct access to North American deal flow. Holdings indicate the firm participates across the early-stage continuum, from seed checks into startups like Spaceium — building automated space stations — through growth equity and late-stage venture in scaled businesses such as Applied Intuition. In the most recent reporting period, Zeno continued actively building its AI-centric portfolio by adding companies like Eloquent AI and Angström AI, both bringing applied machine learning to financial services and drug development respectively. The firm does not publicly disclose total assets under management or aggregate deployment figures. Zeno's structural differentiator is its operation as a dual-practice platform — venture capital and private equity — within a single, geography-dispersed team that sources globally but operates under Swiss regulatory and advisory infrastructure. This architecture targets asymmetric returns by capturing both technology venture upside and control-oriented private equity, while the San Francisco office, rather than being a full-scale investment hub, functions as an origination channel into Silicon Valley deal flow.