Matt Pells, Product Manager, Funds Administration, explains that the firm works with four of the world’s five biggest custodian banks supporting their role as transfer agents.

“Our clients use our software to run their administration on behalf of fund managers,” he says. The firm also supports wealth managers and offers a front-end advice solution which supplies a digital platform for advisers.

Pells says: “Pre-Covid, on the transfer agency side of our business our clients were all about growing their business using a core registry that was resilient and scalable.

“Post-Covid, that focus switched from our clients who had achieved that scale and then needed to lower their costs and their risks so we were reaching out beyond the core registers, developing enabling technology and orchestration – business process modelling – that would enable clients to reduce their costs.”

Here, Pells reports one client reduced their operational overhead by 60 per cent.

However, clients wanted to reduce their risks as well and the firm created a financial messaging platform, Babel, which trades over a trillion a year, designed to take out the risk and cost element of trading.

The firm found that their clients also wanted to increase the digital experience of their clients, encouraging them to self-serve more, so the firm built new tools for end users, only to find that they struggled with digital adoption, so the next step was to work with clients to raise digital adoption across their clients.

“Change takes a little while to flow through,” Pells says, diplomatically, adding: “In financial services in particular, people are used to doing things in a particular way.”

Looking forward, Pells says that the firm’s clients are seeing new technological developments with new start-ups based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems and blockchain and new providers claiming they can use AI.

“Our clients are sitting up straight and saying ‘we will be left behind here’ so they are coming to us to ask what we are doing in this space.

“Fund managers are saying we want new products and a quicker time to market and our clients used to come to us and say, ‘can you support money market funds or hedge funds’? Now that has swivelled, and they ask for features such as ‘can you support liquidity management or performance fees because they recognise that investors are driving new products.

“It’s not an asset management type solution that they want, but a menu of features they can pick and choose from.”

Pells predicts that as the technology advances, there will be more collaboration as there will be no one solution from one firm so partnering will be more important particularly as new asset classes, such as crypto, appear and they want to go in as quickly as possible.”

The change is driven by new and better technology. “The impact of DLT will be huge and we will move to tokenisation in our business over time, but this is a long term play for the industry as a whole so near term solutions are vital,” Pells says.

His firm is taking its core registries and breaking them out into modules so that rather than three big systems, the firm has a set of modular solutions and in that process it is also mindful of the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) in the industry.

“AI needs data and in the right format, so we have an eye on the future examining how we prepare that data model so that when AI comes along, we know how best it can consume that data. We are thinking about the future as we move towards it step by step.”

Although they can cater to a wide range of services – pensions, tax, philanthropy, lifestyle services – family offices across the globe are focusing on one theme: investment management. Here, they face an increasingly complex environment: diverse asset classes, more information to manage, and the need for transparency and risk reduction, while aiming for better risk and performance management. Against this backdrop, it is key for them to reflect on how they must secure wealth for future generations. A multifaceted goal which can be met by using smart modular technology.

Family offices are shifting capital allocation in the face of inflation, geopolitical unrest, fluctuating policy rates and investor preferences, e.g. towards sustainable investment projects. Against this backdrop, the number of asset classes in which family offices invest is on the rise.

Investments are not only restricted to financial markets but can also include alternatives. Art, private equity and venture capital are gaining a bigger share of allocations. As for the latter two asset classes, family offices are becoming more prominent in deal-making alongside M&A, real estate transactions, and directly investing in businesses. And increasingly more, family office professionals are actively investing in crypto investments.

Family vehicles are also transitioning to a more active fund management approach as a function of portfolio diversification. This general shift in diversification, especially since family offices invest across several investment entities, means increased reporting, accounting and compliance complexity for teams that remain lean.

Lean but growing

Most family offices are lean, employing a team of ten or fewer people, just enough to fill  investment management needs. Additionally, only 26 per cent have succession plans. Many firms also lack governance frameworks, cybersecurity controls, and risk management processes outside of investments. However, as family offices mature beyond the first generation, their assets under management reaching USD1 billion, and they grow in employee size, they are more likely to put more robust protocols in place.

Looking ahead, families are feeling the winds of change ushered in by wider digitalisation and they are changing their approaches to technology.  In some offices, younger generations are coming to the helm and spurring innovation. They are seizing on the opportunity technology to be able to achieve their investment and operational goals, all of which are essential to supporting future generations.

The digital-first family office

Technology, while not the answer to each family office challenge, does play a key role in nearly all of them via its smart application. Tech makes wealth management processes more efficient and cost effective and simplifies complexity across the broad range of allocations family offices have.

For example, family offices are increasingly adopting cloud-based digital platforms to manage portfolios, run analytics, and handle regulatory reporting across the globe. These platforms offer firms a single system that can minimise errors and inefficiencies involving the key value that sits at the heart of systems: data.

Accurate, timely, and consistent data is indispensable to workflow optimisation of all investing-related functionalities for family offices. Such data can be easily accessed via Data-as-a-Service providers that carry data on millions of instruments, across all asset classes and scores of exchanges. Amidst the abundance of available data, only a customised dashboard service that is designed to provide easy access to curated global data and exchanges will unlock the full potential of information needed for sound decision making.

Customised and intuitive dashboard

The need for robust data tools and solutions that allow financial institutions to manage investment decisions, reduce costs and comply with changing market requirements are more critical than ever. By streaming exactly the data a family office professional needs, its intuitive dashboard provides a highly responsive solution that delivers actionable insights, up to the minute pricing and full company reference data, fully tailored to the user’s needs.

In terms of creating continuity between generations, technology also plays a role. AI-powered solutions are available which enable intergenerational conversations via video. Here, a current steward would record multiple videos about the management of the office, family history, investments, or anything else they deem relevant. When they pass, those taking over the helm could directly see their family member before them, asking questions as if they were still in the room. An AI system would choose the appropriate clippings in response to questions.

Such a digital-first approach gives families an edge in their investment management focus and beyond. A development particularly important as family offices begin bringing additional operations under the family office umbrella or merge with other family offices to further optimise resilience, governance and operations.

Supporting future generations

Family offices by nature are generational undertakings, their horizons being 50 to100 years. And since technology will increasingly become the core of their service provision, the question arises of how they can choose vendors that support sustainable investment over lifetimes. Especially since the abundance of software solutions available that can help family offices increase efficiency in managing their wealth can be overwhelming.

When considering outsourcing solutions, family offices should also play the long game. This practically translates to prioritizing vendors that constantly develop products to ensure they are up to date.Vendors should also have outstanding support services and maintain a security-first approach. The latter point is key considering the impact of the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and rising cybersecurity threats.

Finally, addressing the challenges faced by family offices today requires leveraging modular, intuitive technology. These systems provide plug-and-play components that allow users to create workflows for processes, data management, trading, and funds with ease.

They enable the consolidation of diverse asset classes, automate reporting, integrate ESG data, and simplify regulatory compliance. Importantly, such technology can often operate alongside existing legacy systems, offering a seamless transition to more efficient and adaptable operations. Embracing these innovations presents a significant opportunity for family offices to evolve and thrive in a rapidly changing landscape

Iress writes that Dow Jones has one of the world’s largest news-gathering operations globally, providing news and business information across multiple formats. Dow Jones Newswires offers global coverage complimented by local reporting expertise in key markets including Australia. Through the partnership, all of Iress’ global market data and trading customers will be able to access premium news from Dow Jones Newswires, including select content from The Wall Street Journal, Barrons, MarketWatch and Investor’s Business Daily.

Iress’s CEO, Global Trading and Market Data, Jason Hoang says: “It’s of critical importance that traders have access to trusted, accurate and timely information. Through this partnership, we believe that our clients can be confident that the information they use through Iress’s software is of the highest calibre and can be relied upon to help make better trading decisions.”

Dow Jones Newswires’ General Manager, Joe Cappitelli, says: “Wealth and investing professionals around the world trust and rely on our premium news, insights and analysis to identify investment opportunities and better serve their clients. By integrating our real-time market news directly into customer workflows, Iress is creating even more value for their clients, enhancing their user experience and helping them make smarter investment decisions.”  

“MSCI AI Portfolio Insights is designed to help investors better identify and manage potential emerging risks that dynamic markets pose to their portfolios,” the firm says.

MSCI writes that it has combined its extensive risk and performance modelling capabilities with GenAI to enhance risk reporting.  MSCI AI Portfolio Insights aims to create efficiencies and deliver insights to institutional risk and portfolio managers by helping identify and analyse the most salient information in risk reports before the working day starts.

Investors can use MSCI AI Portfolio Insights’ interactive capabilities to drill further into changes in their portfolios without any need for code or extensive user interface dropdowns. MSCI AI Portfolio Insights merges generated text with modern dashboards and cloud-based technology to enhance communication and efficiency in risk and portfolio management. These tools aim to empower risk management teams at asset managers, hedge funds and asset owners to drive collaboration across their firm’s investment teams.

Traditionally, risk managers have invested significant time and resources integrating complex models to process, clean, generate, store, and extract all data necessary to provide a comprehensive overview of risk and performance. Today, risk leaders at investment firms face increased pressure to deliver both enterprise-wide risk monitoring on a growing number of portfolios and risk advisory services to their investment teams. At the same time, global challenges like climate change, geopolitical tensions, macroeconomic uncertainty, and technological advancements have created new investment challenges and opportunities for risk leaders to monitor.

MSCI AI Portfolio Insights leverages proprietary algorithms to curate large volumes of data, aiming to surface the most important factors impacting risk and performance and connecting them as appropriate to market events. It also features an AI agent to help risk managers further understand and decompose the risk and performance drivers. Based on natural language interaction, the assistant can answer complex questions about portfolios.

“Institutional investors both can and must shift their risk teams from being largely control-oriented to also being an investment-focused function,” says Ashley Lester, Chief Research Officer at MSCI. “With MSCI AI Portfolio Insights, we are transforming risk reporting to make it more insightful and more accessible to investment decision makers.  Risk should not be just about monitoring: it should be about providing investors with actionable insights.”

MSCI also introduced the Macro Finance Analyzer, leveraging MSCI’s financial modelling and stress-testing capabilities. This tool is designed to test how changes to macroeconomic conditions could affect a portfolio’s risks and returns across asset classes, supporting investors’ asset allocation decisions. Users can explore and test a wide variety of conditions, with the ability to adjust expectations for rapidly evolving market events and trends – like potential impacts of interest rate changes or changes in long-term economic growth.

“At MSCI, we have observed a shift in the relationship between investment and risk management teams, driven by senior investment leaders’ growing demand for the integration of risk analytics into the investment process,” says Jorge Mina, Head of Analytics at MSCI. “Risk teams must seek efficiencies, modernise processes, and enhance the guidance they offer to the entire investment organisation. To accomplish these goals and increase collaboration with portfolio managers, risk managers need the right toolkit, which is now provided on a single platform by MSCI.”

LMT receives real-time transactional feeds and proactively notifies asset managers in case their custom thresholds have been exceeded. LMT supports liquidity management for fund structures with liquid and illiquid assets and can be adjusted and customised to various fund cycles and cut off times.

Accessed through BBH’s client portal Infuse TA, BBH writes that asset managers can now simulate within LMT and manage their liquidity decisions online. Trades can be accepted as instructed or adjusted on an individual basis or at fund level, with automatic STP cancellations and new STP instructions to support the newly accepted cash flow.

LMT not only provides online projections for the fund’s liquidity needs, but it also provides asset managers with a tool to use to fulfill the growing requirements from regulators around liquidity transparency, BBH says.

The latest Financial Stability Board recommendations FSB Revised Policy Recommendations to Address Structural Vulnerabilities from Liquidity Mismatch in Open-Ended Funds, 20 December 2023, ELTIF 2.0 regulation Regulation (EU) 2023/606 of The European Parliament and of The Council of 15 March 2023, and European Securities and Markets Authority draft regulatory technical standards ESMA Draft regulatory technical standards under the revised ELTIF Regulation, 19 December 2023 call for well-established and documented processes using defined and tested liquidity management tools and procedures. Furthermore, the International Organization of Securities Commissions OR01/24 Update to IOSCO 2023-24 Work Programme – March 2024 – March 2025 Workplan has prioritised LMTs as a 2024 focus area and the Central Bank of Ireland announced a thematic review and questionnaire for 2024 Irish Funds Weekly Update – Friday 12 April 2024.

“General spikes of market volatility, as well as risk of higher market volatility due to geopolitical tensions and world events such as COVID-19, have highlighted the importance of automation in liquidity management for risk mitigation and to preserve financial stability,” says Manuel Dienhart, Global Head of Transfer Agency at BBH. “LMT will offer managers a digital solution to manage their funds’ liquidity. It takes what was once a manual and risky offline process, and turns it into straight through automation, helping managers meet regulators’ expectations.”

Further driving the demand for an automated liquidity management tool is the growing interest among managers in ELTIF 2.0, LTAF and evergreen funds, which are open-ended structures that offer high net worth and retail investors exposure to private market asset classes that have traditionally been harder to access. According to BBH’s 2024 Fund Distribution Outlook survey, 50 per cent of asset managers plan to go to market with ELTIFs and LTAFs in the next three years.

“Semi-liquid, open-ended structures put liquidity management into finer focus, especially through a regulatory lens when offering liquidity within a fund holding largely illiquid assets,” says Lata Vyas, Head of European Alternative Funds Product at BBH. “For asset managers, GPs and Management Companies who oversee these portfolios, establishing an appropriate redemption policy and managing the ongoing liquidity needs of a broad spectrum of investors requires tools to be in place that are visible to regulators.”

BBH’s LMT utilises API technology and is integrated with BBH Infomediary, an open-architecture data integration and messaging engine, and currently available for Transfer Agency clients.

With a 40-year track record for innovation and value creation in private markets, Pantheon writes that it invests across the full lifecycle of investments through secondary, direct co-investment and primary fund commitments, with specialist capabilities and expertise spanning private equity, real assets and private credit. Since launching its first listed private markets fund in 1987, Pantheon writes that it has been at the forefront of opening access to private markets to a wider range of investors, and it now offers a range of evergreen solutions with a combined USD7 billion in assets under management.

Providing a complete suite of technology and structuring capabilities, iCapital writes that it will help deliver enhanced access to Pantheon’s evergreen offerings globally, including the firm’s first open-ended, semi-liquid private equity offering available outside of the US, targeting markets with growing demand across Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia.

Victor Mayer, Head of International Private Wealth at Pantheon, says: “iCapital’s global leadership in expanding the alternative investment marketplace makes it an excellent partner to bring our suite of products, providing access to high-quality, hard-to-access assets and fund managers, to a wider range of international investors. We look forward to working with iCapital to continue to bring the power of private markets and our unique expertise to help more people build secure financial futures.”

“We are very pleased to partner with Pantheon and support them in their mission to make their suite of evergreen private markets investment products available to the wealth management channel,” says Marco Bizzozero, Head of International at iCapital. “With wealth managers globally increasingly making private markets a strategic priority as they seek enhanced diversification and superior returns for their clients’ portfolios, iCapital is the trusted technology partner to asset managers expanding their offering to the growing pool of private wealth.”

Powered by billions of US consumer credit card and debit card transactions, Bloomberg writes that the BSM data analytics feeds deliver valuable insights into company performance and consumer trends in near-real-time at a three-day lag. The transaction data comes from a subset of a US consumer panel that includes 20+ million consumers and covers 3,000+ public and private companies and 4,000+ brands across industries.

Making Bloomberg Second Measure’s transaction data analytics available for use across the enterprise is Bloomberg’s latest step in developing solutions tailored for quant customers requiring new and advanced data solutions and technologies to find an edge in their investment process. The firm writes that this new offering follows the launch of Bloomberg’s Company Financials, Estimates and Pricing Point-in-Time solution that connects and integrates a broad, diverse range of datasets from multiple sources, provides historical point-in-time data and will enable linking traditional company data to more esoteric data like alternative data.

“By continuing to build out our interconnected suite of company research products, Bloomberg is a catalyst for change to the typically complex quant workflow that requires sourcing and organizing datasets from multiple providers,” says Tony McManus, Global Head of Enterprise Data at Bloomberg. “Delivering our proprietary alternative data directly alongside our traditional financial data through Data License allows quants and research analysts to make efficient, better-informed market projections with unique insights.”

The BSM transaction data analytics feeds are also the flagship data source for the ALTD <GO> function on the Bloomberg Terminal, which launched in September 2023 in an effort to democratise access to alternative data by seamlessly integrating it alongside traditional market data, broker research, estimates and news on the desktop. With this latest development, Bloomberg is building on its investment in expanding the applicability of alternative data to new use cases for its clients, the firm says.

“Making our Bloomberg Second Measure transaction data analytics feeds available for use across the enterprise with Data License is the next step in our effort to lower the barrier to entry for investment analysts to use alternative data for generating differentiated insights,” says Richard Lai, Global Head of Alternative Data in Bloomberg’s Office of the CTO. “We’re excited to continue building on this momentum to support additional research workflows and create new use cases for Bloomberg’s alternative data solutions.”

The firm writes that, powered by BBH’s data integration and connectivity engine Infomediary, the service involves the curation of fund holdings data, which can be leveraged as part of multiple fund output publications, including regulated fund disclosures.

The curated data, which involves ingesting, transforming, and aggregating disparate data and optimising it for distribution, has resulted in greater efficiencies, enhanced risk mitigation and transparency, and improved consistency across AB’s outputs, the firm says.

“Having easy access to high-quality fund holdings data that can be leveraged in our fund reporting is critical for us to evolve our business,” says Joe Mantineo, Head of Fund Administration at AB. “With BBH as our partner in this regard, we have consistent and reliable data to support these activities – data that is available on-demand and is customizable.”

BBH’s data management services can be configured to aggregate data across all administrators and third parties, enabling a provider-agnostic model that gives flexibility and interoperability to the asset manager. The authoritative data set has provided a doorway into other strategic areas in need of data transformation and oversight solutions and will lead to addressing additional use cases.

“Simply put, an asset manager’s ability to focus on the front office is limited by inconsistency and the burden of manual reviews and processes,” says Josh Fine, Co-Head of Infomediary Data Solutions at BBH. “Our work with AB demonstrates the value of addressing those issues with authoritative data sets. What started as a specific use case with fund disclosure documents, is now scaling to other use cases across fund operations.”

Companies across end markets are continually demanding increasingly complex, high-performing and efficient chips, across an expanding number of applications and different system requirements – all to drive innovation within their own products. 

For semiconductors to meet these increasing demands, they need to constantly innovate. At the ‘leading edge’, innovation is focused on shrinking the size of the ‘node’, and thus increasing the number of transistors per chip. Over several decades, progress in this area has seemingly followed Moore’s Law: that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years, leading to an exponential increase in computational power and efficiency. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has been at the forefront of this progress and is able to produce chips at the 3 nanometre ‘node’, with a 2nm node offering 30 per cent more efficiency expected by 2025. Even at the ‘trailing edge’ – older, more mature semiconductor technologies – innovation is still important, focused on improving the reliability and efficiency of chips. To facilitate this innovation, the semiconductor industry is one the most intense in research and development (as a proportion of sales), second only to Pharma in 2022.

While innovation is clearly a significant cost for semiconductor companies, a high investment allocation to R&D not only creates high barriers to new entrants, but allows the industry to continue growing, not only by providing improved, more complex and powerful semiconductors, but facilitating the development of new technologies in different categories and industries – as seen with the progress made in generative artificial intelligence across sectors over the course of 2023. Consequently, the semiconductor market has grown rapidly over the past decade.

Two sectors we would highlight where there has been this significant growth in the use of semiconductors are the automotive and datacentre industries.

Growth in the automotive semiconductor end-market (14 per cent annually* through to 2030), is expected to far outpace the broader sector, with long-term trends such as digitalisation, electrification and autonomous driving increasing the complexity and content of semiconductors within vehicles. Semiconductor content per vehicle averaged around USD600-700 in 2021 and is expected to reach USD2000 by 2030. Semiconductor content roughly doubles from an internal combustion engine vehicle to a battery or plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, and the expectation that EVs (full or hybrid) will make up more than 50 per cent of car production by 2027 is a significant tailwind to demand. 

Datacentre semiconductorusage is expected to be the second fastest growth sector over the remainder of the decade (+13 per cent annually*). We have seen rapidly increasing demand for cloud computing capacity across industries, not only due to more businesses and industries migrating on-premise infrastructure to the cloud, but the rise of ‘Big Data’ and more data-centric analytics boosting demand for more efficient servers, and thus more complex, efficient and powerful processors. Furthermore, advances in artificial intelligence, particularly following developments in generative AI during 2023, require specialised hardware that has the ability to handle complex and energy-intensive computations, with datacentres providing the necessary infrastructure for both the training and running of AI systems. 

The increasing demands and complexity of the underlying products within these two industries are resulting in greater ‘semiconductor content per device/unit’ (measured as the dollar amount). However, this phenomenon is also present across many other use cases.

Costs associated with fitting more transistors onto a given area are one reason why the semiconductor industry is one of the most R&D-intensive industries. Advancing to smaller technologies becomes increasingly complex, meaning that at each ‘node’ (historically the minimum distance between transistors on a chip) the cost increase is significant. Whilst no data is available yet, the 3nm node is expected to be c.USD1 billion. The more significant cost, however, is the cost of the fabrication module (semiconductor factory), which is estimated to be c.USD5-6 billion at the 5nm node. The cost of TSMC’s 3nm proposed fabrication plant is estimated to be USD20 billion, highlighting a significant acceleration in the costs required to progress the technology further.

Geopolitical tensions have driven governments to offer significant subsidies to accelerate the onshoring of chipmaking facilities. 

The covid-19 pandemic exposed vulnerabilities in the semiconductor supply chain, with varying lockdown measures across regions driving severe shortages in many areas of the chip markets. 

The supply chain disruption exacerbated existing underlying tensions and concerns over national security and supply chain stability. Strained relations between the US and Chinese governments have resulted in sanctions and restrictions over exports between the two countries since 2017, with the US ultimately aiming to limit China’s ability to acquire and manufacture chips at advanced nodes and thus slowing efforts to gain a meaningful foothold in industry and become self-sufficient. The US’s vulnerability is clear. Whilst accounting for 25 per cent of global semiconductor demand, the US possesses just 12 per cent of global manufacturing capacity. Other regions have also weighed in to obtain their own slice of the rapidly growing and critical industry, with the EU, Japan, Korea and India all offering additional subsidies to incentivise chipmakers to build on their shores. One concern with government subsidies is that they typically lead to the misallocation of capital. We do not expect this to be the case for the semiconductor industry since the subsidies are coming at a time when companies need to ramp up capacity in order to service the long-term underlying growth trends. Either way, semiconductor equipment manufacturers such as Lam Research and KLA Corp stand to benefit from these long-term capex cycles.

Despite their superior characteristics, Guinness’ holdings have, on average, typically been in line with the MSCI World Semiconductor Index valuation on a price/earnings (P/E) basis. However, recently a significant discount has emerged. With the exception of Nvidia, all of our holdings are at a discount to the MSCI World Information Technology Index and the MSCI World Semiconductor Index today. We therefore continue to see good opportunities for holdings in the semiconductor sector and believe they continue to have good pathways for future growth, and potential outperformance.

* According to Bernstein Research

The firm was founded in 2019 by Swiss unicorn GetYourGuide co-founder Pascal Mathis, former Switzerland Lead at Creathor Ventures Alex Stöckl, and EAT.ch co-founder Lukas Weder. 

The firm writes that the team’s driving force has always been helping ambitious Swiss tech startups to become international market leaders. The firm was established with the singular goal of backing local, pre-seed startups in their first financing round with hands-on, founder-focused funding.

Bucking the venture trend of keeping ‘dry powder’ on hand, Founderful has made nearly 50 investments in the last four years, having made eight Swiss investments in 2023. 

From Fund I, Founderful has deployed USD60 million into 40 start-ups. This represents 109 founders who scaled to create 1,093 jobs and went on to raise almost 6x additional funding of over USD350 million in just three years, some of which from international venture firms. Wingtra (survey drones) has scaled to 200 employees and an annual revenue of over USD20 million. DePoly has been recognised globally for its revolutionary plastics recycling technology and raised a USD15 million seed round, while Corintis (sustainable computing)  is collaborating with global big tech and enterprise businesses.

Founderful has started deploying the capital raised in Fund II, backing the founders of Chiral Nano (alternative silicon chips), Nala Earth (ESG reporting), Ascento (security robotics), SAEKI (manufacturing robotics), Anthropos (workplace skills), Isospec Analytics (biomolecular analysis), Eightinks (lithium-ion batteries) and Faive Robotics (humanoid robotics). 

Alex Stöckl, Founding Partner at Founderful, says: “We’re beyond grateful that we get to continue our work with the most ambitious founder teams of this exciting ecosystem. Switzerland is one of the world’s fastest-growing venture capital markets. With the global shift towards more complex technologies solving some of our society’s most pressing challenges, it will become one of the world’s most important tech hubs. With our founder-operator backgrounds and the deeply rooted access we’ve built over the years into the universities and research institutions with our Founderful Campus program, we’ve become the go-to firm for entrepreneurs and investors alike.”

Founderful II is backed by a range of institutions, family offices, and founders who have scaled their start-ups into global unicorns such as Duolingo, Climeworks, GetYourGuide, Delivery Hero, and Scandit. 

Severin Hacker, CTO and co-founder at Duolingo, says: “Building Duolingo, I’ve seen my own fair share of VC firms, and it is rare to collaborate with an investor who is as meticulous and relentless toward creating value to the founders they backed, as the team at Founderful.”

Jonas Theiler, Head of Asset Management at Artemis Group, adds: “We’ve been working with Founderful since day one, and the companies they back have impressive substance and relevance from a technological and business perspective – they are spot-on doubling down on the Swiss venture ecosystem.” 

Founderful writes that it is laser-focused on the Swiss tech market and, with it, concentrated on supporting founders in the B2B software and industrial technology space This includes robotics and industrial automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning, computer vision technologies, and material sciences innovations in cleantech, climate tech, and construction tech. Founderful works quickly and closely with academia and industry to boost the new generation of technology leaders. 

Lukas Weder, Founding Partner at Founderful, says: “Our fresh identity as Founderful reflects our purpose as a venture capital business to have the deepest understanding of founders and give them the highest level of support. We were once founders ourselves and know what it takes to succeed. We are redefining founder-friendliness beyond just the term sheet through sharing advice, granting insights, and investing courageously. We bring lightheartedness and empathy to serious topics and remain calm in the face of adversity. We try to be the honest companion we would have wanted by our side when we built our own companies.” 

Founderful writes that its thesis on investing in Swiss-based startups has been proven by three megatrends: 

For the 13th consecutive year, Switzerland has ranked first in the Global Innovation Index – topping the lists for technology, knowledge, and creative output. It also has the world’s highest patent per capita ratio, and ETH Zurich produces more university spin-outs than any other university worldwide.

Big tech is fascinated by Switzerland, which is why Google has 5,000 developers there (its largest tech office outside the US). Disney, Nvidia, Meta, Huawei, and Intel have consistently grown their local R&D teams over the past years.

Switzerland is a Unicorn state – there are more billion-dollar tech startups per capita in Switzerland than anywhere else in Europe. Recent unicorn graduates like Scandit (logistics software), Climeworks (carbon capturing), and SonarSource (code security), and bootstrapped under-the-radar success stories like Proton (internet privacy) underline Switzerland’s rising global relevance for B2B technologies. 

Yoram Wijngaarde, CEO and founder of Dealroom, says: “When looking at our data, Switzerland has been on the rise as one of Europe’s fastest growing VC ecosystems over the past five years, and in 2023 becoming the fifth largest venture market on the continent only behind powerhouses UK, Germany, France and Sweden. When you look at nine tech unicorns on 9 million inhabitants, it becomes apparent that this is a market you cannot miss in your coverage as a European fund or limited partner.”