Wingman Ventures rebrands to Founderful

Zurich-based venture capital firm Wingman Ventures has announced that it is now operating as Founderful. The company also disclosed that it has already raised $85 million for its new Fund II, and is aiming to close $120 million in the next few months.

The fund’s backers include institutional investors, family offices and founders from unicorns like Duolingo, Climeworks, GetYourGuide, Delivery Hero and Scandit. Founderful invests in the first financing rounds of startups. Its portfolio comprises startups from the fields of robotics and industrial automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning, computer vision technologies and materials sciences such as clean tech, climate tech and construction tech.

According to founding partner Alex Stöckl, when Founderful finished raising its first $90 million fund in 2020, it was Switzerland’s first independent venture capital firm to invest only at the pre-seed stage. “With this, from day one to the other we disrupted old-fashioned business angels, accelerator and incubator programs and family offices that would hand founders unfavorable terms, cause early over-dilution and tone down ambition levels to cater to their conservative risk-return profiles,” said Stöckl in an interview with online news portal TechCrunch.

So far, Founderful has two exits: the vision chip startup Insightness, which was acquired by Sony, and the mobile commerce startup Bring! Labs, which was acquired by Swiss Post. Two other exits in the pipeline are anticipated to be in the double-digit millions. ce/mm