Backing Bold
Student Founders

We are the only independent Students-2-Students venture capital fund in Switzerland. We invest CHF 25,000 in start-ups founded at Swiss institutions of higher education and provide students with personalized feedback and support for their start-ups.

Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.

Investment Process

For transparency, we outline our investment process here. We try to provide helpful feedback at any stage of your startup, regardless of our investment decision.

  • 👋 Getting in Touch

    We are happy to talk to student founders as early as possible! Once they satisfy most of our Investment Criteria, we encourage them to submit your Investment Application or get in touch with our analysts on LinkedIn.

  • 🎙️ Interviews

    If a potential fit, we invite the founders to pitch their idea to our team. Questions from both sides are possible! Have a look at some typical VC Interview Questions.

  • ✍️ Due Diligence

    The leading analyst now writes a detailed investment memo. It might include interviewing experts and (potential) customers. Our partners then vote on the investment memo.

  • 💰 Investment Decision

    With a positive decision, S2S and the founders converge on terms (see S2S Standard Term Sheet for reference), both parties sign a standard legally-binding agreement, and we transfer the money.

  • 🤝 Portfolio Support

    Once a startup is part our portfolio, we aid the founders in securing follow-up investments through our strong Swiss and European network. We expect monthly updates (see S2S Reporting Template for reference).

Vision

Discovering breakthrough innovations through the eyes of the next generation.

  • 🧑‍🚀 Vision

    Discovering breakthrough innovations through the eyes of the next generations

    We believe that students have clear advantages over established investors when it comes to understanding the needs of the next generation. We believe that a student-run operation will discover several breakthrough ideas and novel business models of their peers that would otherwise have a hard time getting funding in Europe.

  • ⚙️ Operations

    Students run the whole VC operations and are supported by a strong network of advisors, mentors & board of directors.


    The investment committee consists of representatives from leading student organizations ("Club of Clubs") and is allocating a total of CHF 10,000,000 into start-ups from Swiss institutions of higher education. Students make the investment decisions autonomously and negotiate key terms with the start-ups directly.

  • 🥅 Goals

    Hands-on Venture Capital Learning

    Students learn all elements of venture capital operations and make real investment decisions. They are put in the driver seat to make a real impact on the ecosystem in funding new, big, and unconventional ideas.


    Discovering the next tech leaders

    Enable highly-educated students to become the investors of the future and discover the tech leaders of tomorrow among their peers.


    Increase the velocity of university startups

    Foster an entrepreneurial mindset in students and increase the velocity of university start-ups. A student-run VC will inspire also further peers to get the courage of starting their own company.


    Long-term thinking for people & the planet

    The next generation looks at opportunities beyond short-term profits. This enables funding also ventures with social entrepreneurship and more long-term investments in people and planet.

  • 💸 Investment Strategy

    Ticket Size that Matters

    We back ambitious projects at pre-seed level with CHF 25k initial investment for founders to grow their business.


    Technology at the heart and business scalability in the focus

    We look for technology developed at institutes of higher education with the potential to become innovative, scalable, and profitable solutions.


    Diversity & people-centric

    We back world-class founding teams with a passion to take risks and to build transformative technology ventures that tackle societies' toughest problems.


    University link

    At least one of the founders must be a current student at institute of higher education (Bachelor, Master, PhD) or young alumni.

  • 💙 Giving Back

    50% of the carry goes to our student team and to Swiss student organizations

    Investors in S2S Ventures enjoy a unique deal flow with a typical VC fee model while giving back to the ecosystem. From the carry, we donate 50% to the students who have been involved in our team and to student organizations to strengthen the ecosystem in a sustainable way. The annual management fee is directly used for events, team-building, operational expenses, and to provide ecosystem support & partnerships. No salaries are paid to the student teams or BoD/advisors.

Portfolio

Swiss student start-ups that are building the future.

K2 Photonics unveils their latest breakthrough: a compact dual-comb laser, combining lightning-fast speed with unmatched precision. They are solving the current tradeoff problem between speed, precision and affordability needed in practice for inspection tools to measure distance and thickness of systems varying from nanoscopic to macroscopic scales. Their innovative system isn't just a tool – it's a gateway to new realms of research and industrial advancement, offering seamless integration into full measurement systems.


Founded in 2023 by a team with 3 ETHZ co-founders.
Website - LinkedIn - Job openings

Deal led by Meline Cretegny & Laurynas Lopata

Their innovative product not only enhances the capacity of district heating networks by optimizing grid performance and accommodating more buildings but also achieves significant reduction in energy emissions through more efficient heating solutions of up to 25 %


Yuon Control’s optimization software is already optimizing first networks and leading Swiss utility providers are starting to test their solution, while further implementations for networks are on-going. This positions Yuon Control at the forefront of sustainability initiatives in the energy sector and increases the speed towards net zero.


Founded in 2020 by a team with 1 ETHZ, 1 BFH and 1 UNIBAS co-founder.

website - LinkedIn


Deal led by Jaques Schmidt & Laurynas Lopata

Cotierra aims to make the agricultural value chain more sustainable by reducing the burning of agricultural waste via biochar production. They are developing a mobile reactor to produce biochar at scale in Latin America. In doing so, Cotierra provides high-quality carbon removal certificates and helps coffee brands reduce their supply chain emissions while helping improve farmers’ margins with biochar as a fertilizer for their soil.


Founded in 2022 by a team with 2 HSG co-founders.


Website - LinkedIn - Job openings 


Deal led by Alessandro Boccassino & supported by Maximilian Krödel

Maven Health is making waves in the preventive healthcare market by providing metabolic health assessments based on non-invasive saliva samples. To assess the level of different metabolites, most healthcare professionals currently rely on multiple blood samples. Maven Health helps health care professionals, clinical labs, and nutritionists assess the metabolic wellbeing of their patients with a simple saliva sample, which allows them to know if and how to treat patients within their preventive care programmes by supporting them with detailed and actionable insights.

Founded in 2022 by a team with 2 EPFL co-founders.
website - LinkedIn - job openings


Deal led by David Campbell and supported by Arnout Devos

askEarth provides an easy-to-use answer engine to access unique information from daily satellite images. Freely available, trustworthy and up-to date, Earth Observation (EO) images are a powerful tool to fight disinformation and provide traceable information to the public. Yet, insights from EO are mainly reserved for data scientists. To change this, askEarth is democratizing the access to EO information by building an intuitive EO answer engine powered by Natural Language Processing.


Founded in 2023 by a team with 3 ETHZ and 1 UZH co-founders.
Website - LinkedIn - Job openings

Deal led by Mikhail Stoliartchouk & Sarper Melik Ertekin

Enantios is transforming the field of molecular characterization, in the context of complex chiral molecules and biologics. Understanding molecular structure is crucial in predicting how a molecule interacts with the body. However, tools for proper characterization have lagged behind, hindering drug discovery and increasing costs. Enantios is addressing this challenge by leveraging a state-of-the-art measurement technology based on Raman Optical Activity (ROA).

Founded in 2022 by a team with 2 ETHZ co-founders.
Website - LinkedIn - Job openings

Deal led by Alessandro Boccassino & supported by Maximilian Krödel

Oryl Photonics simplifies solubility measurement with its patented light-scattering based solution. Their instrument saves days of repetitive work, thousands of dollars of consumable cost and provides quick and reproducible solubility data through sustainable use of resources (chemicals, compounds, consumables).


Founded in 2020 by 2 EPFL co-founders.

Website - LinkedIn - Job openings


Deal led by Jaques Schmidt & David Campbell

Biosimo AG is pioneering the production of sustainable chemicals, focusing on acetic acid and its derivatives. By developing a groundbreaking process which uses bioethanol - a renewable resource - as the primary feedstock and a scalable catalytic process, they drastically reduce global warming contributions from the chemical industry.


Founded in 2021 by a team with 2 ETHZ co-founders.

Website - LinkedIn - Job openings


Deal led by Jaques Schmidt & supported by David Campbell

Storabble helps individuals and businesses to find the right storage space. Customers save time and make sure they find the best storage solution by accessing the largest range of storage facilities for private individuals in Switzerland. Simultaneously, they help Swiss self-storage providers and companies with a real estate portfolio increase their turnover, avoid vacancy costs, and reduce marketing costs.

Founded in 2023 by a team with 3 HSG and 1 FHNW co-founders.
website - LinkedIn - job openings


Deal led by Marvin Reusing & Noah Ghisleni and supported by Katerina Rigana

CITUS follows the mission of a healthier skin. The skin’s elasticity is a major factor for clinicians and for researchers to decide upon treatment strategies and test efficacies of products. The current solutions, which lack sensitivity and objectivity, are prone to errors thus creating large costs for the healthcare system. CITUS’ solution, NIMBLE, provides a reliable, objective and easy-to-use measurement.

Founded in 2023 by a team with 2 ETHZ co-founders.
website - LinkedIn - job openings


Deal led by Lewis Jones & supported by Flurin Andri Martin

enhance-d improves the data-tracking, data analysis, and patient experience for people with diabetes types 1 & 2. The software is connected to typical diabetes monitoring hardware, such as continuous glucose monitors (CGM), and provides data analysis and recommendations based on the patient’s data to improve day-to-day decision making.

Founded in 2022 by a team with 1 UNIBE post-doc co-founder.
website - LinkedIn - job openings


Deal led by Maximilian Krödel & supported by David Campbell

Sensawear brings the first wearable near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) sensors to market, allowing for both tissue pressure AND tissue oxygenation tracking in paraplegic patients. Their innovative product enables accurate risk assessment and prevention of life-threatening and expensive pressure wounds.

Founded in 2023 by a team with 2 UNIBE student co-founders.
website - LinkedIn - job openings


Deal led by Anirudhh Ramesh & supported by Eric Bezzam

FRIGG provides a DeFi solution to the multi-trillion dollar gap in sustainable infrastructure financing. Their platform is faster, standardized and more transparent than existing financing options, enabling infrastructure developers to build previously-unimaginable projects.

Founded in 2022 by a team with 2 UZH co-founders.
website - LinkedIn - job openings


Deal led by Anirudhh Ramesh & supported by David Campbell

Digit Soil provides a soil health sensor that allows to see live information on biological soil quality and decomposition of organic matter by measuring soil enzyme activity.


Founded in 2022 by 2 ETHZ co-founders.
website - LinkedIn - job openings


Deal led by Arnout Devos

Correntics enables companies to strengthen their supply chain by understanding scientific data about climate change & natural hazards.

Founded in 2021 by a team with 1 UZH &   
1 ETHZ co-founder.
website - LinkedIn - job openings


Deal led by Julia Wagner & supported by Arnout Devos

Umi applies immersion learning, repurposing short real-world videos for users to learn real language usage. Instead of teacher-made content, Immersely uses <1 min daily life situations, which provides better immersive context to teach language.


Current languages: 🇺🇸 🇯🇵 🇪🇸

Founded in 2022 by a team with 1 ETHZ co-founder.
website - app store - google play


Deal led by Arnout Devos

Prodlane has built MAIA, the Artificial Intelligence Assistant for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), a personal AI assistant. It recognizes correlations across multiple documents and delivers in-depth answers in seconds. This allows SMEs to chat with their documents in a GDPR-compliant way.


Founded in 2021 by a team with 1 HSG co-founder.
website - LinkedIn - job openings


Deal led by Arnout Devos

Using synthetic biology and machine learning, Adaptyv Bio is accelerating protein engineering for therapeutic and industrial applications.

Founded in 2021 by 4 EPFL co-founders.
website - LinkedIn - YC profile


Deal led by Nhi Luong, Lewis Jones, & Arnout Devos

Student Team

Our student team sources, conducts due diligence, and makes independent investment decisions.

Team St. Gallen

Lion Six

Partner

BSc Computer Science (HSG)

Felix Wiese

Partner
MA Accounting & Corporate Finance (HSG)

Marlene Silz

Analyst
MA Business Innovation (HSG)

Oscar von Podewils

Analyst

BA Business Administration (HSG)

Simon Schütz

Partner & Vice President St. Gallen

MA Accounting and Corporate Finance (HSG)

Thaddäus Heim

Analyst
MA Accounting and Corporate Finance (HSG)


Tom Blackmore-Esslinger

Partner

MA Business Innovation (HSG)


Charles Karamoko

Community Manager

MA Business Innovation (HSG)

Katleen Chang

Community Manager

MA Banking and Finance (HSG)

Team Zurich

Sarper Melik Ertekin

Partner
MSc Electrical Engineering (ETH)

Fabius Wiesmann

Partner

PhD Cancer Biology (UZH)

Amélie August

Analyst

MSc Management, Technology and Economics (ETH)

Pietro Miotti

Analyst
Computational Science (USI, ETH) 

Elina Teplygina

Community Manager

BSc Electrical Engineering (ETH)

Alessandro Boccassino

Analyst

MSc Management, Technology and Economics (ETH)

Bahar Acilan

Analyst
BSc Computer Science (ETH)

Nora Zimmerli

Partner & Vice President Zurich

PhD Energy and Process Engineering (ETH)

Nayanika Debnath

Analyst
MSc in Computer Science (ETH)

Max Schaldach

Partner & President
BSc Mechanical Engineering (ETH)

Team Lausanne

Jaques-Christopher Schmidt

Partner
PhD Chemistry (EPFL)

Meline Cretegny

Partner
MSc Life Sciences (EPFL)

Xunhui Wang

Analyst
PhD in Chemistry (EPFL)

Analyst

BSc Economics (UNIL)

Maia Migliaro

Partner

MSc Mechanical Engineering (EPFL)

Analyst
MSc Computer Sciences (EPFL)

Lorenzo Arbolino

Community Manager

MSc Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology (EPFL)

Giammarco Bozzelli

Partner & Vice President Lausanne

MSc Sustainable Management and Technology (EPFL, IMD, UNIL)

Advisory Board

Our advisory board brings in decades of experience from venture capital investing and deep-tech entrepreneurship to mentor the next generation of investors.

Cynthia Jurytko

Board Chair

Wille Finance

Isabelle Siegrist

Board Member
ETH AI Center, Sandborn

Alex Ilic

Board Member
ETH AI Center, Dacuda, Magic Leap

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