Swiss Angel Investors Group

Investing / Others
1

Hi,

Is there an Angel Investors Group within Switzerland ?

Thanks

2

Hi,

There is BAS Switzerland (https://www.businessangels.ch/). I can highly recommend them, very nice people.

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3

There are many. I am part of SWISS Health Angels (only healthcare) and RisingTide which I would not recommend. Whatever you do AVOID GoBeyond investing which has bad practices and recently had 3m of investor money misappropriated with no recourse for investors.

4

May I stupidly ask what it is?

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5

My two cents based on my experience (4 investments + 1 exit), and by quality of the deal flow:

  1. Investiere
  2. Sictic
  3. BAS
  4. Go Beyond

You don’t want to invest with bas and go beyond, sictic is okay, investiere is good to great.

Angel investment is like truffle hunting, best deals are done through connections, most of the time between existing founders or if you personally know a VC. I suggest that you attend the events of the above groups to build your network before investing. Also, if you have a strong expertise in a particular area, you could try to go the advisor path to build your own deal flow and enter super early.

You need to be aware of the risks as well, usually 8 out of 10 investments will return 0$, 1 out of 10 will pay back your investment, and the final will yield a x00% return.

My strategy: I have a “personal” fund of 100k that I divided in 10 parts of 10k (5 to go), I try to do 2 investments per year.

Good luck, it is super fun and rewarding, you meet exceptional individuals :+1:

6

+1 to Investiere (I’m invested in 2 startups thru them).

I’d also agree to that, I’ve attended some pitches organized by Investiere and met very interesting people on both sides (investors and “inventors”).

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7

Great input, thanks everyone. Any further recommendations ?

8

I looked into Investiere, but you need to be a qualified investor based on the criteria defined by Swiss law (500k net worth and educational/professional background OR >2M net worth). Unfortunately not there yet.

9

Awesome, I am actually on the other end and looking for funding instead for investment opportunities. I did not know about these opportunities, listed here

10

Been ‘offline’ for a while dealing with a lot of little / big stuff, nothing dramatic, just running endless little errands.

In any case, became active with SICTIC and my first observations

  1. Massive load of vague or outright bad pitches. You really need to cut through the clutter. Keep in mind, I only reviewed pitches for $$$ dating back 2-3 months as I figured the older ones were dudes or already funded.

  2. I trimmed that down to 10-15 which i spent a bit more time looking at. Quickly realized: things which sound cool but where I can add zero value or have close to zero knowledge / professional experience are probably best to be avoided as I won’t know what I don’t know. So that cut it down to 3-4.

  3. And recently I jumped in with one and made a 25k seed investment - was really impressed with the idea and how far advanced they had brought it (working prototype, IP, customer trials) as well as with the team itself. It also happened to be in a space where I have a lot of experience. It’s also been inspiring to interact with the team during due diligence - smart, entrepreneurial, imaginative. A lot more fun than dealing with large corporate f#$kers.

Might be money wasted, let’s see. I’d rather do say 1 investment a year, and be closer to it, then spread 5k here, 5k there, etc. etc. which come seem to also do (as part of a syndicate).

What I appreciate with SICTIC is that you’re not on your own - there’s deal pipeline which you have access to online and a collaborative effort to do DD with others (some of them impressive themselves).

It also (after only a short period of time) made me realize a few more things

  • Lots of great ideas, not many great teams.
  • Corporates are really insular (not all) from an innovation perspective. E.g. I am looking at a scale-up (further advanced - they are doing Series B) which supplies to competitors of my prior employer and I can see how that prior employer is rapidly losing share in a certain product category due to having missed the innovation enabled by this scale up.

My 2 cents (for now)

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