The Zurich-based company said it will use the funding to grow its engineering and deployment teams and expand beyond the wood industry into recycling, chemical processing, mining, oil and gas, and maritime operations.

Founderful led the funding round for AVIAN, which spent two years operating without outside funding before raising fresh capital.

During that period, the company built a customer base across about 50 industrial sites in nine countries and says its systems have helped prevent more than $50 million in fire and equipment damage.

Industrial operators have faced high insurance expenses in recent years as ageing machinery, electrical faults and dust-related fire risks continue to increase. In some cases, insurers now consider facilities too risky to cover at affordable rates.

AVIAN says many factories still rely on periodic thermal inspections carried out with handheld cameras. According to the company, that approach usually misses early warning signs that appear hours before equipment failure or fire outbreaks.

Its platform uses thermal cameras to monitor machinery continuously. The system tracks heat changes in motors, bearings, conveyors, presses and electrical cabinets, then sends alerts when temperatures begin to drift outside normal patterns.

The company said customers can install the system within minutes and receive automated maintenance reports alongside round-the-clock support.

Several manufacturers using the platform have already reported operational gains.

Kamps Pallet reduced annual insurance costs by 10% at its Dillwyn sawmill after deploying AVIAN’s monitoring system. Sierra Pacific Industries also avoided more than 24 hours of unplanned downtime at its Quincy facility over the past year, according to the company.

AVIAN noted that its system has also detected small fire incidents before they escalated.

In Switzerland, the platform identified a pellet press fire early enough to prevent what the company described as millions in potential damage. In Germany, it detected an electrical fire beside a machine valued at several million dollars, helping operators contain the incident before production was disrupted.

“AVIAN has developed a solution to a problem which probably affects everyone in the industry directly. For us, it is a great partnership as it helps us make our operations much safer and improves the monitoring process.

“You will never be able to reduce the risk of fires to zero, but you can do everything you can to minimise the danger as much as possible, and AVIAN makes that possible in a simple and straightforward way,” said Ernest Schilliger, CEO Schilliger Holz.

The company was founded after a Swiss sawmill contacted the team about recurring fires, high downtime and growing insurance pressure.

Drew Hanover, AVIAN’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said the company focused first on building trust with operators before seeking investment.

“Most operators don’t need another camera. At 3 a.m., they need to know that a bearing is running hot before it ignites the dust around it,” Hanover said.

“We bootstrapped the business for two years because we wanted to build something operators actually trusted. We raised with Founderful for one reason: to keep doing that, in more markets, faster, without changing what we are. We spent zero minutes on a deck.”

AVIAN now plans to leverage the new funding to strengthen its work with insurers by providing real-time risk assessments using live thermal data from industrial sites.

The company is also developing a new product called AVIAN Vision, which upgrades existing CCTV systems to detect smoke and fire without replacing current infrastructure.

The startup’s debut product, Chipmind Agents, is aimed at automating the repetitive, low-level work that ties up engineering teams and drags out design cycles.

Chipmind describes its agents as a new class of tools that work from a customer’s own, proprietary design data.

The agents are built to slot into existing engineering flows, learn a company’s toolchain and design hierarchy, and then carry out multi-step design and verification tasks autonomously, all while leaving final control with the human engineer. The company claims engineers can save roughly 40% of their time on routine chores.

The problem Chipmind targets is familiar to anyone who has worked in chip design: massive, customised EDA flows that simply were not built to talk to modern automation. Chipmind’s founders say they didn’t try to rip out those legacy systems.

Instead, they built a platform that prepares them for agentic automation and wraps intelligence around the existing stack.

“In the semiconductor industry, deep customisation and data protection are fundamental, but true design awareness is what separates a generic tool from an intelligent partner. Each company’s chip is a complex hierarchy with unique constraints, surrounded by a proprietary environment of tools and workflows,” said Harald Kröll, co-founder and CEO of Chipmind. 

“That is the reality we built for. Our ‘design-aware’ agents are engineered to holistically understand the entire chip context, not just the surrounding tools. We’ve found this deep awareness is the key that unlocks productivity, translating directly into significant time savings on the most complex tasks, all while integrating seamlessly into existing workflows.”

The startup’s origin is rooted in academic and industry experience. Co-founders Harald Kröll and Sandro Belfanti met at ETH Zurich during their PhDs and together have been involved in the development of more than 20 chips, from mobile modems to system-on-chip designs. Their experience, they say, exposed how much of chip engineering is precise but repetitive work.

“Anyone who’s spent time in chip development knows how much of the work is repetitive and time-consuming, demanding precision but not necessarily creativity,” said Sandro Belfanti, Co-Founder and CTO of Chipmind. 

“Throughout my career developing chips at top-tier semiconductor companies, I’ve often wished for a solution that could magically take care of those tedious tasks so I could focus on solving real engineering challenges.

“With Chipmind Agents, we’re finally bringing that solution to life: AI agents that can autonomously handle the boring parts, letting engineers focus on what truly matters: innovation.”

Chipmind’s first funding round was led by Founderful, with several semiconductor industry angels joining the table. The founders say the money will go to hiring engineers, speeding up product work and deepening relationships with strategic customers.

The launch arrives as chip design grows continually harder, demand for compute rises, design complexity increases, and simply adding headcount is not a realistic fix. Chipmind places itself as a practical bridge, a way to keep existing toolchains while automating the parts of the process that slow teams down.

Edouard Treccani, principal at Founderful, added: “In a world buzzing with AI every day, Chipmind stands out as a refreshingly real solution to a problem Harald and Sandro have spent 20 years deep in. From day one, they’ve built in close dialogue with the market, and the early feedback has been remarkably positive. Founderful is thrilled to be part of their journey!”

Chipmind is offering demos to semiconductor groups interested in testing its agents and says it will continue scaling its engineering team as it works with early customers.

However, their energy consumption is skyrocketing. By 2030, an estimated six percent of global energy consumption will be used specifically for cooling data centres. A shift from traditional cooling methods to more cost- and energy-efficient liquid-based solutions is inevitable. 

Enabling this transition, deep tech startup Apheros is today announcing a $1.85m funding round seizing this critical moment to introduce its innovative metal foam technology, offering a superior solution to this pressing industry challenge.

The pre-seed funding round, led by venture capital firm Founderful, will accelerate development and deployment of Apheros’ revolutionary metal foam-based cooling solutions.

The Apheros patented manufacturing process creates unique foam structures with completely open porosity and unparalleled surface area, surpassing traditional solutions by a factor of thousand, which translates into exceptional heat transfer and flow properties. 

Ideal for high-performance cooling applications, Apheros’ metal foams are easily integrated within its customers’ existing cooling systems. They address customers’ urgent needs of reduced energy consumption and cooling costs. 

Apheros AG, founded in August 2023, was developed as an ETH Zurich spin-off to tackle cooling challenges in a wide range of applications including high-performance computing and mobile devices. Apheros is led by a team with a proven track record in innovation, business development and tech transfer. 

Apheros’ co-founder and CEO Julia Carpenter was recently named one of Switzerland’s Top 10 “Founders to Watch” for her invention of Apheros novel metal foam manufacturing process. Co-founder and CTO Gaëlle Andreatta, has over 16 years of experience in R&D, Tech Transfer, and start-up development.

Julia Carpenter commented: “Our technology has the potential to set new industry standards and significantly reduce the environmental impact of cooling solutions worldwide. This funding round will allow us to advance our mission of helping our customers achieve superior thermal performance, increase energy efficiency, and contribute to a greener future. Immediately, we will expand production, increase research and development efforts, and bring state-of-the-art solutions to a broader market.”

Apheros currently targets the thermal management market with a focus on liquid cooling, a segment expanding at a fast pace due to the needs created by the growing demand for High-Performance Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Data Centers. 

More efficient cooling systems are needed to overcome current energy shortages and to reach ambitious climate protection goals. There is a pressing need to introduce higher-performing cooling solutions to the market.

Gaëlle Andreatta, co-founder and CTO of Apheros added: “There is a dire need for more efficient cooling solutions. AI development is driving exponential growth in data center energy consumption and inefficient cooling is the main culprit. Our unique metal foams have superior heat exchange and fluid transport properties, especially for liquid and two-phase cooling. With our customers, we are redefining thermal management.“

Apheros’ vision is to catalyse the transition to a more sustainable future through materials innovation. Apheros will redefine sustainable, high-performance liquid cooling and establish its products as the gold standard for sustainable, high-performance liquid cooling. 

Lukas Weder, founding partner at Founderful commented: “We are excited to support Apheros’ mission to revolutionise cooling technology. Apheros’ groundbreaking approach has the potential to significantly reduce energy consumption and set new industry standards. We are confident in the team’s vision and capabilities and look forward to seeing the positive impact they will make on both the industry and the environment.”

Helping them take control of the situation, startup Anthropos has raised $2.7 million to create a new way for companies to help employees evolve their skill sets in line with business needs while improving retention. 

With offices in the US and Switzerland, Anthropos’ pre-seed round was led by Switzerland-based Founderful with additional participation from Eden Ventures, Exor Ventures, Zanichelli Venture, Alessandro Rivetti and several angel investors across the EU and US. 

“People want to see a clear path to grow in their organization and learn the exact skills they need to succeed there. At the same time, you can’t run your business without modern skills and a solution to constantly understand what your people can and cannot do. It’s a problem that is intensifying across all industries and it will get even more important as people need to adopt AI and make it part of their daily job,” said Stefano Bellasio, CEO of Anthropos. 

Anthropos was founded by Stefano Bellasio and Giacomo Marinangeli after building Cloud Academy Inc., a cloud training platform they started in 2013. 

The duo scaled the business to over $25 million in ARR with Fortune 500 customers like Microsoft, Warner Media, and Deloitte, and, in the process, realized the majority of their enterprise customers were struggling with the same interrelated problems: employee retention and skills development. 

After exiting the business to the UK’s largest tech training provider, Stefano and Giacomo decided to focus on a completely different space with Anthropos, a solution that wants to help corporates with their constant challenges to retain and build their skills.

Anthropos helps companies centralize all their skills, employee experiences and training libraries in a modern, employee-focused platform. With Anthropos, companies can map out dedicated paths for every role inside the organization. 

As a result, employees can upskill themselves in accordance with the roles they want to advance in, and companies can constantly assess what skills are relevant for each role and verify which employees have those skills. 

This is a significant improvement from the status quo of long, convoluted employee questionnaires to ascertain skill abilities. Central to evidencing its approach, Anthropos can verify soft and technical skills at different stages of the employee lifecycle, from hiring to training and progression.

As part of the platform, Anthropos has built its own skills taxonomy, which currently covers over 60,000 skills and 18,000 job roles. The company has also created a new technology, called AI Job Simulations, to screen candidates at scale by placing them into immersive real-life scenarios with virtual customers, stakeholders, and colleagues where they can solve missions that demonstrate their soft and hard skills. 

Early customers at Anthropos have decided to customize their AI Job Simulations to screen candidates at scale and to prepare them for new roles, letting them make mistakes talking to (virtual) customers and other teams and learning from them in a safe environment.

The founders describe Anthropos as the easiest way to build a school for each organization where people can learn and evolve with the business at different stages of the employee lifecycle. 

As part of this, Anthropos is also designed to act as a network. Employees can see the skills their colleagues have, learn how they acquired them, and ultimately pinpoint potential mentors to help them grow. 

The team launched Anthropos earlier this year and their initial customer base, concentrated in the tech and tech consulting space, is already leveraging Anthropos to stay competitive and retain top talent. 

Current customers are using Anthropos to rapidly verify the skills of employees that were migrating to new roles, to easily identify the right people with the right skills for certain projects, and to screen candidates at scale by putting them in real scenarios related to their roles using the company’s AI Job Simulations. 

“It’s a great opportunity for companies. We have seen it first hand, modern generations consider growth and a clear path to learning new skills as the most important aspects of their jobs. It’s more important than your salary or bonuses. If you can’t provide this, you will see employees joining and leaving within months.” said CEO Stefano Bellasio. 

Antonia Albert, Principal at Founderful added: “We believe that every employee wants to grow and evolve, and that lack of career development and advancement is one of the key drivers of employee turnover. Using AI to democratize career paths and skills development is such a great mission. 

We are convinced that Stefano and Giacomo, after having successfully scaled and sold their previous tech company, are the right founders to give both companies and employees the transparency needed to enable clear career paths and professional as well as personal growth.”

Looking ahead, Anthropos plans to provide companies and employees access to thousands of skill paths and AI Simulations for roles and skills across multiple departments that every organization can customize. The company is also planning to publish its first batch of AI Job Simulations in the coming months. 

“Giacomo and I envision Anthropos becoming the solution for companies to manage and develop all their competencies. In a world that will be redesigned by AI in every role, we believe it’s a great opportunity to help everyone transform their careers,” added CEO Stefano Bellasio.

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 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 4 years alone, having made eight Swiss investments in 2023.

From Fund I, Founderful has deployed $60m into 40 startups. This represents 109 founders who scaled to create 1,093 jobs and went on to raise almost 6x additional funding of over $350m in just 3 years, some of which from leading international venture firms.

Notably, Wingtra (survey drones) has scaled to 200 employees and an annual revenue of over $20m. DePoly has been recognized globally for its revolutionary plastics recycling technology and raised a $15m seed round, while Corintis (sustainable computing) is working with tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia.

Founderful has already 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, commented:

“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 successfully scaled their startups into global unicorns such as Duolingo, Climeworks, GetYourGuide, Delivery Hero, and Scandit.

Severin Hacker, CTO and co-founder at Duolingo, commented:

“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, added:

“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 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, commented:

“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.”

The Founderful 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-outsthan 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 capitain 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, added:

“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.”