Forestay, Europe’s newest $220M growth-stage VC fund, will focus on AI
Forestay, an emerging VC based out of Geneva, Switzerland has been busy. This week it closed its second fund, Forestay Capital II, at a hard cap of $220 million. The VC wasn’t well known in Europe until it started to lead rounds in enterprise startups a couple of years ago, notably scanning software startup Scandit — which has raised $273M to date — out of Zurich.
The Forestay II fund will invest across Europe and Israel, with a ‘sweet spot’ of leading growth rounds of $10M-$15M, at the inflexion point of a company, it said.
To date the VC has backed 13 companies, including K2View, Nexthink, Scandit and Wasabi, of which three reached unicorn status and two were acquired. Most recently, the firm backed Neural Concept, a company spun out from EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, which raised $27M in a Series B round to tackle fast manufacturing design with AI.
Forestay also led the A round for Portugal’s ‘predictive maintenance’ startup Stratio, with a $12M Series A back in 2021.
The Forestay fund was founded as a fund of B-FLEXION, the private investment vehicle created by the Bertarelli family which is best known for building Serono into the third-largest biotech business globally, before its merger with Merck KGaA.
Forestay is led by Frederic Wohlwend, the former Global Chief Digital Officer of Merck KGaA and Serono.
“As Chief Digital Officer in large corporations, mainly the biopharma clinical space, I had the chance to look at the entire value chain, from early research down to distribution, in fairly sizable enterprises,” he told TechCrunch over a call. “So by knowing the enterprise inside out, that’s why we decided to focus on on enterprise and enterprise AI.”
While “it’s a highly competitive market”, Wohlwend said the fund will be “extremely focused in the way we do venture, adding: “We only do enterprise AI and SaaS. We don’t do any hardware, even sensors and stuff like this. We’re super focused in terms of stage — we mainly play in Series B. We can do A to C rounds, but our sweet spot is Series B at the inflection point. So we brand ourselves as a ‘nearly-growth’ fund because we capture our targets as soon as they make some kind of revenue.”
He added that, besides Switzerland being “an interesting ecosystem”, Southern Europe is also coming up, as we recently reported.
Forestay’s new fund is also backed by Anaïs Ventures, the investment vehicle for certain members of the Firmenich family, which created a perfume empire.
In a statement, Julien Firmenich, said: “Forestay’s focused investment strategy and operational acumen, honed through years of industry experience, align perfectly with our vision.”
Given its consumer markets are so fragmented, by geography and language, Europe has carved out a very good market for SaaS and enterprise, and there are plenty of enterprise-focused VCs.
Indeed, an in-depth analysis of the top companies and trends in the SaaS market across Europe and Israel last year found the SaaS ecosystem market reset was being driven by the growth in generative AI. But Forestay’s emergence can only be a good thing, adding to the choice of funds for growth-stage startups in a Europe where growth capital is often harder to acquire than in the US.
Forestay, an emerging VC based out of Geneva, Switzerland has been busy. This week it closed its second fund, Forestay Capital II, at a hard cap of $220 million. The…
Threads, Meta’s alternative to Twitter, just celebrated its first birthday. After launching on July 5 last year, the social network has reached 175 million monthly active users — that’s a…
J2 Ventures, a firm led mostly by the U.S. military veterans, announced on Thursday that it has raised a $150 million second fund. The Boston-based firm invests in startups whose…
HealthEquity said in an 8-K filing with the SEC that it detected “anomalous behavior by a personal use device belonging to a business partner.”
Roll20 said that on June 29 it had detected that a “bad actor” gained access to an account on the company’s administrative website for one hour.
Fisker has a willing buyer for its remaining inventory of all-electric Ocean SUVs, and has asked the Delaware Bankruptcy Court judge overseeing its Chapter 11 case to approve the sale.…
Teddy Solomon just moved to a new house in Palo Alto, so he turned to the Stanford community on Fizz to furnish his room. “Every time I show up to…
With increasing competition for what is, essentially, still a small number of hard tech and deep tech deals, Sidney Scott realized it would be a challenge for smaller funds like…
A guide to turn off reactions on your iPhone and Mac so you don’t get surprised by effects during work video calls.
Amazon has decided to discontinue its Astro for Business device, a security robot for small- and medium-sized businesses, just seven months after launch. In an email sent to customers and…
Hiya, folks, and welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down “Chevron deference,” a 40-year-old ruling on federal agencies’ power that required…
Noplace had already gone viral ahead of its public launch because of its feature that allows users to express themselves by customizing the colors of their profile.
Cloudflare analyzed AI bot and crawler traffic to fine-tune automatic bot detection models.
Twilio says “threat actors were able to identify” phone numbers of people who use the two-factor app Authy.
The news brings closure to more than two years of volleying back and forth between some of the biggest names in additive manufacturing.
Planning to attend TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 with your team? Maximize your team-building time and your company’s impact across the entire conference when you bring your team. Groups of 4 to…
As more music streaming apps and creation tools emerge to compete for users’ attention, social music-sharing app Popster is getting two new features to grow its user base: an AI…
Meta’s Threads now has more than 175 million monthly active users, Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday. The announcement comes two days away from Threads’ first anniversary. Zuckerberg revealed back in…
Cartken and its diminutive sidewalk delivery robots first rolled into the world with a narrow charter: carrying everything from burritos and bento boxes to pizza and pad thai that last…
Ashwin Nandakumar and Ashwin Jainarayanan were working on their doctorates at adjacent departments in Oxford, but they didn’t know each other. Nandakumar, who was studying oncology, one day stumbled across…
LG has acquired an 80% stake in Athom, a Dutch smart home company and maker of the Homey smart home hub. According to LG’s announcement, it will purchase the remaining…
CoinDCX, India’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, is expanding internationally through the acquisition of BitOasis, a digital asset platform in the Middle East and North Africa, the companies said Wednesday. The Bengaluru-based…
Collaborative document features are being made available inside Proton Drive, further extending the company’s trademark pitch of robust security.
Telegram launched a digital currency called Stars for in-app use last month. Now, the company is expanding its use cases to paid content. The chat app is also allowing channels…
For the past couple of years, innovation has been accelerating in new materials development. And a new French startup called Altrove plans to play a role in this innovation cycle.…
The Indian social media platform Koo, which positioned itself as a competitor to Elon Musk’s X, is ceasing operations after its last-resort acquisition talks with Dailyhunt collapsed. Despite securing over…
Apiday leverages AI to save time for its customers. But like legacy consultants, it also offers human expertise.
Google totally dodges the question of how much energy is AI is using — perhaps because the answer is “way more than we’d care to say.”
SpaceX’s ambitious plans to launch its Starship mega-rocket up to 44 times per year from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center are causing a stir among some of its competitors. Late last…
The situation around a data breach that’s affected an ever-growing number of fintech companies has gotten even weirder. Evolve Bank & Trust announced last week that it was hacked and…