VC Sounding Board: Playfair
The VC Sounding Boards are here. Every month, a fund from ETH Investor Connect is spending a few hours in our office to spar with founders from ETH, one-on-one. This is not a pitch, and neither is it a get-to-know coffee; it’s a place to throw around thoughts and untangle the disarray of building.
On 1 October our offices will be taken over by Felix Neubeck from Playfair. He has a background in mechanical engineering and motorsports, and covers everything hardware & DeepTech for Playfair. He’d love to have a chat, especially if you match the following:
Stage: Ideation/angel/pre-Seed;
Primary industry: Robotics, semicon, energy, manufacturing and a bit of biotech;
Want to spar on hiring, strategy, storytelling, fundraising and anything beyond.
Over the course of the day, we’ll have 6 slots which you can apply for; you can indicate which one(s) you’d prefer on the registration page.* These sessions are open to any and all builders at ETH!
About ETH Investor Connect
ETH Investor Connect, an initiative by ETH Entrepreneurship, is a community of selected institutional investors who actively contribute to the entrepreneurial ecosystem at ETH. Through community events, a VC-in-Residence engagement, and other initiatives, these funds support and engage with founders looking to build at - and scale beyond - ETH Zurich.
About Playfair
Playfair is a generalist fund focused exclusively on pre-seed investing. Based in London, Playfair invests across the UK and Europe with an intentionally high-conviction, low-volume approach: making six investments a year out of their third $70m fund and preserving time, capital, and resources to help companies post-investment. Their 78% Series A graduation rate is approximately 4x the industry average and their founders have raised over $3bn of follow-on capital since 2013. Playfair has backed 100+ companies, including Thought Machine, Orca AI, Protex AI, Ascento, and Exclaim Robotics.
* Please note: We want the VC Sounding Boards to be a space where you can be specific, go deep, and spar in an actionable way - not simply provide you with generic advice. For this reason, we need to make sure that there’s a good match between your needs and stage, and the investor’s competence and focus - in practice this means that we’ll allocate the slots based on fit as well as on when you register. Don’t worry if there isn’t a match this time; our investor community is diverse and chances are high that there’ll be a fit with another fund!