Graham Partners

We’re the scientific founder’s partner. Our due diligence process is a commercial collaboration. If your technology is ready to be demonstrated, we will take you to potential customers and partners to jointly substantiate the market opportunity. Software is eating the world, but we’re eating hard tech Universities and the surrounding ecosystems are full of brilliant, inspired scientists who are inventing our future. They are graduate students, post-docs, undergrads and professors. And they are grinding. Material science innovations don’t arise from weekend hackathons. Novel biochemical pathways aren’t discovered by instinct. In our space, inventions arise from countless failures and require unrelenting tenacity, deep expertise and fortitude. When luck, timing and entrepreneurial courage come together, scientific breakthroughs are startup opportunities. Inventions are often born out of years of research (funded by government and industry grants), yet as startups they must start new journeys. The importance of innovation in applied science and engineering cannot be overstated. We believe the next decades will be shaped by critical progress in hard tech. Growing populations and natural resource constraints demand it. We are optimistic that our scientists and a culture of entrepreneurship, combined with smart policy, can deliver a prosperous future. VC funds are structurally a mismatch for early-stage hard tech startups, and so are angel networks. Understanding and investing in scientific innovations is specialized, time-consuming, expensive, and often requires access to insights in opaque industries. Our aspiration and structure are different from those of other VCs. We are the scientific founder’s partner. Our vision is that hard tech innovation can create a sustainable and prosperous world. Our mission is to help bring about this future by supporting the best scientific founders with capital and co-creation.

라플라스파트너스는 초기 단계 기술 기업들의 성장을 돕는 것을 소명으로 여기며, 시장을 확장하는 등 강한 목적의식을 가진 스타트업들과 협력하고 싶습니다. 비전 어떤 문제를 해결하고 세상에 어떤 변화를 가져오고 싶은지, 즉, 미래에 대한 명확한 비전을 그릴 수 있는 팀을 기대합니다. 이유 세상의 많은 문제들 중 왜 ‘그 문제’를 해결하고 싶은지에 대해 납득할 만한 이유가 있는 팀을 선호합니다 가치 ‘비전’과 ‘이유’를 바탕으로 고객에게 얼마나 유의미한 가치를 제공할 수 있는가에 집중합니다. 혁신 기술 라플라스파트너스는 혁신 기술로 문제를 해결하고 새로운 패러다임을 만들어가는 영역에 투자합니다. 바이오·헬스케어 제약, 혁신 진단 기기, 디지털 헬스케어, 건강 기능 식품, 푸드테크 등 소재·부품·장비 2차 전지, 반도체 소재·장비, 에너지, 신소재, 디스플레이, 통신 등 IT 인공지능(AI)의 응용, 전기차, 자율주행, 로봇, 메타버스, 증강현실(AR) 등

At Matter, we’re committed to taking the “hard” out of HardTech. Beyond capital and advice, we bring execution heft and strategic leverage. Through years of experience as hands-on investors, founders, and operational executives, we know how to substantially accelerate the process of bringing HardTech innovation to scale. We get customers to our startups early; to shortcut product-market fit. We build business models to scale sustainably from day one. And we’ve built a collection of strategic LPs - the same companies that enabled the fabless model for semiconductors, the rise of cloud computing, and more - to be a diversified manufacturing and technology scale-up supply chain for our startups.

We partner early with unstoppable entrepreneurs leveraging breakthrough science and technology to pursue progress at scale. Everything we do revolves around a single problem: What are the best ways to reconcile economic growth with human and planetary health? We invest in teams and solutions that address multi-decade problems that humanity has no choice but to solve. Our focusing questionsHow can we decouple improving living standards from resource depletion? How can we ensure food, energy and materials supply security when confronted by deglobalization, multipolarity and the distractions of the attention economy? How can we improve life on Earth and unlock future economic growth potential by leveraging next-generation computing and exploring outer space? How can the clean industrialization of biological processes reduce humanity’s impact on our planet? How we invest in unstoppable founders We look to problems and unmet needs first and then to which technologies and solutions have the potential to address those problems effectively. We don’t push any one type of technology or limit ourselves to one field. We look for founders and companies at the pre-seed and seed stages leveraging the three basic disciplines (physics, chemistry, biology) to engineer economically viable solutions. We look for teams that are uniquely suited to address the opportunity and its inherent challenges and for solutions that are radically better, technically viable, and defensible. Some of the areas we are keen to continue exploring include clean commodities, space technology, industrial decarbonization, electro- and green chemistry, next-generation computing, new materials & production methods. How we partner for the long-term Starlight is a Pre-Seed and Seed investor and ideally the first institutional check into your company. Having been in your shoes as founders and scientists ourselves, we will serve as an ally in the journey ahead. Here’s what you can expect from working with us: We will lead or co-lead your first institutional round. We reserve capital for follow-on investment in later rounds, and we have to ability to partner with our LPs to augment our participation in future opportunities. We will be personally invested in your success, as a large portion of our fund comes from our own team. We will put a particular focus on ensuring that your roadmap is focused on the key risks and milestones unique to addressing the most pressing problems. We will work with you to establish rock-solid governance and operational practices that hold up to the scrutiny of the world’s best institutional investors. We will help you line up and credibly engage the right future investors for your business and trajectory. Let’s partner and make change happen.

elev8.vc is a B2B focused VC Fund based in Singapore, with interests globally. We invest in and support early-stage deep tech founders (up to Series A), to scale their businesses globally.

Twenty years together through the good, the bad and the ugly. We understand that nothing really goes to plan when you are trying to build the future. Targets, deadlines and churn rates, any can be missed when constant focus isn’t applied and stress levels rise. We have been there before, we have steadied the ship, removed roadblocks and provided support for the next stage of growth. Capital buys time but the market waits for no one. Efficiency, productivity and transparency are key for entrepreneurs in our portfolio and the time we spend with them as partners in their journey to greatness. Our job is to pool the knowledge gained by decades of successes and failures and share that wisdom with those we back. We don’t run the companies we invest in; we try to behave like the partner we wished we had if we were. Our relationships with corporate and academia run deep. Decades deep. We are fortunate to include global leaders in the areas of robotics, consulting, engineering, production, insurance and finance in our investor base - ABB, Buhler, Credit Suisse, ETH, Hilti, McKinsey, Nestle, Schindler, Sulzer, Suva and ZKB. We jokingly call this our “unfair advantage”. Beyond their investment into our fund, these partners work with us to mutually understand a space or emerging trend, find new exciting companies or become customers of our relevant portfolio businesses. We are also fortunate to have relationships with management and professors at some of the world’s leading technology and life sciences universities, such as ETH and EPFL, the universities of Basel, Geneva and Zurich - dating back more than 20 years. Our network also consists of a wealth of European and international investors who we have previously invested with or bought into our companies for follow-on rounds. We invest in both digital technologies and life sciences, priding ourselves on our interdisciplinary approach to select and support our portfolio firms. Our geographic emphasis is Switzerland and neighbouring countries, but we also look further afield if the opportunity makes sense.