Backed to the Future

The Art of the Imperfect Bet 

A venture capitalist is only as good as their conviction when things look messy. For Alessandra Agnello, the “perfect deal” rarely exists. Instead, she looks for the resilience that emerges after the storm. 

“A lot of smart investors have rigid rules,” Agnello notes. “Don’t invest in broken founding teams. Don’t invest in siblings. Don’t invest in pivots. Don’t invest in companies older than X years. If we followed those rules, we would have missed our best performing investments.” But for Agnello, these imperfections are often times where the alpha is hidden. While ACE has historically backed US decacorns like Rippling and Fivetran, their recent “Swiss Tech Outliers” strategy has required them to ignore standard VC heuristics and bet on the messy, human reality of building a company for the first time. 

Adaptyv Bio: Fourth Time’s the Charm 

Take the case of Adaptyv Bio, a Lausanne-based company building a “cloud lab” for protein design. The promise was immense: automating the “design-test-learn” cycle for biology using microfluidics and AI, effectively allowing engineers to test protein designs in weeks rather than months. 

But by the time Agnello met the founders for the first time, the company had been through the wringer. They had been part of Y Combinator years prior and failed to crack the market. They had pivoted their core product. Most alarmingly, they had suffered a “founder breakup,” shrinking from an original team of four down to just two: Julian Englert and Daniel Nakhaee-Zadeh. 

But for ACE and Agnello, it was love at first sight- the survivorship bias, a direct consequence of the resilience of the remaining founders, made her certain that their clean and simple vision about revolutionizing an outdated industry will soon be a cornerstone of their portfolio.  

Veezoo: Is Blood Thicker Than Term Sheets? 

The next investment Agnello mentions is another “no-go” from the classic investor’s handbook- Veezoo has two sibling co-founders, as well as a long life prior to taking off.  

The company had been operating for nearly a decade, founded by the Monteiro brothers, Marcos and João Pedro and a third Swiss co-founder, Till Haug. For years, they were “off the radar,” building an agentic business analytics technology before the market knew it needed it. 

But Agnello recognized an inflection point. The arrival of Large Language Models (LLMs) suddenly made the market catch up to what Veezoo had been building for ten years. The “hair” on the deal – the long timeline and family dynamic – masked a product that was technically superior to the sudden wave of “chat to your data” GPT-like BI tools. 

“It pays off to have a contrarian view on the timeline,” she says. “Finding the underdog who has survived ten years of winter means you are backing a team that won’t quit when the summer heat turns up.” 

Scholé: Learning Curves, Rewritten 

In a domain that is severely overrepresented by men, Agnello is proud to have backed a fully female-founded team that have found their way from the American continent to the EPFL campus in Lausanne.  

The two founders are the first graduating PhDs from EPFL’s Machine Learning for Education (ML4ED) laboratory. But their story fits the “Swiss Tech Outliers” thesis perfectly because of its global texture: Vinitra Swamy is a Californian who graduated from UC Berkeley at age 20 (the youngest in her department’s history) before coming to Lausanne, while Paola Mejia, originally from Mexico, has built AI for education tools that are in the hands of over 200,000 learners in 5 different languages.” 

“From a technical standpoint, they are top notch,” Agnello says. “They have spent over ten years combined studying specifically how humans learn and how machines can augment that. It’s not about building another corporate learning platform, they are building a pedagogical engine.” 

Scholé tackles the corporate upskilling crisis by creating a “multimodal, context-aware” tutor. It ingests a company’s specific data and teaches employees in the flow of work, making learning ultra-personalized and situation-specific rather than generic. 

The Founder Is the Thesis 

Ultimately, Agnello argues that investing with a thesis – in their case, Swiss tech founders and their diaspora – requires a suspension of disbelief regarding the “sector.” ACE is sector-agnostic because they know the sector is a moving target. 

She points to Destinus, Swiss portfolio company originally born to build hydrogen-powered hypersonic planes. “Did we have a thesis on hypersonic travel? No,” she says. “We backed a great founder we had backed before.” 

Two years later, Destinus pivoted. Today, it is a defense technology heavyweight, selling hundreds of autonomous drones and systems to NATO governments – a sector that didn’t exist in European VC conversations five years ago. 

“No one knows what is coming,” Agnello concludes. “We can spot long-term, seemingly inevitable trends, but there are countless ways to build successful businesses around them. And certainly a VC will never know an industry as deeply as the founder who is actually building in it. We don’t bet on the map; we bet on the person who can navigate when the map changes.”