Backed to the Future

Thomas Dübendorfer doesn’t invest like a portfolio manager optimizing for returns. He invests like a scout who found someone worth running alongside – and then actually runs. In Part 1 of our series, we traced the origin of that instinct, from a student fund at ETH Zurich to SICTIC, Switzerland’s largest angel investor network. In Part 2, we look at three companies where the scouting turned into something deeper: a co-founding that nearly died twice, a pivot he saw coming two years early, and a deal that arrived through a professor who used to work down the hall at Google.

Frontify: Right Product, Wrong Customer

Frontify is now a 300-person SaaS company with clients like NASDAQ, Lufthansa, Visa, and Uber, approaching CHF 100 million in annual revenue. When Thomas Dübendorfer got involved, it was a tool for web developers built by a single founder in St. Gallen.

Roger Dudler had an idea Dübendorfer believed in and a technical ability that was rare – he could design, code, and ship an entire product by himself. Four angels, including Dübendorfer, put in the first money. But after two years, the product had a problem: its users didn’t want to pay. Web developers loved the free style guide tool. They didn’t love it enough to open their wallets.

“We were almost bankrupt after two years,” Dübendorfer says. “And then two of the angels just wanted to leave. They said: “stupid idea, and it was a stupid idea to do a single founder investment anyway, told you so”.”

This is the moment where most angel stories end. Dübendorfer stayed. He bought the departing angels out – at a profit to them, he notes – and sat down with Dudler and the one remaining angel to rethink the entire business. The product wasn’t wrong; the product was pointed at the wrong customer. Web developers needed style guides. But the people who would actually pay serious money for brand consistency were marketing teams at large corporations – companies managing dozens of sub-brands across countries and channels.

“We figured maybe we should sell to marketing people and to brands, not just to tech people building websites,” Dübendorfer says. “Of course we still had to build a new product, which meant we had to invest again.”

The pivot required a full rebuild, and the first enterprise client they landed was Lufthansa – won through a competitive RFP where Frontify beat out established players including Adobe. “We truly built the better product because we were listening to the client very carefully,” Dübendorfer says. “Lufthansa doesn’t just have the Lufthansa brand – they have Swiss, Miles and More, and all of that under one group. It’s a very complex client. We learned to understand the brand management complexity by working with them to build the perfect product, and then we could sell it to all the other corporations with a similarly complex setup.”

But the Frontify story has a second layer that’s just as revealing. Dudler, a single founder several had warned against backing, knew from the beginning that he wasn’t ready to be CEO. Rather than pretend otherwise, he and the board went looking for one. They found Dudler’s former boss from a previous company, who took the role and scaled the team past a hundred people. During that time, Dudler quietly acquired the management skills he’d been missing – including through a high performance leadership course at IMD, which Dübendorfer took together with him.

“And then what happened is the other CEO left, and so we had a place for him, and he could become the new CEO,” Dübendorfer says. “But by that point, he had built a capable management team around him and a support organization. If he had tried to scale up to a hundred people for the first time in his life without all of that, I think many things would have gone wrong.”

Dübendorfer is still on the board, twelve years in. He knows he’s no longer essential to day-to-day challenges. “With 300 people, they have the right person for all the major things already inside the company,” he says. “But it’s a great journey. Seeing how it grows, how it goes international – we even bought a startup in Paris and suddenly had a French office, new talent and new product features.”

The scout found the talent. Then he stayed long enough to help reshape the company underneath it. Twice.

Beekeeper: “Come On Guys, Students Don’t Pay”

The Beekeeper story starts with a rejection – or something close to one. Dübendorfer met the founding team while they were building communication software for university students. He liked the founders immediately. The business model, less so.

“Amazing founder team,” he says. “But come on guys, students don’t pay. I know that – I was one myself. They’ll take your product for free, but you will not have a large business. I told them: I would love to invest if you ever do this product for companies.”

Two years later, the founders were nearly bankrupt and had pivoted to exactly that: a mobile-first communication hub for companies with large frontline workforces – retail staff, factory workers, hotel employees – who had a phone but no email, no desktop, no connection to the corporate mothership. They called Dübendorfer. The timing was right, the product was right, and he came in as the first angel investor after the pivot.

What followed wasn’t just a cheque. Dübendorfer had spent seven years at Google, where he had personally conducted more than a hundred interviews with software engineers applying to Google. The Beekeeper CTO had never built a hiring process in his life. So Dübendorfer became his sparring partner – monthly meetings for two years, walking him through everything from structured interview processes to peer feedback systems to the organizational scaffolding you need to keep culture intact while growing fast.

“I helped him a little bit with how to set everything up – all the processes, the hiring, employee goal setting and peer feedback systems, all of that, which you actually need to keep the organization healthy and the culture intact,” Dübendorfer says. “I became a very close sparring partner for the CTO until he really knew everything. And then he didn’t need me anymore, and I stepped back.”

That last line is worth pausing on, because it captures something about how Dübendorfer operates. He doesn’t fade out passively. He builds the system around the person, runs alongside them until the system holds, and then deliberately steps back. It’s the same pattern as Frontify – get close, transfer knowledge, leave when you’re no longer the most useful person in the room.

In July 2025, Beekeeper merged with LumApps, a French intranet platform backed by Bridgepoint. The combined company is valued at over $1 billion.

“It was great to see this from day one – student software, pivoting into B2B, then scaling up globally, going to the US,” Dübendorfer says. “All these steps. That’s what you get when you stay close to founders.”

DeepJudge: The Professor’s Knock

DeepJudge arrived through the kind of connection that only exists in a small, densely networked ecosystem. Thomas Hofmann, a professor for Data Analytics at ETH Zurich and a former colleague of Dübendorfer at Google, sent his PhD students over with a simple message: they want to do an angel round, you have an angel club, why don’t you help them?

The students in question were Paulina Grnarova, Kevin Roth, and Yannic Kilcher – all ex-Google employees with PhDs in artificial intelligence from ETH. They had built a semantic search engine for legal documents, and the feasibility wasn’t in question. The technology worked. What they needed was the capital and the network to turn it into an industry-grade product.

“I knew their professor because he used to work at Google like I did,” Dübendorfer says. “He came over and said, hey Thomas, they want to do an angel round. So I basically organized it – a seed round with quite large ticket sizes. We quickly got the seed funding from private investors. The idea was already proven, but now they had to build everything from scratch to make it an industry-grade application.”

The early money worked. A $10.7 million cheque from California’s Coatue followed, then a $41.2 million Series A led by Felicis, valuing the company at $300 million. Revenue grew tenfold in twelve months. The team hired more than sixty people in a single year. Their client list now includes some of the largest law and M&A firms in the United States and many reputable law firms in Switzerland and Europe.

“The problem is not the money anymore,” Dübendorfer says. “The problem is how you can hire the right talent and how you can be even faster in the European and the US market. They’re really growing like crazy.”

He sits on the board as observer and hold public panels with CEO Paulina Grnarova on topics like scaling culture during hypergrowth – a challenge he has now seen up close across multiple companies. “Sometimes I take one of the founders and have a panel discussion with them at events,” he says. “All these topics that I learn first-hand, I find it very rewarding to talk about with other founders so I can learn from their experiences too. It’s up-to-date know-how. You couldn’t get it fresher.”

Three companies, three very different stories. But the pattern underneath is the same: Dübendorfer doesn’t scout for deals. He scouts for people. And once he finds them, he stays close enough to help them see what they can’t see alone – whether that’s a pivot they haven’t considered, a hiring process they’ve never built, or a funding round they don’t yet know how to orchestrate.

In Part 3 of our VC in Residence series, Dübendorfer turns his scouting lens on the Swiss ecosystem itself: what international investors get wrong about Switzerland, where the real talent gaps are, and the three wishes that would complete the flywheel.