Forestay, Europe’s latest $220M growth-stage VC fund, will concentrate on AI investments

Forestay, a venture capital firm based in Geneva, Switzerland, has closed its second fund, Forestay Capital II, at $220 million. Although relatively unknown in Europe until recently, Forestay has made significant strides by leading funding rounds in enterprise startups, notably backing the Zurich-based scanning software startup Scandit, which has raised $273 million to date.

The Forestay II fund aims to invest in Europe and Israel, focusing on growth rounds of $10 million to $15 million at critical inflection points for companies. To date, Forestay has invested in 13 companies, including K2view, Nexthink, Scandit, and Wasabi. Of these, three have achieved unicorn status, and two have been acquired. The firm recently led a $27 million Series B round for Neural Concept, a company spun out of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), specializing in AI-driven fast manufacturing design.

Additionally, Forestay led a $12 million Series A round for Stratio, a Portuguese startup focused on predictive maintenance, back in 2021.

Forestay was founded as part of B-Flexion, the private investment vehicle created by the Bertarelli family, known for building Serono into the third-largest biotech company 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,” Wohlwend told TechCrunch. “So by knowing the enterprise inside out, that’s why we decided to focus on enterprise and enterprise AI.”