Skilder receives Venture Kick Stage 1 grant

Venture Kick is a Swiss pre-seed programme for start-ups emerging from Swiss universities. Each session, a handful of projects pitch their business idea to a jury of experienced entrepreneurs and investors, and only some of them are selected to continue. Skilder was one of them. The problem Skilder is solving

In most companies, every employee uses AI tools their own way, often as shadow AI. Working methods, internal rules and hard-won know-how stay buried in individual conversations and are never shared at the scale of the organisation.

Skilder offers a platform that lets teams centralise those working methods and make them available across all the AI tools already used inside the company, with no technical skills required, and without replacing the tools already in place.

What the grant will fund

Stage 1 funding is dedicated to business development, and that is exactly where Skilder will put it: talking to more companies facing the same fragmentation of AI practices, validating which use cases deliver the clearest value, and sharpening the offer around what the first customers actually need.

The Stage 1 grant is also the entry point into the rest of the programme. Over the next few months, Skilder will take part in the Kickers Camp and prepare to present its business case for Stage 2, where the jury awards a further CHF 40,000, followed by Stage 3 and its CHF 100,000: up to CHF 150,000 in total across the three stages.

About Venture Kick

Venture Kick is a philanthropic initiative launched in 2007 to double the number of spin-offs from Swiss universities, accelerate their time-to-market and make them more attractive to professional investors. It runs a structured three-stage programme over roughly nine months, combining funding with hands-on coaching in its Kickers Camps and access to a wide network of entrepreneurs, industry partners and investors. Start-ups that complete the programme can also access up to CHF 850,000 in follow-on funding from Kickfund.

Being selected is a meaningful signal for a young company: every stage is decided by an expert jury, and the chance of selection at each stage is 50 percent.