Ruya Ventures Named a Founding VC of ETH Investor Connect

A few months ago, we sat down with ETH Entrepreneurship to talk about what was missing for deep tech founders in Zurich. Not funding - ETH has no shortage of capital chasing its spin-offs. What was missing was the kind of sustained presence that lets an investor actually understand what a founder is building, before the founder needs anything from them.

This week, Ruya Ventures was named a Founding VC of ETH Investor Connect: a new initiative bringing a select group of European institutional investors onto campus to work alongside ETH founders, builders, and researchers, with access to opportunities across the broader ETH ecosystem.

ETH Zurich is not a place we needed convincing about. It sits among the world's leading institutions in artificial intelligence and robotics, and that strength comes from something specific: a research culture that does not treat commercialisation as an afterthought. The founders coming out of ETH are often already thinking about manufacturing pathways and supply chains while they are still finishing their PhDs. That instinct is rare, and it is exactly the instinct we look for.

Our thesis spans batteries, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, materials science, novel computing, and robotics. Across all of these, the pattern is the same. The science is hard, but it is rarely the reason a company fails. The reason is what comes after - the slow, unglamorous work of getting from a working prototype to something that can be manufactured, scaled, and sold. That is where we try to be useful, and being close to ETH Zurich, close to the labs and the early conversations, is part of how we do that well.

We are looking forward to spending more time on campus. Some of the companies we end up backing over the next few years are probably already working on something there.