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Venture leasing and working capital solutions for high tech companies

kineo finance is a globally active financing specialist for innovative technologies and equipment.

Our offer

Through our smart asset financing and working capital solutions, we enable young companies to successfully commercialize their products “as a service”.

We focus on venture leasing as well as other debt structures to fulfil young companies’ working capital needs while limiting dilution and allocating capital efficiently.

Our ultimate goal is to help companies to accelerate their growth and to drive adoption of their products with the help of tailor-made asset financing and working capital facilities that are complimentary to equity and compatible with almost all capital structures. On occasion we can participate in equity rounds when an asset financing relationship is already in place.

Our financing programs will be customized for your needs along the following offerings

  1. Asset financing: Sale-and-lease-back/direct lease programs

    The business world transitions to a focus on services which generate recurring revenues beneficial for the companies and their investors. However, young companies with hardware components in their offerings are often under financial pressure during their market entry.

    With our asset financing programs, we enable companies to offer equipment-as-a-service models and thus fulfil customer demands. With our funding, companies can concentrate on recurring revenues instead of chasing lumpy, one-off hardware sales.

    Our asset-based financing model is built specifically for young, innovative companies entering their commercialization phase and is designed to maximize alignment between kineo and the company.

    kineo finance offers fixed leasing interest or shared risk financing models.

    Enabling companies to transition from selling devices to selling services and data analytics.

  2. Working capital solutions

    We provide hands-on support and creative, customized solutions for a range of working capital needs. We pride ourselves in our creativity, our flexibility and our global reach; thus we frequently find additional solutions for other capital requirements.

Our focus

The common denominator of the companies we support is a focus on automation and digitalization.

While our team’s heritage is in Healthtech and Life Sciences, kineo has rapidly expanded into other sectors, e.g. robotics, IOT or logistics as they undergo major shifts towards digitalization as well.

Typically, we look for the elements listed below. We like to engage early, even before market entry, to build lasting, mutually beneficial partnerships.

  • Early commercialization of product
  • Recurring revenue models
  • Novel technologies
  • B2B business models
  • Long term customer relationships

We strive to be as transparent and flexible as possible – a financing partner for the long run. In providing our expertise and network, we are valued not only by our portfolio companies, but also by their shareholders and investors.

kineo finance focuses on lifescience & healthtech, environmental engineering, intelligent robotics & automation, smart mobility & logistics.

Examples of use cases

Medical Device

An EU/US based medical device company with a novel biomarker in oncology addressing an unmet need for optimizing cancer treatments. The diagnostic tests combine hardware and AI-powered algorithms and are brought to market in the EU and the US based on a pay-per-test model. As the diagnostics space has been dominated by reagent-rental pricing models in the last decades, introducing a new biomarker to the market while swimming against the industry standard revenue model would have been very challenging for the company and its investors.

Solution

kineo provided an asset financing program for the US and the EU with variable lease payments on a pay-as-you-earn (PAYE) basis and participated with a small equity investment. The result was that the company can offer its diagnostic reader (hardware) for free and focus on recurring revenues through consumables, while ramping up market penetration without working capital constraints.

Logistics/IOT

A Swiss based logistics / IOT company developed a sensor gateway module for large freight railway waggon fleets. Digitalization in logistics is in full swing demanding large CapEx investments. As competitive edge, the company charges its customers only based on daily data output and associated data analytics.

Solution

kineo provided an asset financing program for Europe and the US in form of a sale-and-lease-back model, thus financing a successful digitalization in a competitive market.

Robotics

An EU based company develops AI powered software for roboter-assisted warehouse logistics. Autonomous, smart robots supporting human labour will become key for the digitalization of logistics and manufacturing over the near future. Current technological challenges still require frequent human interaction with those robots. This company beats other solutions and structures as its customer contracts are based on “one-stop-shop” agreements with warehouse managers without having to sell the robots on top of the software solution.

Solution

kineo provided an asset financing program for robots with fixed interest payments. The company was able to focus on the higher-margin software part of its business as opposed to the capital-intensive hardware portion. This will most likely result in higher future valuations in capital markets.

About us

kineo finance, is a Swiss-headquartered asset financing Group with global reach and with subsidiaries in Germany and the USA.

We are backed by large institutional investors as well as Multi-Family Offices.

kineo finance is authorized and supervised as Financial Services Institution for offering financial leasing by the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) and authorized in Switzerland as Financial Intermediary.

Additional financial information can be found under Investor Relations.

Who we are

Dr. Gerhard Ries

Founder & CEO

  • 25+ years of venture experience
  • Co-Founder + former Managing Partner of BioMed-Funds

Kreske Nickelsen

Partner

  • 20+ years of venture experience
  • Former Partner at 3i and Aescap, Co-Founder & Managing Director of JPIF

Jörg Schmidt

Group COO/CFO

  • 20+ years of finance experience
  • Former Executive Director at EY

Dimitrios Dimitrakopoulos

Managing Director Germany

  • 20+ years of risk management & banking experience
  • Former Head of Risk Management at SüdLeasing and Sixt, started career at Deutsche Bank and KPMG

Christine Müller

Partner

  • 10+ years of venture experience
  • Former Investment Manager at aeris Capital and PwC Life Sciences & Pharma Advisory

Charles Sellman

President USA

  • 20+ years of equipment leasing and finance experience
  • Former Executive VP at Cypress Financial Corp.

Lee Hsieh

Senior Vice President USA

  • 15+ years of venture experience
  • Former Head of Business Development and Investment Director at Anzu Partners and Fosun RZ Capital

Andrew Brigham

Vice President USA

  • 20+ years of private markets experience
  • Former Partner of a Swiss-US Multi-Family Office

Christian Löbhard

Senior Director Risk & Regulation

  • 20+ years of experience in banking and financial services
  • Former Head of Marktfolge at Fidor Bank (Germany) and Non-Executive Director, Member of the Board at The Car Finance Company (UK)

Jukka Schäublin

Head of Finance and Controlling

  • 10+ years of finance experience
  • Former Engagement Manager at EY

Sean Saunders

Investment Associate USA

  • 5+ years of venture experience
  • Former Associate at VU Venture Partners & Boulder Ventures

Olivier Deman

Investment Associate

  • 8+ years of experience in corporate and investment banking, and entrepreneurship
  • Former chief digital officer in the industry and Analyst in Mid-Market Leveraged finance at Credit Suisse

Renato Galli

Investment Associate

  • 10+ years of venture experience
  • Former co-Lead Entrepreneurship at Climate-KIC start-up program

Zarah-Sophie Holzwarth

Senior Investment Analyst

  • 4+ years of experience in private equity, investment banking and consulting
  • Former Analyst in the investments team at Energy Infrastructure Partners ("EIP", a Credit Suisse spin-off) and Consultant in the deal advisory team at KPMG Switzerland

Steven Everaert

Investment Analyst

  • 3+ years of experience in venture capital, venture building and academia
  • Former analyst at the Swiss Ventures Group and program manager at the CAS of entrepreneurship at ETH Zurich

Balázs Lodi

Accountant

  • 5+ years experience in Financial Accounting
  • Multinational corporate experience

Sabine Nolle

Office Management

  • 10+ years in project management and business development
  • Industry background

Board of Directors

Prof. Dr. Erich Reinhardt, Chairman of the board

Former CEO of Siemens Healthcare, a subsidiary of Siemens AG, and former member of the Management Board of Siemens AG

Arne Kirchner

Managing Partner Alp Financial, a Swiss Multi-family Office

Gerhard Ries

CEO of kineo finance

Jacques Schächtele

Former Member of the Management Board of Deutsche Leasing

Ganapathi Subrahmanyam

Director of Investments at Seedamm-Vermögensverwaltungs GmbH

Eberhard Vetter

Member of the Board of Directors of RSBG SE, Essen
Head of Asset Management of RAG-Stiftung, Essen

Gert Waltenbauer

CEO of KGAL GmbH & Co KG