The Equidam Podcast — Episode 18. Moritz Pill of Borobotics on how a Swiss deep-tech hardware startup builds its funding stack — from local angels and drilling-industry strategics to InnoSuisse, Venture Kick and specialist VCs like Underground Ventures.
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A geothermal drilling robot, built in Zurich
Daniel Faloppa: Excited to have you here, Moritz. We go way back, but we never really did one of these. The experience you’ve had over the past year is super interesting, and a great story to share.
Moritz Pill: Very happy to be here. It’s been seven or eight years since I left Equidam, when I was still working with you. Since then I’ve dived deeper into the startup world in the Netherlands, and now in Switzerland. Really enjoying it.
Daniel: Now you’re working with one of these cutting-edge deep-tech startups on geothermal energy — drones drilling tunnels for geothermal heating, which sounds extremely sci-fi. Tell us a bit more about what the company does to set the scene for the rest of the conversation.
Moritz: For sure. We’re not super far advanced in terms of the usual startup timeline — we’re still in development, a team of 15, building and testing prototypes. We’re developing a drill that can go 200–250 metres down and lets you install a heat probe to heat or cool your building afterwards. The aim is to make it small, cost-efficient and accessible, so we can bring sustainable heating to a lot more households in the coming years.
It’s a spin-off from ZHAW (Zurich University of Applied Sciences). Most of the team are mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and mechanics — and then there’s me, handling pretty much everything else: fundraising, public funding, hiring, a bit of the software side. Heating is one of those markets where you never have to explain the size — everyone gets it from the start.
Daniel: Especially now with rising energy costs and the constraints we’re going to see on energy supply because of AI. Geothermal is very much at the centre of a wave.
Moritz: Investors need to understand what payback periods and go-to-market look like in hardware startups. We can’t push out software and run Google Ads to a million users the next day. We have to work very closely with customers, learn from them, and develop a product that has to work across very different geologies. Once you’ve hit a certain level of reliability you can scale up, bring production up, and start creating assets that are valuable. For investors with a longer-term view, that’s actually very attractive.
The fundraising journey: from the local newspaper to VC
Daniel: Can you share your fundraising journey so far? I know you raised a big round early last year.
Moritz: Our journey started in 2023, when this was still a university project. We got a tiny bit of public interest — we appeared in the local newspaper, which nobody outside the area reads — and that was enough to find our first angel investors. These weren’t professional angels; they were private people who loved the technology and wanted geothermal heat pumps for their own homes. They got us off the ground.
That also opened the door to drilling companies as investors. The largest Swiss drilling company invested in us early on, which was hugely useful: we got an early read on how a drilling company actually operates, and they could help us with our own drilling work — the ground is different everywhere, so that experience matters.
From there we moved further down the equity path, with a property development company joining as well. And then there’s the Swiss-specific layer of public funding programmes.
The Swiss public funding stack: InnoSuisse and Venture Kick
Moritz: There are funding programmes here that really help you get off the ground. The federal innovation agency is InnoSuisse, which can support you in a variety of ways — from small grants to larger funding when you’re working with universities. You can do small ideation projects with them — up to about 20K — which can really kickstart things like buying initial parts for prototypes.
Then there’s Venture Kick. It’s structured as a startup competition with rounds throughout the year, in three stages. Win the first stage and you get 10K with no obligations beyond applying to the second round. Second round is 40K, which becomes a convertible loan. Third round is 100K. So you can stack up to 150K to kickstart, and along the way you become relatively well known in the Swiss startup scene.
It’s a bit like the Netherlands — there’s a small set of organisations that dominate early-stage funding. If you’re in those circles, which isn’t difficult, you become known, and you can really build from there.
Underground Ventures, and what a specialist VC actually adds
Moritz: Then we got the best VC introduction we’ve ever had — from you, Daniel — to Underground Ventures. They’re not a typical VC: they’re so focused on the geothermal market that they’re at every relevant conference, everywhere in the world. They teach other VCs about geothermal, they bring us along on that journey, and the connections that come out of it are very valuable.
For the first time, I could really feel the impact that an investor who’s well-connected in a niche industry can have on your business. The money is important — you pay bills and wages — but the network is the other half of it.
Daniel: There’s a lot of debate over whether investors actually add value on top of money. On average, probably not. But the best investors definitely do, and these days — with AI noise and the difficulty of reaching the end customer — warm connections from an investor are extremely helpful.
Building a mix of investors: angel, public, strategic, VC
Daniel: You now have pretty much every class of investor — angels, public, strategic, VCs. Do you see real value in the mix, or would you rather have one dominant category?
Moritz: I see real value in the mix. Early on, angels are the first signal that there’s interest in your product — if someone is interested enough to invest, that says something. They’re not going to bring you connections or follow-on capital, and that’s fine; their job is just to get you started.
Industry investors are ideal because you learn how they think, and a customer investing in you is the ultimate signal of trust — both for other investors and for other customers. Property developers help you with go-to-market further down the line. Strategic investors bring larger cheques and open doors. And VCs become really powerful once you want to scale beyond your home market — they all talk to each other, they’re at the same events, and if one of them believes in you, they push the word.
Milestone-driven rounds: how hardware fundraising actually works
Daniel: And you’re structuring this fundraise to reach specific milestones that then unlock the next round.
Moritz: You’re forced to. You can’t get all the funding you need in a single round — especially in hardware. You de-risk the technology, you de-risk the market, and you reduce risk for investors round by round.
With our machine specifically, the “natural” milestone of how many metres you’ve drilled isn’t actually the right one — the first few metres are the hardest because you have to stabilise the borehole; after that, going deeper doesn’t validate much. But that’s hard to communicate to investors who aren’t in this industry. So we use milestones that are easier to read: full modules integrated, drilling to a certain depth, a pilot project completed, a null-series in place.
We’ll be raising another round around September–October, assuming our summer milestones are hit. Then we’ll reach back out to our network of VCs. After that, the next milestone might be reaching a depth that lets us install the first heat pump, doing pilot projects, setting up the production facility. You essentially hang yourself from one milestone to the next.
What can a hardware startup pivot into?
Daniel: Do you think of all this research and progress almost as a stop-loss — even if the next milestone doesn’t pan out, the patents and IP still have value and you can exit?
Moritz: It’s harder to pivot in hardware than in software — you’re not turning a SaaS product into a new SaaS overnight. But the modules in our drill have many possible applications. The drill is vertical, but it could drill horizontally — that opens up cabling, sewage, foundations, tunnel stabilisation. We’ve developed an extrusion unit that prints HDPE pipe around the robot as it goes — that’s useful for geothermal, but also for cabling and for in-place pipe repair.
You have more technology lock-in than in software, but you can still find adjacent avenues — and you have to, because things rarely play out exactly as you planned.
Daniel: When you go after something hard, you solve a series of hard problems along the way — and those can become Plan B. I remember the CTO of Flipboard back in the day; the company didn’t explode, but the discovery technology they built was very useful and got sold. Great outcome for the founder and early investors. Sometimes doing harder things is less risky than chasing something easy.
Going hardware doesn’t mean blindly chasing VC
Moritz: It also depends on what you want. As a hardware company it’s harder to escape the VC route than as a software company, but you really need to understand whether you actually want VC on board — there’s a trajectory it requires you to follow. A lot of news measures success in dollars raised, but to me a very successful company is one that doesn’t need to raise much money and still manages to grow.
In hardware that’s tough, because unless you’ve done a successful exit before, you can’t easily afford the engineers, the parts, the time it takes to build. The supply chain side is greatly underestimated. European parts manufacturers are spoiled by 40–50 years of working with the automotive industry — they’re not interested in a startup ordering 10 units. Lead times of three to six months are normal, and if you need to iterate, that makes prototyping almost impossible.
You can still find value in different parts of what you’re building. Sometimes it’s deliberate, sometimes it’s lucky — someone shows up with an idea and you realise a sub-module of yours fits.
Listen to customers — but to enough of them
Daniel: I think the much better vector for an early company is: what do customers want, and what are they willing to pay for? That clarifies so many questions and pulls your business plan in the right direction. We made the mistake of not doing this hard enough for too long.
Moritz: Agreed — but you need enough customers pulling you in the same direction. If only one customer is pulling, you might build a solution for Rotterdam and nothing else. It has to be a mix of opinions pointing roughly the same way.
It’s comfortable to say “I’ve talked to a few customers, now I’m building.” Then you build for two or three years, go back to customers, and they’ve changed, or they don’t want what you’re making anymore. Founders like building — that’s why they’re founders — and they forget the part where someone needs to actually want to buy it.
Daniel: Another mermaid on the beach: the idea that some other business is easier. If you’re in hardware, software looks easier. If you’re in software, hardware looks easier. In reality, everything is hard. Constantly thinking about the customer and how to build a real competitive advantage over time simplifies a lot of those discussions.
Moritz: And you also need to like the market and the people you’d be selling to. For us, the drilling industry is part of the construction industry — very specific, no-bullshit, you don’t usually meet these people at university. You have to actually enjoy talking to them and learning from people who’ve been doing it for decades.
Switzerland vs the Netherlands: the ecosystem difference
Daniel: You were in Rotterdam for some years and then moved to Switzerland. What do you see as the main differences in the startup environment — funding, talent, taxation, capital?
Moritz: What strikes me most is the community difference. In the Netherlands — at RunTime, at the Science Tower, at Workspace 1 and 2 — there’s a tight-knit community of startups. You know each other, you know each other’s skill sets, and if you need help you know who to ask. People hang out after work.
In Switzerland a lot more companies operate in their own space. There’s less idea-sharing, less problem-sharing in the day-to-day. There are events, of course, but I’m talking about the everyday: you’re in a startup hub, there are other startups around you, but you don’t really see them. That’s a shame, because that’s where the Netherlands is strong.
On talent: in Switzerland it’s relatively easy to find great engineers — ETH and the other universities produce a lot of them. What’s hard to find is mechanics. The training pipeline points them toward production-line work, and the curious ones who like prototyping tend to go on to study mechanical engineering and end up doing CAD instead. Finding people who love being in the workshop, assembling, disassembling, testing — that’s been our struggle.
Daniel: I saw a podcast yesterday with Jensen Huang at NVIDIA saying one of the bottlenecks for scaling AI will be plumbers — not enough of them to plumb up the data centres. Seems to be a widespread issue.
Why community matters more than people think
Daniel: Historically — Silicon Valley, Bell Labs, even the UK hi-fi industry of the 80s — you see what concentrated, well-connected communities of engineers produce. The UK hi-fi industry was the best in the world for a while, and they reportedly had a monthly dinner where the whole industry shared things openly. Microchips in Taiwan are an art as much as a science because of those tacit recipes and yields people share.
In Rotterdam, we had something like that — a young industry, a tight place, everyone fairly young and on what they thought was the same boat. I don’t think it has repeated since. Station F in Paris feels like another version of it — bring enough startups, talent and corporates into one place, and something will come out.
Moritz: The Dutch are very open to new people, probably partly because of their history of immigration, and that carries into the startup world. In Switzerland the hubs are big and the talent is here, but you have to genuinely go and knock on the door — people don’t really stay around after work to connect.
Funding by sector — and the EU’s €600K gap
Daniel: How do you see the funding environment in Switzerland evolving — especially with AI making Zurich a centre in Europe?
Moritz: You almost have to take AI out of the funding picture — those amounts are in their own sphere. Anthropic, Google, OpenAI all have a presence here. Switzerland has become a centre within Europe geographically — good standard of living, no EU laws — and that draws them.
For other sectors it depends. Climate tech funding has dropped over the last few years. Geothermal is going up now because of larger startups like Fervo and Quaise in the US showing there’s a marketable product. But it’s still niche — most investors don’t know the difference between drilling types.
We tried the EIC Accelerator last round and didn’t get funding. We’ll try again. It’s a great vehicle in principle, but the process has become way too complicated — though it’s apparently being simplified this year.
Then there’s Sprind — the German federal agency for innovation — which is now setting up sister entities in other countries, including the Netherlands. They focus heavily on business model viability and have VCs sitting in on decisions. You usually start with a “validation project” — they order validation from you (up to ~200K), where the only deliverable is two reports. From there you can step up: a founder’s grant up to €1M covering 100% of milestones, then funding vehicles covering up to 70% of development to €35M. They’ve got €300M to deploy this year across Europe, including Switzerland.
Daniel: So alternatives, indeed.
Moritz: Public funding should be the bit that fills the €600K gap — that gap between what angels can give you (less than 600K) and what VCs will write a cheque for (more than 600K). Nobody wants to spend exactly 600K, and that’s where public programmes are most valuable.
CLAs, GmbH vs AG: the structural lesson
Daniel: You did a few CLAs with the earliest investors and they got converted. How did that go?
Moritz: Not ideal. An equity round already involves four parties — you, the investors, and both lawyers. Add CLAs into the mix and the complexity goes up: they have to be converted, calculated, checked.
We started as a GmbH — the Swiss equivalent of a Dutch BV. A GmbH has fewer requirements than an AG (the Swiss equivalent of a public limited company): the initial capital is 20K versus 100K, so it’s easier to found. But moving from GmbH to AG later is a lot of work. Auditors get involved, you have to show you’re not making big losses inside the GmbH — which is more or less impossible because a startup will be making losses by design.
The way we solved it: the CLAs were transferred to us as founders, and we then invested the money ourselves into the company. That way the company didn’t carry the losses from day one, and in return we promised the investors shares. It’s a strange process, takes time, costs money.
The lesson: if you’re starting a company in Switzerland and you have the funds, start as an AG from the get-go. Don’t go GmbH-then-convert.
Daniel: And at the beginning, 20K — let alone 100K — is meaningful. If you’re a student or recently employed, you probably don’t have it. It’s a real barrier, and I think the credit-worthiness rationale behind it is outdated. People pay on Stripe in advance — companies don’t need that signal anymore. The 100K floor is mostly useless these days.
Advice for university researchers thinking about a company
Daniel: Let’s say there are a couple of researchers in a Swiss university, looking to spin out their own research. What’s your main advice — not on company structure, but on what you’ve learned so far?
Moritz: The customer point is the big one — and it’s the one researchers most easily forget. Research is the dream of a builder: you get funds to build something without needing a customer first. Then you find a customer afterwards and try to wrap a company around it. You’re trained to work on the product without checking the market side.
That part is non-negotiable. You need to be in close contact with customers, get their ideas, get their feedback. The chance that you’ve developed something that perfectly fits them on the first try is essentially zero.
Second: don’t put yourself in a corner because of your education. If you’re a mechanical engineer or a biologist, you can still talk to customers, you can still explore the market — you don’t necessarily need a “business person” to do that for you. They might be more used to it, but you might also enjoy it, and you understand the product better than anyone else.
I studied finance, and I do still do finance things at Borobotics — fundraising, budgeting, forecasting — but I do a lot of other things I didn’t study. All you need is curiosity. There’s so much in a startup that anybody can do if they’re curious enough. That’s the great part of working in a small company: you learn every day. That’s what I experienced at Equidam the first time, and it’s why I keep doing startups.
Daniel: On that note we’ll close. Thanks to everyone listening, talk to you next time — and thank you, Moritz, for coming on and sharing so openly.
Moritz: Thank you, Daniel. Very cool to be here.