Co-founder and CEO Dr. Gerhard Ries in our interview: ?kineo means “move forward” or “accelerate” and this is exactly what we do.?
Dr. Gerhard Ries has more than twenty years of global life sciences and venture capital experience – both as an entrepreneur and investor. He has a strong scientific and operational background and has held various positions at BioMedPartners, McKinsey, Novartis, Ciba Geigy, and Boehringer Mannheim.
Gerhard, you have already co-founded two venture capital companies in the life sciences and healthcare industry. What was your motivation to found kineo now?
Venture capital is an excellent and important way of financing start-ups. In particular, the R&D activities of young and innovative high-tech companies. However, when it comes to financing growth and the working capital required for market launches and expansions, equity is often far too expensive and not the right tool. Unfortunately, traditional lenders like banks and leasing companies typically shy away from young, cash flow-negative companies. Venture debt can also be an option in certain circumstances, but has its limitations, too.
We wanted to improve these choices for high-tech companies; therefore, we founded kineo finance. kineo is a specialized asset financing provider, which not only actively supports young and fast-growing companies in marketing their innovative products and technologies via “as-a-service” business models, but also offers “intelligent money” with as small a burden as possible for companies, founders, and shareholders. Today, we are an internationally active financing partner with a broad industry focus and nearly twenty employees in three offices in Basel, Munich and San Francisco.
Why the name kineo?
I learned ancient Greek in school, and in ancient Greek kineo effectively means “move forward” or “accelerate”. And this is exactly what we do at kineo. With our dedicated asset financing solutions, we accelerate market entry and boost the growth of our portfolio companies in industries that move society forward.
kineo’s focus is on venture leasing. Can you briefly explain what this means?
Our novel “venture leasing” approach for young, innovative high-tech companies combines the risk-tolerant venture capital approach with tailored go-to-market leasing solutions. With kineo we have created a third financing pillar for SMEs alongside equity and plain debt. Venture leasing is a perfect solution for hardware or software companies looking to bring their disruptive technologies to market much faster and more efficiently than they otherwise could.
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Why is your asset financing solution so interesting for young companies?
Our venture leasing approach and our asset financing programs provide companies the opportunity to develop completely new recurring revenue business models, such as hardware-as-a-service (?HaaS?) or software-as-a-service (?SaaS?), without the traditional working capital barriers. Importantly, we also enable companies to transition from purely selling equipment in one-off sales (CAPEX business models) to providing a one-stop-shop of service solutions and data analytics (OPEX business models) for the entire customer lifecycle. These new service business models offer major advantages for companies and give them the possibility to:
Please describe in a few words what companies particularly appreciate about working with kineo.
We are neither a bank nor a leasing company. We understand the problems and the needs of young, fast-growing companies from the early fragile seed stage to the late stage, as many of us have our roots and backgrounds in startups and venture capital. I think our portfolio companies very much appreciate that we are a trustworthy long-term financing partner who not only brings technology know-how, market expertise and an industry advisor network, but also the financial means to grow companies successfully on an international scale.
What motivates you about your work with young companies?
Since early childhood, I have been absolutely fascinated by scientists. I have been drawn to their ability to develop cool technologies and products that have the potential to change the world and dreamed of supporting that mission. With kineo I can now make my dream come true. I am motivated to work every day at the edge of science, alongside enthusiastic, entrepreneurial teams and super clever scientists to build next-generation companies with game-changing technologies and breakthrough products.