goNEON Secures €160,000 to Push Its AI Infrastructure Planner to Market

ETH Zurich spinoff goNEON Agentic Systems has cleared every rung of Venture Kick’s funding ladder, collecting €160,000 (CHF 150,000, roughly $181,000) to keep building an AI platform that turns weeks of infrastructure design work into minutes. Venture Kick is a Swiss philanthropic initiative that funds university spinoffs through a competitive, multi-stage process, and this payout completes the full sequence for goNEON, which first cleared the program’s opening round in December 2025.

The same three-stage formula has backed bigger names before. One graduate turned into a billion-dollar carbon-removal company. goNEON is now walking the identical path.

Three Stages to CHF 150,000

Venture Kick does not write one check. It runs founders through three separate jury pitches, cutting roughly half the field at each round before the money moves.

Stage 1 pays a flat grant. Stages 2 and 3 arrive as convertible loans that only convert once a startup closes its next real investment round.

Those three numbers add up to exactly CHF 150,000, the figure now attached to goNEON. The conditions governing each convertible loan mean the money effectively waits on the sidelines until outside investors set a price.

Climeworks and Flyability Walked This Ladder First

Venture Kick launched in 2007 to double the number of spinoffs coming out of Swiss universities. It has since become, by its own count, one of the busiest seed pipelines in Europe.

Two names show what the top of that pipeline can look like. Climeworks, a 2010 Venture Kick winner and fellow ETH Zurich spinout, built its business on direct air capture and had raised more than a billion dollars by 2025, running large-scale carbon removal plants in Iceland. Flyability, a 2015 winner out of EPFL, turned collision-proof drones into a real industrial inspection business.

The program’s aggregate numbers give some sense of the odds goNEON is now playing against, and for:

• 1,271 startup projects funded since 2007
• CHF 103 million committed by private donors and foundations
• CHF 10.2 billion raised by alumni companies from outside investors
• 84% survival rate for incorporated graduates, against a roughly 50% rate industry-wide

Beat Schillig, co-managing director of Venture Kick, said the program’s alumni now “transform breakthrough research into global companies and real economic impact,” a claim the program’s own funding and survival figures largely back up.

How Agent N! Designs a Road Network in Minutes

goNEON’s product is built around a single AI agent the company calls N!. Planners, engineering firms and infrastructure operators prompt it directly and get back technically feasible, regulation-aware designs for roads, utility lines and transit networks.

The platform automatically generates infrastructure designs based on engineering requirements, local regulations and real-world constraints, rather than replacing the engineers who currently do that work by hand. It supports decision-making by rapidly generating technically feasible planning options, so teams can assess and refine projects far faster than traditional methods allow.

Raphael Eder, goNEON’s co-founder and chief executive, has described the industry’s current baseline bluntly in a public LinkedIn post, writing that the team is chasing a sector where “97% of the work is still manual: tedious, repetitive, and frankly work nobody signed up for.” The company’s own materials go further, calling itself the first fully agentic infrastructure-planning service and pointing at a $1.5 trillion global architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) services market as the prize.

Two ETH Researchers, a PhD and a Paper Trail

The company was built by Raphael Eder, who holds master’s degrees from UC San Diego, the London School of Economics and ETH Zurich, and Dr Lukas Ballo, an ETH Zurich PhD who also earned an ETH master’s degree and an ETH Medal for his thesis work.

Their research background is not just a resume line. goNEON’s own site traces the platform back to work the pair did at ETH Zürich on computational methods for redesigning urban transport systems, work that produced peer-reviewed output rather than just internal slide decks.

• Journal of Transport Geography (Ballo et al., 2023)
• Journal of Cycling and Micromobility Research (Ballo et al., 2024)
• 25th Swiss Transport Research Conference (Ballo, Eder et al., 2025)

The team has since grown to roughly a dozen people of a similar number of nationalities, according to Eder’s own LinkedIn posts, and goNEON has also been selected for the University of St. Gallen’s HSG START Accelerator, a second institutional stamp alongside Venture Kick’s.

Can AI Fix Construction’s Stalled Productivity?

Global construction output is on track to grow from roughly $13 trillion in 2023 to $22 trillion by 2040, even though productivity in the sector barely moved for two decades. That gap is the underlying reason investors keep funding planning software that promises to compress design cycles.

McKinsey, the consultancy, has tracked construction productivity growth at just 0.4% a year between 2000 and 2022, a rate that lags nearly every other major industry. Generative and agentic AI tools are among the few levers McKinsey’s own researchers point to for closing that gap, precisely because they let firms simulate many more design scenarios without adding headcount.

goNEON is not the only European startup riding this wave into agentic AI funding this year. E-commerce specialist Kopa.ai closed a two million euro seed round for agentic commerce tools around the same stretch, a sign investors are placing similar bets across very different verticals.

What CHF 150,000 Buys goNEON Next

The new money is earmarked for three specific jobs, according to the company: prioritizing pilot projects with the strongest market potential, turning its most repeatable planning workflows into scalable product modules, and validating the use cases meant to anchor its broader platform.

Venture Kick helped us make the leap from research to customers. It pushed us to validate the market early, connected us with an exceptional network of founders and investors, and gave us the momentum to build a global company.

Eder said that in describing what the program meant for goNEON’s path so far. The next test is less about the jury room and more about whether engineering firms and infrastructure operators actually pay for pilots.

Only Stage 3 graduates qualify for Kickfund’s equity checks of up to CHF 850,000, the next rung on the same ladder Climeworks climbed before it raised its first billion.

Frequently Asked Questions

What counts as agentic AI in infrastructure planning?

Agentic AI refers to systems that do more than answer a single prompt. In goNEON’s case, the agent N! checks a generated design against zoning rules, safety codes and budget constraints on its own before handing a feasible option back to a human engineer for review.

Which other startups were selected alongside goNEON at Venture Kick’s first stage?

goNEON’s Stage 1 cohort, announced in a December 2025 Venture Kick release, also included Doxomed in digital healthcare, GenoRobotics in field DNA sequencing, Maus Robotics in autonomous food vending, and Spikeforce in regulatory compliance AI for banks.

How much total funding can a startup collect through the full Venture Kick pipeline?

Up to CHF 1,150,000 combined. That includes the CHF 150,000 across the three core stages, an additional CHF 150,000 InnoBooster grant for Stage 2 winners, and up to CHF 850,000 in equity funding from Kickfund for Stage 3 graduates.

Does goNEON have to repay its Stage 1 grant?

No. The first CHF 10,000 is a non-repayable grant, though founders make a moral pledge to return it if the company later succeeds. Only the Stage 2 and Stage 3 money arrives as convertible loans carrying 5% interest.