Redalpine: At Face Value | Deep Tech Nation Switzerland

Lab Rat turned Gardener

Michael Sidler, Founder and Partner at redalpine, has spent a fair share of his career in a lab. As a trained plant molecular biologist, it’s unsurprising that he compares the search for early-stage startups to being a scientist: “You need to have a strategy in place, the right tools, and some kind of idea of what to look for. But what you find, very similarly to a research project, is up to testing, being open to surprising outcomes and uncut gems.” 

His view of funding later-stage startups, however, shifts from the rigor of science to the patience of cultivation. “Once you get to the later stage, it starts to become more similar to tending a garden: the seed is already placed, and the sprouts show the promise of bearing fruit. At that stage, it’s up to you to use the right soil, the right nutrients and the right conditions to make that promise come to life.”

The Needle in the Haystack

The analogy captures Sidler’s philosophy in a nutshell: curiosity, precision, and nurture. Investing, to him, is neither gambling nor pure pattern recognition. It is observation with purpose. “A team, a founder, an idea- these can’t be measured with a table,” he says. “Most often, we don’t talk to a team just once and invest. We talk to them, we watch them grow and step into their potential.”  Natural experiment, field study, whatever you want to call it: Sidler’s approach is as systematic as it is people-first. Even when he talks about his team behind the fund, this systematic thinking takes precedence: “We don’t leave finding the needle in the haystack up to chance. We filter the entire haystack until we find the needle. And we have a machine that crunches over 5000 investment opportunities every year to do exactly that.” Sidler quickly clarifies: “When I talk about a machine, I mean people, processes and tools. Having a system, a strategy in place to search for the next big thing is just as important as identifying it when it’s in front of you.”

The Scientist’s Instinct

After completing his PhD at University of Zurich in  1998, Sidler traded pipettes for PowerPoint. Five years at the Boston Consulting Group transformed his analytical discipline into strategic craft. “That’s when I became interested in the intersection between technology, innovation, disruption, and startups,” he recalls. During his consulting years, he experienced both the Swiss and North American markets; two very different approaches to change management. In Switzerland, structure prevails; in the U.S., experimentation does. 

As the dot-com boom accelerated, Sidler’s curiosity turned practical. He began investing his own money while still at BCG, driven by a fascination with how new technologies challenge incumbents. “I was so passionate about it that after five years at BCG, I left and joined a startup myself,” he says. “I saw so much innovation in Europe and Switzerland that wasn’t getting commercialized properly.” His scientific training had taught him to follow evidence, but venture capital demanded something different: belief before proof. What emerged from that tension was a conviction that would define his career: The idea that science, entrepreneurship, and finance are not separate worlds but can be combined to create the next revolution.

The Bust of the Bubble

Tracing Sidler’s steps all the way back to his first investments takes us back to the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s, a trial that cost him more money than it made him- but gave him the intellectual framework he still applies today. “Yes, I did not get a decent return ” he says, “but that’s where I learned what separates failures from giants. Because in the beginning, they all look the same.” Together with his co-founder Peter Niederhauser, he put on a lab coat again to dissect the aftermath and he distilled two traits common to the survivors. The first was a hungry, talented, slightly crazy founding team: People able to tell their story with conviction and execute under uncertainty. The second was what he calls a “tech-hedge,” a hard-to-replicate core such as a patent, prototype, or process that provides structural resilience. “If you have an innovative core, you have an asset,” he explains. “Even when things aren’t going well, that gives you stability.”

Those two insights- team and tech-hedge- became the blueprint for Redalpine’s investment philosophy. They bridged Sidler’s analytical roots with his entrepreneurial intuition. Just as a biologist looks for reactions that endure stress, he looks for founders whose ideas survive volatility. “During a bubble, thousands of companies are born and equally, thousands of companies die,” he says. “But the giants of tomorrow are born there as well.” Sidler also carefully evaluates current bubble-tendencies. It’s an open secret that the valuations of emerging AI companies are shooting through the roof into ridiculous valuations, and similarly to the properties of gravity, what goes up must come down. But where others fear a downward correction of the ones who tumble, Sidler considers the ones he believes will stay soaring high. Bubbles are meant to burst- but contrary to their soap counterpart, the remainders stay winning. And they win big.

The Art and Gut of Decision-Making

When Sidler talks about decision-making, he oscillates naturally between data and instinct. Early-stage investing, he insists, is about people; later stages about numbers. “You invest in people,” he says. “Assessing people is an art. It’s like hiring- you can have formal criteria, but in the end there’s always a gut feeling.” He draws parallels between the uncertainty of research and the uncertainty of entrepreneurship: both demand intuition guided by method. As a company grows, metrics become more reliable, but gut feeling never disappears. It merely becomes informed by evidence. “The science helps you stay disciplined,” he says. “The instinct helps you stay human.”

This combination has also shaped redalpine’s internal culture. Sidler prefers teams that reflect the same duality: analytical enough to evaluate risk, empathetic enough to recognize potential. It’s why he looks out for traits in founders that can’t be calculated in the data room: Chemistry between people, the trajectory of growth, the ability to learn. “If we’ve seen a founder three or four times and every time the curve goes upward, we can extrapolate that into the future,” he says. “That tells us more than any spreadsheet ever could.”

Alignment Over Optimism

Asked what he has changed his mind about after nearly two decades in venture, Sidler answers without hesitation. “I used to think you could fix a weak team,” he says. “You can’t.” It is, in his view, one of the most expensive misconceptions in the industry: The belief that money or mentorship can correct foundational misalignment. “If the team and the investors aren’t on the same page from the start, it rarely works. You can’t buy alignment.” He chuckles when he adds: “And when someone says they’ll pivot later, that’s not a pivot. Either they do it or they don’t. There is no try.” 

From Loser to Rock Star

Sidler’s career traces the evolution of Switzerland’s innovation culture as much as his own. When he and his partners launched redalpine in 2006, founding a startup was still considered a poor fallback option. “When you founded a company, you were a loser,” he says. “You didn’t get the corporate job at UBS or Nestlé, so you started a startup. Now founders are rock stars.” That cultural shift, he believes, changed everything. From the quality of talent to the ambition of ideas. “The best graduates from ETH or EPFL now see startups as an equal, sometimes better, career path than corporates.”

The perception of venture capital followed a similar arc. After the dot-com collapse, VC was viewed as reckless and opaque. Today, it has matured into a respected asset class. “Back then, venture capital was seen as dangerous, risky, almost dirty,” Sidler recalls. “Now it’s part of institutional portfolios. Pension funds and family offices are starting to see it as a legitimate diversification.” For someone who entered the field when it was barely a field at all, the shift feels both overdue and energizing.

The Remaining Variables

Despite the progress, Sidler sees room for optimization.  “In the U.S., pension funds allocate about three percent to VC. In German-speaking Europe, it’s below 0.1. That’s roughly fifty times less money flowing into innovation.” 

Still, Sidler remains characteristically optimistic, viewing these gaps not as constraints but as design flaws waiting to be corrected. “If we build the right conditions,” he says, “Switzerland has everything it takes- talent, trust, precision- to remain one of the best labs for innovation in the world.” It is a fitting closing image: the scientist who became a strategist, still tending his garden of ideas, still testing for what might grow next.