Gunter Festel

Gunter Festel (German and Swiss nationality) is the founder and CEO of Festel Capital, an advisory and investment firm he established in 2002 to commercialise technologies across energy, environment, health, materials and nutrition. He is unusually credentialed academically, holding an MA and PhD in chemistry (polymer chemistry/physics) plus a BA in business administration and an MA in economics from the University of Bayreuth, a PhD in management & economics (technology and innovation management) from ETH Zurich, and an Executive Master / MAS in Corporate Finance from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts — hence the "Prof. Dr. Dr." styling.

Before becoming a full-time investor, Festel built a corporate and consulting career. He began at Bayer, holding management positions in R&D and marketing (head of an R&D laboratory, assistant to a board member, and product manager). He then consulted at McKinsey & Company (Brussels, Frankfurt, London) and was a member of the management team and head of the chemical/healthcare consulting business at Arthur D. Little in Zurich and Wiesbaden, co-heading its global chemicals and healthcare practice.

Festel is best known for developing and championing the "Founding Angels" model — an early-stage variant of angel investing in which the investor co-founds a technology-based company alongside university scientists, contributing business expertise and capital before traditional business angels or VCs get involved. He has published widely on this model (e.g. in Venture Capital and the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology) and set up the non-profit Founding Angels initiative to bridge academic research and commercialisation. In parallel he is Professor for High-tech & Lifescience Entrepreneurship at TU Berlin and a research fellow/lecturer at the University of Basel and University of St. Gallen, and he founded and chairs the Umbrella Kids Foundation.

By his own account, Festel has co-founded more than 10 (bio-)technology companies in Germany and Switzerland, several of which he led as founder/CEO and later exited to industrial acquirers.

• Invests as a Founding Angel: joins spin-off teams at the point of formation, complementing scientist-founders with business and financing expertise — "founding angels join the start-up teams of new technology-based firms... make significantly fewer investments than business angels, but because of their very early engagement, they hold more shares and are much more engaged operationally."
• Very early stage — typically before business angels and venture capital enter; the model "bridges the gap between academic research and the commercialisation of the research results."
• Sector focus on deep science: biotechnology, industrial/white biotech, chemistry, nanotech, medtech and cleantech, framed under Festel Capital's five themes of energy, environment, health, materials and nutrition.
• Hands-on and operational, not passive capital — market research, business-plan development, overseeing product development and market-entry strategy, plus ongoing global business-development support to portfolio companies.
• Prefers university / research-institute spin-offs (e.g. Fraunhofer, ETH, academic labs) with a strong scientist-founder who lacks a commercial co-founder.