Mathias Ruch and the business of bringing people together

A television prize is an unusual item to find in a venture capitalist’s backstory. Mathias Ruch has one. In 2002, “Joya rennt,” a Swiss format connecting television and the internet, won the Rose d’Or’s eRose category. Long before he was explaining blockchain to investors, he was helping make different media work together. The technology has changed considerably. His appetite for assembling people around it has been rather more consistent.

Today, Ruch is founder and CEO of CV VC and a co-founder of CV Labs, the ecosystem business associated with the Zug investment firm. The names are close enough to invite confusion. Their relationship is more interesting than their initials: one invests in young companies; the other helps organise the people, programmes and places around them. Understanding why he built both requires taking the television years seriously.

The television years belong in the story

Ruch studied at the University of Bern from 1996 to 2002. During the dot-com years, he founded a web design agency and developed online community tools for clients including Swiss Post. The combination of business and media was already present. He was studying those subjects while trying to turn them into something customers might actually use.

With Marco Bumbacher, he started the software venture Joya. It subsequently gave rise to “Joya rennt.” That progression is a useful corrective to the tidy career diagram in which a founder selects an industry and stays inside its fence. Here, software led toward television. An internet idea acquired a broadcast life, and eventually an international award.

FaroTV, which Ruch co-founded with Björn Hering, developed and produced formats including “Joya rennt” and “Celebrations.” In April 2006, Condor Films announced its acquisition of the Bern company. The business had 25 employees. Ruch and Hering joined Condor’s executive management, while FaroTV continued operating under its existing name in Bern. An exit, in this instance, still involved going to work.

His later media career included leadership of RingierTV. When Ringier announced a reorganisation of its television activities in August 2010, it said Ruch would leave at the end of September. Alongside these operating roles came angel investing and digital ventures, including the innovation platform Atizo. The career had begun to connect the business of making things with the business of backing people who make things.

Old colleagues, a new valley

By Ruch’s own account, his first encounter with blockchain came in 2013. What drew him in was familiar: a new technology, entrepreneurs trying unfamiliar things, and the possibility that businesses nobody yet recognised might emerge. His memory of the early internet gave him a reference point. It also gave him a worry about where the resulting companies would be built.

Switzerland had been the birthplace of the World Wide Web at CERN. Ruch wanted the country to capture more of the commercial opportunity around the next technological wave. That ambition helps explain his attachment to Crypto Valley. Zug offered proximity to founders and developers at the moment when an abstract technological argument was becoming a collection of actual businesses.

The founding group carried some history of its own. In 2016, Ruch established Lakeside Partners with Bumbacher and Ralf Glabischnig. Bumbacher was the colleague from the Joya days. He and Glabischnig had founded the IT business inacta in 2009. Olaf Hannemann subsequently joined, bringing two decades of experience at JPMorgan. A new venture had assembled around relationships that were considerably older than the industry.

That continuity makes Ruch’s route easier to follow. Television, software and blockchain can look like abrupt turns when reduced to job titles. Follow the collaborators and the turns become less mysterious. The group combined operating experience, technical business knowledge and finance. Even a frontier technology benefits from colleagues who already know how one another work.

A useful idea needs a room

The order of events matters. Before developing a systematic investment model in 2018, the founders put effort into the local community: expertise, events, coworking spaces and opportunities for people to meet. CV VC brought investment activities together, with CV Labs supplying a place for founder programmes and connections. The less glamorous work of organising a community was part of the commercial proposition.

CV Labs gives that proposition physical and practical form. Its activities have included coworking, accelerators, summits and research. A founder might arrive needing capital and also need a lawyer, technical advice or a rehearsal of a pitch. These are different needs, with different people attached. Keeping them close makes the network useful beyond the moment an investment is announced.

Ruch has also co-founded CV Summit and CV Competition. A conference creates visibility and introductions; a competition gives an early company a reason to sharpen its case. Neither guarantees a durable business. Both provide occasions for a young team to encounter questions it may have postponed. For someone who once produced television, the importance of a well-prepared appearance is hardly an exotic discovery.

The pitch still has to make sense

For all the futuristic language surrounding his sector, Ruch’s published selection criteria are recognisable business questions. He puts the team first, then asks whether the product offers a clear benefit, fits a market and can be built with the available skills. A blockchain proposal still has to explain what problem it solves. Vocabulary is a poor substitute for customers.

In July 2023, he described CV Labs’ accelerator as giving projects access to more than 100 mentors. The offer then included up to $135,000 in cash and services for equity and/or tokens. Those were the terms he outlined at that time. The underlying idea was that early capital and structured learning could be delivered together, rather than leaving founders to assemble every introduction themselves.

The context has often been uncomfortable. During the cryptocurrency downturn in 2022, Ruch argued publicly that the industry needed to mature and prioritise usefulness over speculation. He treated the market’s swings as part of a young sector’s cycles. His position contains a demanding test for his own organisation: conviction about technology must eventually produce companies with reasons to exist beyond enthusiasm for the category.

The valley travels

A Swiss base has not confined the ambition to Switzerland. By July 2023, Ruch said CV VC had invested in blockchain startups in 21 countries. The international work became particularly concrete in Africa, where the firm pursued an accelerator and investment strategy. It offered another setting in which to test the proposition that capital works better with local connections.

In December 2023, CV VC described Ruch’s visit to Mauritius with Swiss diplomatic and business partners. Meetings included public authorities and private-sector representatives. The discussions explored collaboration, the regulatory environment and Mauritius as a possible jurisdiction for a planned African investment fund. These were proposals under discussion, with the practical details still part of the work.

By April 2024, Ruch told TechCabal that CV VC had invested in 14 African startups working across wallets, developer tools and infrastructure. That dated snapshot gives the international strategy some scale without turning aspiration into achievement. It also widens the portrait: the Zug investor was spending time on the institutions and relationships through which investment might travel.

There is an echo here of the early media career. Different audiences require different explanations. A founder, a prospective investor and a regulator can look at the same technology and ask entirely different questions. Ruch’s working life repeatedly brings him into those conversations. The task is partly financial, partly organisational, and often a matter of making people intelligible to one another.

A return to Bern, and a question for Switzerland

The public-policy strand runs through the Swiss Blockchain Federation, which Ruch co-initiated. He has served on its board and chaired its Expert Council. The organisation brings business and public institutions into the same conversation about Switzerland as a location for blockchain activity. For an investor whose companies need workable conditions, that conversation reaches beyond any single portfolio.

One public recollection gives it a more personal setting. Ruch described visiting the Federal Palace with 30 blockchain founders, guided by State Councillor Matthias Michel. He noted that he had been born in the Swiss capital and called the tour a highlight. After the software ventures, production companies and investment work, the route had brought him back to Bern in rather different company.

His attachment to Switzerland includes criticism. In December 2024, he warned about complacency and the need for a competitive regulatory environment. In his July 2026 writing, he returned to the tension between institutional trust and the speed of experimentation. His argument is that a location’s early advantage has to be renewed. Familiarity with the origin story will only get it so far.

“Leadership is not a historical achievement. It is a continuous decision.”

Mathias Ruch · July 2026

That 2026 argument extends to artificial intelligence. Ruch expects blockchain and AI to converge around digital infrastructure in which information and actions can be verified. It is a thesis about the future. His organisation, meanwhile, has concrete present-day divisions of labour: Hannemann focuses on Growth, with Lukas Etter and David Long as Co-CIOs, while Ruch remains founder and CEO.

The career began with software that found its way onto television. It now concerns technologies expected to alter how organisations transact and establish trust. Between those points sit company sales, recurring collaborators, meeting rooms, public institutions and young businesses still proving themselves. Ruch keeps returning to the work of bringing them together. A promising idea can attract attention. Giving it useful company takes a rather fuller diary.