In Zurich, the pitch is unusually concrete. For CHF 100, a Swiss retail investor can hold a slice of a portfolio tracking the 20 largest private tech companies on the planet. No carry. No ten-year lockup. A semi-liquid, open-ended fund built around the Morningstar PitchBook Unicorn 20 Index [Stableton]. That product, more than any single funding round, is the bet Stableton Financial AG is making: that private markets are about to look a lot more like ETFs, and that the distribution war will be won inside the books of independent wealth managers, not on Sand Hill Road.
Founded in 2018 by Andreas Bezner, Konstantin Heiermann, Vinzent Zerner and Carmine Meoli, Stableton sells access to growth equity and pre-IPO secondaries, packaged as bankable products with low minimums [Stableton]. The flagship is a passive, systematic portfolio of 20 global private tech names wrapped in a low-cost, semi-liquid fund [Stableton]. Around it sit thematic sleeves in AI, fintech and robotics, plus custom mandates for institutions that want a specific cut of the private market [Stableton]. The wedge is distribution. More than 2% of Swiss financial intermediaries are already clients [9, 2022], and the platform counted over 2,500 marketplace users and almost 500 product investors in Switzerland at the time of the Series A [9, 2022].
The momentum shows up in the AUM curve. Stableton has grown assets 7.5 times since its 2021 seed round, crossing USD 300 million and, more recently, USD 500 million. The transaction count tells the same story: more than 70 deals at one disclosure point, over 100 at another, and 21 investments tracked by third-party databases. For a four-year-old firm operating in a category that institutional allocators were still debating in 2021, the trajectory is real.
Seed (2021 baseline, implied) | 67 | USD M
Post-Series A disclosure | 300 | USD M
Later disclosure | 500 | USD M
The bet
The strategic thesis is that private tech is becoming an asset class, not a boutique. Bezner, who describes himself as a 25-year investor and serves as CEO, CIO and Co-Founder [Moneycab, 2023], framed the alignment with Morningstar PitchBook bluntly: "Institutional investors are no longer asking if private markets belong in their portfolios, but how to integrate them efficiently" [Stableton]. That is the wager. If the next decade of allocator behavior looks like the last decade of public-equity behavior, indexed exposure to the top 20 unicorns becomes a default line item, and whoever owns the rails into European wealth channels collects the fees.
The backers are consistent with that thesis. DEWB led the 2021 seed [Nordic 9], a digital-finance specialist with a track record in listed and private fintech. Swiss media group TX Group and C3 Management joined the cap table by the time of the July 2022 Series A, which closed at CHF 15 million [9, 2022]. TX Group in particular gives Stableton a Swiss media and distribution adjacency that competitors based in London or New York do not have.
Why it could be big
The European private-markets retail story has two structural tailwinds. First, the unicorn cohort is staying private longer, which means the bulk of value creation in companies like Stripe, SpaceX and ByteDance happens before any public investor gets a look. Second, European regulators have been steadily widening the aperture for semi-professional investors to access alternatives. Stableton sits squarely on both currents, with a product that a Swiss IFA can actually put on a client statement.
The Everon partnership is the clearest expression of the retail wedge. Through it, Everon clients can access growth-equity investments starting at CHF 10,000 [Stableton], and Moneycab reported entry points as low as CHF 100 into unicorn exposure [Moneycab, 2023]. A 2025 partnership with Alta extends the reach into Southeast Asia, opening a second geography for the same product catalogue [10,11, 2025].
Team and traction
Bezner runs investments and the firm; Heiermann is Co-Founder and Managing Partner. The firm took home the Swiss Fintech Award 2022 in the Growth Stage Startup category, a credential that matters more in Zurich than it would in San Francisco because it signals to the FINMA-regulated wealth channel that this is a serious counterparty. Open roles, including a Chief of Staff in the CEO Office and an Investment Analyst [Stableton/Workable], suggest the next hiring phase is about institutional muscle rather than founding-team expansion.
The honest counterfactual
The bear case is competitive. Moonfare and Titanbay are chasing the same European wealth channel with deeper brand recognition among family offices, and US incumbents like Forge Global have a head start in secondaries inventory. What bulls answer with is the index wrapper itself: passive, rules-based, no performance fee, distributed through Swiss intermediaries that Moonfare does not yet own at the same density. The 2% penetration of Swiss financial intermediaries [9, 2022] is small in absolute terms but unusual in a category where most platforms still sell deal-by-deal. If the index product becomes the default building block, Stableton's distribution moat compounds faster than a feature-by-feature comparison would suggest.
What to watch
Three milestones over the next twelve months will tell the story. First, whether AUM crosses the USD 1 billion mark, which would put Stableton in the same conversation as Moonfare on scale. Second, whether the Alta partnership produces disclosed Southeast Asian volumes, validating the geographic playbook beyond German-speaking Europe. Third, whether a Series B materializes; the last priced round was July 2022 [9, 2022], and a firm doubling AUM into a friendlier rate environment will face the question of whether to raise growth capital or stay disciplined on burn.
So here is the question for allocators watching the European private-markets stack: if indexed unicorn exposure becomes a checkbox on every Swiss client statement by 2027, who owns the rails, and is it already too late to bet against the firm that wired them first?