Mathias Ruch, Founder and CEO of CV VC and CV Labs: “If you’re not building with AI, you have a disadvantage right now”

Mathias, where do you think capital will flow over the next 24 months: real-world assets, AI agents, or something else?

I surely hope it goes into AI, because our thesis is the AI-native future. We strongly believe that capital will move in the coming months into anything around AI.

Already now, and in the past months, 80% of global capital went into AI. So if you’re not building as a founder using AI, or if you’re not investing as an investor into AI, you have a disadvantage right now.

The main topic in everyone’s head right now—whether you are an investor, a manager in a large corporate, or even an individual at home—is AI security.

Within financial services, where do you see AI’s biggest implications?

When we defined the topic of this conference months ahead of time, it was originally a blockchain and crypto conference, and then it transformed into digital assets. We defined it around digital assets at the core, institutional adoption, and AI.

At the time, we thought, “Okay, it’s a bit of a stretch—how will AI fit into that?” We had already started with AI last year, and our thesis is highly dependent on AI. But now, looking at how everything comes together, digital finance and AI are converging.

I just returned from a fireside chat with Switzerland’s BlackRock country manager, Dr. Dirk Klee. I think every other sentence was around AI in finance—whether agentic payments or simply the whole process.

A lot of the incumbents are not yet using agents on the execution side, for example to transact or communicate with clients. But in the background, if you are not looking into AI and using it, you are not ready for the future.

Tom Lee talks a lot about agentic payments, blockchain, and AI coming together as one ecosystem. Do you believe in that?

Absolutely. I have to come back to large incumbents. This conference is being presented with Franklin Templeton. Earlier this year, their thesis was that AI—mainly agentic AI—is the killer app for blockchain.

Recently, BlackRock published its view on AI. They look at AI as machine-native intelligence, and stablecoins as the currency these agents need.

If you look at what actually has to happen in a highly digitized world: if an agent transacts, it basically calls an API. It then has to rent compute and use digital money. It cannot wait for a human click. That digital money is stablecoins, and trust in that infrastructure has been built over time. Right now, it is becoming institutional.

But when you look at us human beings, we do not want to trust machines. We want to trust people or institutions. Hence, it is only logical that those institutions are currently scaling almost like hyperscalers.

You mentioned security concerns around AI agents. How seriously should people take them?

Always critically ask yourself: who is benefiting from what is being put out there in the news?

I’m not saying this is not true, and I also think people should really care about security when using AI. This is software development in the end. If you know something about software development, you know it is hard to control everything at all times.

And especially if part of that software development is being automated by agents, then those models train themselves. That is a cycle that goes faster and faster.

So yes, there are security concerns. Take them seriously. But at the same time, from an individual perspective, use the technology and get used to it, because it is only going to get crazier and more dominant in the future. You have to adapt to what is coming.

You have a helicopter view of the Swiss ecosystem and other markets. Which AI verticals or other areas look most interesting right now?

That is a very good question, and I do not think it is an easy one to answer.

As an investor, before you can deploy money, you need to have the money from your investors—from the partners who invest alongside your thesis. Currently, if you are raising funds, which we are, you listen to what they are telling you: their concerns and where everything is going.

I have to come back to the initial question, because security is such a big issue when it comes to AI adoption. Not a single large corporate organization can embrace the risk of not having control over what is happening in core processes, for example, or in defining products.

In the financial industry, a product means clients’ money being exposed to markets. You have to be very sure that what you are doing is safe and sound. This is really what is driving us right now: how can AI be made more secure?

I think blockchain can play a role. It is a technology that can act peer-to-peer, with billions of entities transacting at the same moment, while at the same time enforcing large-scale rules and boundaries where agents can act, transact, create information, and exchange information.

Given that we come from the digital asset and blockchain space, this convergence of technologies is what fascinates us. We call it frontier technologies, because in not too much time, I think these technologies will be in the background, like the technology in our cell phones. We do not talk about it; it just happens. The same will happen with all these technologies we are talking about today.

If someone wants to launch a startup right now, would your advice be to go into cybersecurity because that is where the capital flows?

I’m not saying that is where all the capital flows. The largest IPOs currently are, of course, the large language models. But that is not where we, as a smaller investor compared with what is going on, can have a focus area.

We are actually looking at what you could call the middleware. There are three areas we take a closer look at as a VC:

• Digital finance, everything with an AI focus
• The agent economy, or agentic economy
• Security

In all of these areas, there is middleware where incumbents are not going to innovate heavily. In almost all of those pillars, the infrastructure technology is there. The models are pretty good. In blockchain, the layer ones and protocols are pretty good—you can use them and build something.

But the middleware, when it comes to very specific use cases, including in the financial world, is where small startups can generate value very fast through innovative products. Those products can eventually be bought by incumbents or used by corporates. This is where we think founders should go.

CV VC and CV Labs are not only based in Switzerland. How does your international network work together?

When we started our company in 2018, this new technology called blockchain and crypto landed massively in Switzerland. Roughly 80% of the projects, and also the money, came at some point into Switzerland, into Zug.

But for us, it was always clear that other jurisdictions would catch up. Very early on, we wanted to be abroad and offer the startups we invest in a faster path to growth. We wanted to accelerate their growth.

We started in other areas of Europe. We started in Liechtenstein early on. We then launched an Africa strategy and have a hub in Cape Town now. We also revisited the Middle East—more specifically the UAE and Dubai—a couple of years ago, and we have a strong presence there.

If you look at our positioning, I think we are really good at covering the EMEA region. And when I say covering, I really mean it. Our DNA is European. Switzerland is located at the heart of Europe. We then have an Africa fund and a strong presence in the Middle East, and we can play that triangle.

A lot of our founders from Africa, for example, have the option of incorporating in Delaware or London. They normally do not incorporate in Africa itself, but that is a whole other topic. Now, of course, the Middle East, especially Abu Dhabi, is a new opportunity.

From an investment perspective, there is also a strong appetite from the Middle East to invest in Africa. If you combine that with technology hubs such as the one we have here in Switzerland—where we probably have the most dynamic AI hub with ETH and the technology universities here—this is something we can combine and offer to startups and investors.

You started in blockchain and digital assets, but you are also looking at AI, robotics, and biotech. What excites you in these verticals, and where are you focusing now?

I mentioned the three focus areas, which are mainly the Global Fund thesis. But what is also interesting to share is how different the perspective becomes from an emerging-markets perspective.

Our Africa strategy is mainly an emerging-markets strategy. It is a blockchain fund, but if you look more closely, it is actually a fintech and financial-inclusion thesis.

Take Switzerland as an example. We are all fully banked. We almost have 24/7 banking here already, based on traditional rails. We have credit cards. The banking system works pretty flawlessly. Payments and cross-border payments are not really an issue.

That changes dramatically if you are based in a Sub-Saharan African country. If you are in Nigeria, or even in South Africa and originally from a non-South African country, and you want to transfer money home to your family, existing payment rails can cost you up to 10%, and sometimes even more.

In those countries, with a very entrepreneurial society where the average age is well below the European average—roughly around 30—what happens is leapfrogging. People use whatever technology gives them the advantage they need.

A lot of people do not know that many people in Africa are not banked. They use informal payment rails through mobile money, something we do not even know. That does not qualify for banking, so people cannot get loans.

If you now create a programmable version of that money, you basically upgrade it to blockchain-grade infrastructure. Suddenly, these people become bankable—not by the incumbents, but by new fintechs entering the markets. This is where we invest.

Imagine you are someone from Nigeria working in South Africa and you want to transfer money back. You are not using Western Union and paying 10%. You are using a stablecoin-powered fintech that offers app-based transactions at almost no cost.

What is your biggest takeaway from CV Summit this year?

To look at your own conference from a helicopter perspective, as you mentioned before, is pretty hard. But what is almost impossible not to notice is how busy CV Summit has been over the two days.

We are here in the middle of the networking area. I can hardly hear you, and you can hardly hear me. But look at how engaged the conversations are and how energized the crowd is.

Someone told me there are a lot of shirts here, referring, of course, to the early days—the OG days, the crypto bros—when you would not see any shirts. My theory is that many of the crypto bros now wear shirts. So it is probably not only the incumbents who are here.

What I think, and what I hear from my conversations, is that people are very positive about the future. They are positive about what is happening in the digital asset space and about incumbents entering.

The incumbents are happy because they can play a role in shaping the digital future of their own industry. The digital asset players have found a market they can serve and a product they can deliver to new clients.

Even the crypto bros—we know it is not really a crypto summer right now. I feel a bit more enthusiastic, but it is still a bit chilly. Still, there is hope on the horizon.

All in all, I am really happy about CV Summit 2026.

Mathias, thank you so much for this interview.

Thank you so much for having me.