goNEON secures CHF150,000 from Venture Kick for infrastructure-planning AI
Raphael Eder and Dr Lukas Ballo plan to use the funding to turn repeatable infrastructure-planning workflows into product modules, though customers, terms and independent benchmarks were not disclosed.
By Ryan Merket ยท Published
Why it matters
The funding gives Eder and Ballo room to test whether infrastructure-planning work shaped by engineering rules and local regulations can be packaged into repeatable software modules.
Raphael Eder and Dr Lukas Ballo have secured CHF150,000 from Venture Kick for goNEON, the ETH Zurich spin-off they founded to build decision-support software for infrastructure planning, according to Tech.eu. Tech.eu reported the same funding as approximately EUR160,000.
Eder, goNEON's CEO, and Ballo, its CTO, bring experience spanning entrepreneurship, artificial intelligence and urban planning. Their product is aimed at infrastructure planners, engineering teams and operators dealing with manual workflows, disconnected software and lengthy analyses.
Eder described goNEON's path as a move from research into commercial deployment. "Venture Kick helped us make the leap from research to customers," he told Tech.eu, adding that the program pushed the team to validate the market early.
Turning planning workflows into product modules
goNEON is developing an agentic AI platform that takes engineering requirements, local regulations and physical constraints as inputs. goNEON says the software generates technically feasible infrastructure designs that teams can assess and refine. goNEON positions it as decision-support software for engineers, who remain responsible for evaluating the proposed plans.
Tech.eu reported that goNEON can generate and evaluate infrastructure scenarios in minutes instead of weeks. That performance comparison comes from goNEON and has not been supported by an independent benchmark, accuracy study or regulatory audit in the supplied material.
The founders plan to use the funding to prioritize pilots they believe have the strongest commercial potential, convert frequently repeated planning workflows into product modules and validate use cases for a broader infrastructure-planning platform. That effort will test whether work developed for individual projects can be reused across customers and jurisdictions.
The available reporting does not identify goNEON's customers, pilot count, revenue, supported jurisdictions or initial infrastructure verticals. It also does not explain how the platform verifies local rules, updates them when regulations change or transfers generated designs into the CAD, building information modeling and simulation tools used by engineering firms.
Funding terms remain undisclosed
The CHF150,000 was announced as funding from Venture Kick. No supplied source identifies the instrument, valuation or terms for the CHF150,000 funding. The material also does not establish an approval or closing date for that tranche or goNEON's total capital raised.
The funding gives Eder and Ballo a defined product-development mandate: select the strongest pilots, identify recurring planning work and package those workflows as software modules. Evidence from named deployments, independent performance testing and adoption inside existing engineering processes would provide a clearer measure of whether goNEON can turn its research-led system into a repeatable product.