R17 Ventures AG

R17 Ventures AG is a hybrid performance-marketing agency and equity investor headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, with additional offices in Cape Town and Berlin. The firm was founded in 2020 by Swiss entrepreneur Raphael Rohner, following the sale of his prior venture, and is chaired by Marc Degen, co-founder of the Swiss startup incubator Trustsquare. R17 operates an integrated model: it functions simultaneously as a full-service digital performance-marketing agency and as an equity investor, combining services-for-equity arrangements with direct pre-seed and seed capital to accelerate DTC e-commerce, SaaS, and B2B lead-generation companies, primarily in the DACH market and increasingly in Africa. The firm leads rounds and invests at pre-seed and seed stage across 11 disclosed portfolio and joint-venture companies. Notable names include Secondhandbags AG (a luxury handbag marketplace JV that achieved 400 percent sales growth in its first year), Horoskop Paradies (an astrology SaaS acquired by R17 that doubled revenue within three months), Plakativ.Store (Swiss artist posters), Indyvit, GotPost, Fliggs (a Web3-enabled mobile operator), and Mira, a retail and hospitality operations platform. R17 was named to Clutch's 100 Fastest Growing Agencies list in 2023. In August 2024, R17 launched Go Time AI, an AI accelerator for African startups — reflecting the firm's expansion beyond DACH into the African technology ecosystem via its Cape Town presence. R17 also runs the R17 Academy apprenticeship program in Cape Town to build local performance-marketing talent. This dual DACH-and-Africa mandate, combining agency leverage with direct equity participation, makes R17 a distinctive operator-investor vehicle within the European and emerging-market startup landscape.