A new injection kicker system capable of deflecting electron beams with short pulses has been developed at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), Switzerland. The primary technical challenge addressed in this work was the reduction of the kicker pulse length to a few nanoseconds without compromising the overall reliability of the system. This kicker plays a critical role in realizing advanced injection schemes that are compatible with the stringent aperture constraints of fourth-generation light source storage rings and transparent to the stored electron beam, ensuring that photon beam stability is preserved during top-up injection. To meet the high reliability requirements necessary for user facility operation, the kicker system adopts a conservative design philosophy aimed at minimizing the excitation pulse voltage, thereby enhancing operational robustness and reducing potential failures. A prototype version of the kicker was installed and tested with electron beam in the storage ring of the Extremely Brilliant Source at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF-EBS) and the new storage ring of the Swiss Light Source at PSI (SLS 2.0). The experimental results from the beam test at ESRF-EBS successfully demonstrated the generation of short kicker pulses with effective deflection of the electron bunches, validating both the design concept and its practical implementation, while the kicker design in terms of beam-induced heating was validated at SLS 2.0. In this paper, we present the design of the kicker, along with results from the beam tests.