March 10, 2017
How diverse is the Swiss start-up scene?
Dear reader
Technopark Aargau recently hosted more than 100 meetings in one day. In half-hour meetings, representatives of SMEs and start-ups were able to exchange information. The young entrepreneurs were looking for customers, suppliers and development partners, and at the end of the day were enthusiastic about the many partnerships they were able to initiate.
In Biel, Swisscom and the creative workshop Creaholic will build a joint innovation centre; as part of the partnership, Swisscom has taken a minority stake in Creaholic. And in St. Gallen, the five promising finalists of Startfeld Diamant were announced.
These examples show that it is not only in the urban start-up hotspots that much is happening, but that all over the country Switzerland has a lot to offer young companies.
But as diverse as the start-up landscape is, there is one area where it needs to catch up. In her guest post Ava co-founder Lea von Bidder puts it in a nutshell: in Switzerland, your daughter is probably not a start-up founder. There are very few female founders of ambitious companies in Switzerland and even fewer female start-up CEOs.
The contribution by von Bidder shows that despite the dynamism of the Swiss start-up scene there is still plenty to do. However, the example of fintech shows how quickly development can progress if a topic is tackled resolutely. When Swiss Finance Startups (SFS) was founded in 2014, the term was barely used. Today, the fact that fintech has established itself is due in no small part to the association. SFS was therefore awarded Influencer of the Year at the Swiss Fintech Awards yesterday. And the quality of start-ups has also risen, as the two winners of the start-up awards show: Qumram has had impressive international success, and Crowdhouse, winner of the early stage award, already has 26 employees. Large companies have played an important role in the development of fintech and this week it became known that further corporations have become members of the fintech accelerator F10.
For your schedule planning, the new SEF.Award Campus Day takes place in Zurich on 6 April. The 18 best candidates will compete for this year’s Swiss Economic Award, and the day will also include keynote speeches by Edouard Bugnion, EPFL professor and co-founder of software company VMware, and Ian Roberts, CTO of Bühler.
Further important information: start-ups and participants can still register for the redesigned Swiss Venture Day from Swiss Venture Invest, and Swisscom has launched the second Call for Innovation on ‘Leveraging Telco Data’.
At the IMD ACE start-up investment event in Lausanne next week, I will make a brief presentation on the Swiss start-up scene, based on our data from the Swiss Venture Capital Report. Registration is still open.
Have a sunny weekend
Stefan Kyora
Editor in Chief, startupticker