Since the start of the program in 2007, start-ups supported by Venture Kick were able to attract 1,347 billion Swiss francs from investors, acquiring companies and other financial backers. In total, the venture kick start-ups represent 3,881 jobs. Venture Kick published yesterday its Annual Report 2016 that reports about the impact including highlights such as the financing round of Amin Shokrollahi’s Kandou.
Find innovative minds at Swiss universities and kick them out of the lab in order for them to commercialize their patents and prototypes. Turn scientists into entrepreneurs and help them create businesses and jobs. This was the original idea of Venture Kick in 2007, and it still is. Meanwhile, Venture Kick has proven its supporting process and growing success. The philanthropic initiative initially supported by the foundations Gebert Rüf Stiftung and Ernst Göhner Stiftung has grown into a consortium of donors with more supporting foundations and well-known philanthropists such as André Hoffmann, Hansjörg Wyss and Martin Haefner. In 2016, Venture Kick was selected as a program line of digitalswitzerland’s venture and growth program, which paved the way to get Swisscom and Engagement Migros as new partners, both members of digitalswitzerland.
Strong growing impact in 2016
The 2016 Venture Kick annual report which was published yesterday shows, that Venture Kick startups are definitely on the rise: Since 2007, 463 spin-off projects from more than 20 Swiss universities received CHF 18,650,000 in funding from Venture Kick. This resulted in 303 active companies and 3,881 active and highly qualified jobs. Moreover, Venture Kick startups attracted a total investment of CHF 1,347,000,000. Only in 2016, the startups raised CHF 451 million. These figures include awards; grants; equity investments from founders, business angel, venture capitalists or corporate investors; loans; equity transactions and exits. The trend keeps going strong: In the first days of January, the two Venture Kick alumni Advanon and Scandit closed financing rounds worth CHF 21 million in total already.
Looking for strong partners to support more startup projects
In addition, Venture Kick was happy to announce a partnership with the new Business Incubation Centre of the European Space Agency in Switzerland supporting startups in the field of space technologies and their applications. With this, the innovations of Swiss startups will not only conquer the globe, but also space. However, there is still a lot of untapped potential in terms of great research, which can be converted into businesses and jobs. The growing number of applications from researchers who request support from Venture Kick show it. To cope with this, Venture Kick is looking for additional donations in the range of CHF 4 million to achieve its vision of 10,000 jobs provided by 500 growing high-tech startups.
Download the Annual Report 2016 of Venture Kick
Read about the success stories and detailed statistics of Venture Kick and the supported startups in the 2016 Venture Kick annual report.
Some highlights:
- Faceshift was acquired by Apple
- MindMaze became Venture Kick’s “first unicorn” (a startup with a valuation above 1 billion USD)
- G-Therapeutics raised 36 million, Kandou Bus 15 million and Ava 10 million
- QualySense counts industry leaders as customers and raised more than 6 million in total
- Climeworks presented at the COP22 Conference and raised more than 10 million in total
Picture: Amin Shokrollahi, Founder and CEO of Kandou, Venture Kick / Martin Heimann
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