CEO Day: The Swiss funding gap and actions to close it

CTI-Invest Chairman Christian Wenger started the CEO Day with clear words: “We have a gap in every stage of financing in seed, early stage and late stage”, he said. Although there is enough money around in Switzerland. Swiss pension funds have more than CHF400 billion at their disposal. “One tenth of a percent would be enough to close the funding gap”, Wenger said. (Video of the keynote)
 
In Wengers opinion the lack of venture capital is obvious. “We shouldn’t debate any longer and we don’t need more studies – we should act now”, he said and proposed to copy actions that were successful in other countries.
 
The CEO Day itself makes the best of the challenging situation. A new element of this year’s CEO Day was “Investors on stage” – Investors were pitching to the audience. It made clear that there are investors looking for start-ups. Three of them said clearly that they have money to spend: Creathor Venture (Video of the Pitch), SHS (Video) and the Innovationsstiftung der Schwyzer Kantonalbank (Video).
 
In addition several investors, that have invested outside Switzerland perviously, declared that they are interested in Swiss start-ups: the High-Tech Gründerfonds (Video), Mountain Club (Video) and Partech Ventures (Video). And then there are of course the organisations that are investing regularly especially the Zürcher Kantonalbank (Video) and Swisscom Ventures (Video).