Courage and openness

Dear reader

The medtech sector is one of Switzerland’s leading industries, and one was able to discover why this week at Swiss Medtech Day. Straumann’s CEO Marco Gadola described how the dentistry group found its way out of a crisis. The range was expanded with, for example, the production of cheaper dental implants. The risk paid off: Straumann’s valuation rose from CHF 1.5 billion to CHF 10.5 billion. In addition to a willingness to take risks, the sector is also open to new trends. The Swiss Medtech Award was presented to the digital health start-up Ava at the event.

Ava is already very successful on the international market and it is not alone. Andrew Alliance sells its pipetting robots to 18 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies, and this week the company closed a USD 14 million financing round. Insphero also raised funding: the company, which focuses on microorganisms for drug development, collected USD 10 million.

ETH Zurich spin-off GreenTEG is already successful as a cleantech company; now it is using its technology to measure core body temperature. The company is also participating in an accelerator programme supported heavily by Samsung.

In addition, this week young companies from another traditional Swiss sector – financial services – caused a stir. Carbon Delta, a fintech start-up that calculates and analyses the risks that climate change poses for investment, closed a financing round of CHF 1.7 million. Riskifier is pushing into the B2C market with its platform riskprofiler.com: the new platform brings risk analysis into the world of cryptocurrencies. And our article on Investment Navigator describes how the Swiss start-up is tapping into the Asian market with the help of an accelerator programme.

In Switzerland, digitalswitzerland’s Market Entry Bootcamp, which is run together with Impact Hub Zurich, is intended to make it easier for foreign start-ups to take the first step into a new market. We asked how the foreign companies are found.

Speaking of digitalswitzerland, you can submit visionary ideas to the location initiative’s Matterhorn Projects until 22 June. New start-up coaches can apply to Innosuisse until 20 June. And I would like to draw the attention of start-ups to the Dart17 programme, which brings designers, artists, researchers and techies together to create novel human-machine interfaces.

Over the next few days, we will be able to meet the Venture Leaders Fintech and China at the Startup Champions event (Zurich, 19 June), F10 Investor Day (Zurich, 21 June) and SICTIC Investor Day with Blockchain Challenge (Zug, 21 June ). The awards ceremony for the venture competition will be held in Lausanne on 25 June.

Have a sunny weekend.
Stefan Kyora

Editor in Chief, Startupticker.ch