New heads, new products

Dear reader

Wenger, the founding president of digitalswitzerland, has stepped down. He will be succeeded by Ivo Furrer, an insurance industry stalwart – an industry in which ‘run’ traditionally has a higher weighting than ‘change’.

But industries are not islands and the insurance companies also face digital transformation. This is shown by Furrer’s choice, as well as a message from his former employer the day before. Zurich Insurance Group has announced an international start-up competition that will address start-ups in the fields of mobility, smart homes and buildings, digital health and financial planning.

Various products and services were also launched this week: fintech start-up GenTwo has joined forces with CAT Financial Products to launch an issuance platform for structured products. The founders of Faitron, based in eastern Switzerland, have started sales of a heatable lunchbox, and western Switzerland start-up Lunaphore has announced that it is launching its first product for rapid tissue sampling together with Italian medtech company Menarini.

In financings, Beekeeper has raised another USD 13 million for international expansion, and two seed rounds produced an unusually high amount for Switzerland. Drone start-up Auterion generated USD 10 million and medtech start-up Corflow USD 9.7 million.

There was also money for the winners of the Venture Kick final: Geneva-based EBA Med and ETH spin-off UniSieve each received CHF 130,000.

Looking ahead: on Monday week, the application deadline for the ZKB Pionierpreis Technopark expires. And two days after that, Startup DAYs 2018 will take place in Bern. We will be on site with several team members.

Have a relaxing weekend

Jost Dubacher
Editor startupticker.ch