Only a fool starts a company

Dear reader

This week Arnaud Bertrand made the headlines. This was long overdue as the founder of start-up HouseTrip resigned from the company a year ago, a fact that barely registered in this country and is only now known among the general public. The reason being that Bertrand passed over control of his business without much fuss. He deserves great respect!

Bertrand’s resignation from HouseTrip a year ago was the right decision at the right time. He was exhausted and his wife and co-founder was ill. Now that she has recovered, the couple are thinking about their next company – even though he says half-seriously: “If everybody understood how punishing the journey of a first-time entrepreneur is, only a fool would start a company.” Bertrand talks about the couple’s future business plans to startupticker.

Swiss biotech company Memo Therapeutics, an ETH spin-off, has closed a series A financing round of CHF2.3 million to develop and validate its MemoMAB antibody discovery platform.

Isabelle Ohnemus has reported good news of her young company EyeFitU: in a first round of funding, she collected CHF1.75 million from the market. By the way, the name Ohnemus is not unknown in the start-up scene, as Isabelle’s husband Peter is a serial entrepreneur. His current start-up, dacadoo, provides mobile health management solutions.

The relocation service platform movu.ch secured a second round of financing, with Ringier Digital Ventures as its main investor.

The founders of Koubachi have achieved an exit. The Zurich-based pioneer in the field of smart gardening has been bought by the Husqvarna Group for an undisclosed figure.

Zurich development company Bits & Beast has brought a funny, but also a poetic and magical game with lots of action to market. Watch this video about Feist.

Experience two exciting events at Google on 3 August. Apply now for the Google Venture Sprint and push your start-up ahead in only four hours, team and expert inputs included. Or join Jordi Montserrat, managing director of venturelab, in the afternoon for an internationalisation workshop and afterwards introduce your project at the Pitchfest. The tenders: Google Venture Sprint and Startup Festival ‘Internationalization’.

Have a good weekend.

Claus Niedermann
Editor-in-chief startupticker.ch