Strong growth – limited investment

Dear reader

Rready’s customers already included 3M, Cisco and Mastercard; now Holcim and Tetrapak have joined them. And the fast-growing provider of a corporate innovation platform to foster and de-risk innovation raised USD 4 million in its series A round. Capture Media’s client list includes names such as Peugeot, Opel and Generali, and the company has now secured financing from Syz Capital and Saturnus Capital.

B2C start-ups are also making progress in terms of sales. Preventative healthcare start-up Care’s first shop has already recorded annual recurring revenue of USD 1 million, and Swiss NHL ice hockey player Kevin Fiala has now been recruited as an investor and ambassador for the just-launched US expansion.

Young perfume company Pernoire reached its previous year’s turnover in May this year and doubled the number of customers. This convinced the investors on the TV show Höhle der Löwen, three of which secured 12% of the shares for CHF 240,000.

No very large financing rounds were announced this week. It is usually assumed that investors are not willing to put up more money, but it is not simple as that. Start-ups are adapting to the difficult financing environment and putting themselves in a position that reduces their dependence on investors through a focus on customers.

This works well and even young start-ups are able to find well-known customers. VU Engineering, for example, has attracted industrial companies such as Georg Utz and Rollomatic with its solution for the automation of visual inspection processes, even before a planned pre-seed round. We also reported on biotech company Araris, which is now developing drug candidates for a Japanese pharmaceutical company: this is the first such deal that Araris has announced.

Speaking of biotech, sharp-eyed readers will have noticed the mistake in last week’s editorial. It was not BioVersys from Basel, but Memo Therapeutics from Schlieren that closed a financing round worth CHF 25 million. It’s easy to lose track when filtering out the most important announcements from a flood of news every week. By the way, we actually mentioned BioVersys this week. The company has a new CFO, as you can read in our article about new management members at various start-ups.

Global Entrepreneurship Week is taking place next week with a special series of very different events in and around Basel, and in Geneva and Lausanne. You can meet me next week at the SEF.Growth event in Basel and at the *zünder Startup Day in Emmenbrücke. I would also like to draw attention to the deadline for the Venture Leaders Mobile on 20 November. And on 21 November the Investor Summit will take place in Liechtenstein. 

The annual Swiss Startup Radar will be published at the end of November. This year, my co-author Michael Rockinger and I have focused on AI start-ups and the business models of ICT start-ups. We compare data-based Swiss companies and their performance with companies from more than 10 countries. You can order a print version of the magazine in your profile. All you have to do is tick the checkbox and enter your postal address.

Have a good weekend.
Stefan Kyora 

Editor in Chief, Startupticker.ch