Jungfrau Zeitung – Almost four billion for young entrepreneurs
Startup Switzerland | January 30, 2023
Investments in young Swiss companies rose sharply again last year – despite the deteriorating framework conditions. Large sums of money flowed into the cleantech industry, but start-ups from the fintech and IT sectors are also raising more money.
There is more investment, only investments in biotech companies lagged behind for once.Photo: Pixaby
In total, venture capital of CHF 3.97 billion flowed to Swiss start-up companies in 2022, almost 30 percent more than in the previous year, according to the “Swiss Venture Capital Report” published by the online portal Startupticker.ch and the investors’ association Seca is taken. The number of financing rounds rose somewhat more slowly, with an increase of almost eight percent to 383 rounds.
This means that the long-term growth trend will also have increased in 2022, the publishers of the study naturally point to a media orientation in Zurich: since 2020 alone, the invested capital has almost doubled and since 2017 it has more than quadrupled.
Honored cleantech startups
The cleantech company Climeworks was able to collect the highest sum last year. The ETH Zurich spin-off, which specializes in filtering CO2 from ambient air, received capital of around 600 million Swiss francs from investors. The entire Swiss cleantech sector made investments of CHF 827 million in 2022.
Fintech and ICT companies accounted for more than two billion francs (up 72 percent), and thus more than half of the start-up investments. The largest sums include the Geneva software company Sonarsource (395 million) and the Zurich fintech Wefox (392 million).
Weak biotech year
Financing for biotech companies, on the other hand, fell by almost 50 percent to CHF 404 million. In front of the media, the authors of the study attribute this primarily to the “disillusionment” after the corona pandemic: in 2020 the industry had still experienced record-high start-up investments. However, the industry will “come back”, said Stefan Kyora from Startupticker.ch.
In the geographical evaluation, the Canton of Basel-Stadt and its local biotech company subsequently experienced a weak year with clearly declining start-up investments. In contrast, cantons with a strong ICT and fintech sector benefited: In the canton of Zurich, start-up investments increased by almost two thirds. There is also clear growth in the cantons of Geneva and Zug.
Remaining investor interest
On the financing side, interest in start-up investments has evidently not decreased, despite the changing framework conditions. According to the study’s annual survey, 55 new venture capital funds were used up in the fundraising phase by the end of 2022.
In addition, the start-up investors in the survey by the study authors are optimistic for the current year: more than half of the shares stated that they want to invest the same amount or more capital in young companies in 2023 as in the previous year.