Good conditions for growth

Dear reader

Personnel is in short supply. Not only are skilled employees in demand, but also frontline workers such as hotel staff, construction workers and production and logistics employees. Beekeeper‘s software enables companies to engage these frontline workers via mobile devices, increasing efficiency and flexibility and also employee commitment, thus reducing fluctuation. Beekeeper‘s solutions are already in use worldwide and the company has now closed a financing round of more than USD 50 million.

It is unusual and encouraging that several Swiss investors have participated. A new addition to the group of investors is EGS Beteiligungen, the Ernst Göhner Foundation’s investment company. It has expanded its focus to include growth financing for scale-ups with a Swiss connection, thus giving Switzerland another lender in larger growth financing.

Scandit closed a unicorn-rated funding round six months ago. I talked to CEO Samuel Müller about the scale-up‘s prospects in the current economic situation. Müller remains optimistic, not least because the smart image recognition solutions from Scandit, as with those from Beekeeper, support frontline workers and thus counteract fluctuation.

In addition, Scandit and Beekeeper have the fact that they are not only growing with investor money, but are also successful on the market in common. This applies to many other Swiss start-ups. A good example is security company Futurae: more than 120 banks, insurance companies and online retailers rely on its authentication platform.

Sufficiently ambitious founders are a prerequisite for growth stories such as these and there is certainly no lack in Switzerland, as shown by the latest start-ups funded by Innobooster and First Ventures. Speaking of First Ventures, the next deadline for the funding programme for spin-offs  from universities of applied sciences is 1 December. No fewer than 15 Swiss start-up and social enterprise founders have also made it on to this year’s Forbes list of the most influential people under 30 from the DACH region.

In order to further increase the diversity of successful founders, Backbone Ventures has set up a seed/pre-seed fund for under-represented groups. The target is CHF 20 million and the first closing has taken place.

Numerous events are taking place next week, some part of Global Entrepreneurship Week. The Startup Conference Slush will take place in Helsinki from Thursday, with 15 start-ups representing Switzerland.

Finally, a reference to the Venture Leaders Mobile: applications are open until 20 November for a business development trip to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and other exclusive events in the area.

Have a good weekend
Stefan Kyora

Editor in Chief, Startupticker.ch