Much more than life sciences

Dear reader

In Switzerland, life sciences start-ups in particular provide spectacular headlines. But the scene has become broader and this week we report on the achievements of lifestyle, IT and microtechnology companies.

One successful company is FashionVestis, a premium fashion platform for style-conscious women launched in 2012. This week, the company completed a financing round and can now continue its growth.

Securosys has also completed a financing round. Founded by a Silicon Valley veteran in Zurich, it has developed a Hardware Security Module (HSM) used to generate truly random encryption keys and passwords and store them securely; it also signs and authenticates transactions and messages. Securosys joins the ranks of other security start-ups that benefit from being under Swiss jurisdiction.

Battery Doctor has funded itself by a lightning start in terms of sales. The company provides free mobile charging stations at high-frequency locations, such as shopping centres, restaurants and gyms, and has financed its business through advertising. The first station was set up in April; now the start-up has completed 200 location contracts and recorded more than CHF100,000 in sales.

For Morphotonix, the prospects in terms of sales are good too, as the EPFL spin-off’s technology has been introduced by the speciality chemicals group Clariant. Clariant and Morphotonix are talking about future further collaboration. And Bay31 has engineered an exit: the Zug IT company has been taken over by US company Curion.

Bay31 was awarded the CTI Start-up Label last year. And the message of the week on the supporters’ side comes from the CTI: the Federal Council has appointed Annalise Eggimann as the new Managing Director.

I would like to highlight the Arkathon Valais, which will be held again at TechnoArk Sierre on the weekend of 5-7 June. The idea is to bring together health professionals, software developers and designers around practical digital healthcare projects. Innovaud and CVCI are organising an event on June 5 about crowd funding and crowd investing.

The Swiss Economic Forum takes place in Interlaken on 4 and 5 June. My colleague Claus Niedermann will be on hand.

Finally, some information on important deadlines: Swiss ICT Award (31 May), venture leaders China (8 June).

Have a sunny weekend
Stefan Kyora

Managing Editor, startupticker.ch