Microsoft Switzerland's 2022 Startup of the Year Award goes to Decentriq

In just three years, Decentriq has become a leading provider of an enterprise solution, catering to the growing demand for a high level of data protection in a wide range of sectors. The company’s solution is the only data clean room that combines technologies such as Confidential Computing, Synthetic Data, and Differential Privacy to push the boundary on what is possible in security and flexibility. The platform enables companies to collaborate with external partners on sensitive datasets while enabling trust and privacy. The startup benefits from the Azure Confidential Computing solution from Microsoft datacenters in Switzerland.

Companies in highly regulated fields, including the pharma industry, collaborate with Decentriq. Most recently, the startup and pharma giant Roche joined forces to explore how to enable new and exciting opportunities for healthcare data collaboration based on Decentriq’s data clean rooms. More organisations, including the Swiss Military, rely on Decentriq as customers. With the end of the use of third-party cookies data clean rooms are becoming part of the ad tech ecosystem. They play an important role when it comes to first-party data collaborations between brands, media owners and other players and first companies start to use data clean rooms here.

In an era where data protection has become paramount, Decentriq has engineered a solution that will help organisations make their data secure. This potential is also acknowledged by Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella in his keynote speech during the Inspire 2022 event, the company’s annual conference for partners worldwide.

Microsoft Startup of the Year Award
Decentriq, led by Maximillian Groth (CEO) with a team of 30 employees, has been part of the Microsoft for Startups Program since its founding. The program offers up to $150,000 in Microsoft Azure credits, development and productivity tools and mentorship from technical and business leaders.

During the Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards ceremony, Decentriq emerged as the winner of the category “Swiss Startup of the Year”. The award recognises an outstanding startup from the Microsoft for Startup program, which achieved remarkable growth in the past 12 months. The selection process was based on four main criteria: innovation and adoption of the solution, how startups use Microsoft technology, how they collaborate with Microsoft as a partner and a self-declaring statement of why they should win the award.

“After years of successfully working together with Microsoft, we are extremely proud of this recognition. We are very much looking forward to the roads ahead shaping the SaaS (Switzerland-as-a-Service) industry. Thanks to Azure Confidential Compute’s general availability client demand across multiple industries and regions can be fulfilled”, said Groth.

Runner-ups focus on patient monitoring and data extraction
Out of 32 startups from Biotech over Fintech to Climatetech that applied for the award, the jury selected three finalists. Besides Decentriq, the runner-ups are Qumea, the Solothurn-based startup providing an advanced and comprehensive system for fall prevention and mobility monitoring in care institutions, and Acodis, provider of an Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) platform for automated data extraction from business documents. Based in Winterthur, Acodis employs 32 people.

(RAN)