Swisscom Startup Challenge: Affiliate your startup with Silicon Valley

Swisscom is organising a week-long business development trip for start-ups that want to challenge their business model in global context and are not afraid to do so in the most vibrant and most competitive tech ecosystem on this planet, Silicon Valley. The trip to Silicon Valley is a one-time experience for start-ups. It will enable them to further develop and expand their networks.

Together with Swisscom’s support, start-ups will be able to identify their crucial needs such as looking for potential customers, the need to explore their chances for a venture investment or meet with industry experts in their respective field. Swisscom will thus use these aspects as basis to organise individual meetings for each of the winning start-ups. The quality and diversity of the meetings make the trip unique. 

“The week with Swisscom was the perfect introduction to the Valley. We got to meet many investors, experts and potential partners. I would suggest this trip to any start-up.” Lea von Bidder, co-founder Ava Women, winner Swisscom StartUp Challenge 2015. A longer interview with Lea von Bidder will be published soon on the Swisscom ICT blog. You can already read there another interview with Igor Ivanov, CFO at Gamaya, another winner of the Startup Challenge 2015. 

Swisscom has the potential to shape startups to their desired level during the one-week trip in Silicon Valley as it has a unique and long-standing relation with Silicon Valley’s community. For instance, for over 15 years it has had people on the ground in their Silicon Valley outpost to scout for innovation and to identify trends, Swisscom Ventures has been an active investor in Silicon Valley start-ups such as Matrixx, Plumgrid or Quantenna and Swisscom developed some of its latest solutions in their cloud labs in Menlo Park.

Eligible to apply
Start-ups in seed stage until around Series B that have a highly scalable business model that want to challenge their business modal in a global context may apply for this program. These may be from any of the field of: IT & Telecommunications, Internet of Things, Big Data and Fintech.

50 million for the winners
Results of previous trips have been successful. Last year alone Swisscom organised 60 individual meetings and 2-3 pitching opportunities to Venture capitalists during the one-week trip. Also since this program was offered some of the winning start-ups have received over CHF 50 million from Swisscom Ventures and other investors. Swisscom Ventures has in particular invested in Ava, Crowd, Geosatocs and Actlight. Moreover, 27 out of the 30 previous winners are still in business.

(RAN)