Insights about the Swiss and European tech ecosystem

For the third time Atomico, one of Europe’s leading VCs, has published the “State of European Tech“ report. It aims to be the most comprehensive and data-driven portrait of Europe’s technology ecosystem. Atomico has teamed up with several data partners such as LinkedIn, Stack Overflow, Meetup, Dealroom.co, the London Stock Exchange, European Startup Initiative, Signal and Invest Europe to be able to give a comprehensive overview. Apart from existing data, Atomico carried out a survey and received over 3,500 responses - including over 1,000 European founders from across the continent.

The report covers a broad range of topics. One very interesting chapter reports about Europe’s tech workforce and provides data for different European countries including Switzerland. According to the report, Switzerland performs quite well regarding the availability of talents. The study includes statistics with the number of professional IT developers by country. In 2017 Switzerland had almost 150’000 professional developers. This puts Switzerland eleventh in Europe behind countries such as Netherlands and Sweden but ahead of Denmark, Austria, Finland or Ireland.

Another encouraging statistics show that Switzerland has one of the fastest growing tech worker populations in Europe. In 2017 this population grew by 4%. In this regard Switzerland ranks fourth. Only the tech populations of Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany are growing faster. Another statistics prove that talent is an important factor of a start-up ecosystem. Regarding to the survey among European founders access to talent is by far the most important factor influencing founder location choices.    

Top 5 fastest growing tech worker populations of 2017 (% growth YoY). Source: LinkedIn / State of European Tech

Another very interesting result of the survey shows the image of the Swiss tech ecosystem in Europe. Asked which European countries are the best placed to capture certain opportunities in several deep tech field Switzerland was mentioned by the respondents three times. The think Switzerland is particularly well positioned regarding crypto / blockchain, genomics and quantum computing. It is also remarkable that Switzerland made it three times to the top three in this list whereas for example France is only mentioned twice. This result illustrates the strength of Switzerland regarding deep tech. 

Most cited responses for question: which European country do you think is best placed to capture this opportunity? Source: The State of European Tech Survey 2017.