Two years after its launch by Innovaud, the Scale Up Vaud initiative is growing steadily, just as the 21 companies based in the Canton of Vaud that are part of it. In 2017 alone, almost 200 jobs were created in Switzerland , which represents a 23% growth in one year. The best «job-creators» are Pix4D and Flyability.
Once a start-up passed the early stages passed, entrepreneurs face totally new challenges: for example, how to manage the strong growth of the company in Switzerland and abroad, find the right staff, promote the technology and deliver every product or service on time to a growing amount of customers?
It is in order to support these companies, which are not really startups anymore due to their growth and age, that Innovaud created the Scale Up Vaud label in 2016. Other important criteria: companies have to generate 20% of new jobs in average every year to obtain the label.
Today, 21 companies active in all innovation domains form the Scale Up Vaud community. The biggest scale-ups are: Nexthink (Software, 265 employees worldwide), Sophia Genetics (Digital health, 155 employees), senseFly (Drones, 125 employees) and Pix4D (Software, 122 employees). The best «job-creators» in 2017 were Flyability (35 new jobs) and Pix4D (25 new jobs). The complete list of the scale-ups including key figures can be found on the Scale Up Vaud website.
For Jurgi Camblong, CEO of the leading data-driven medicine company and scale-up Sophia Genetics, “Innovaud played a key role in our development since our start. We now carry the label Scale Up Vaud. Such support helped us make our technology available to clinicians, which empowers them to better and faster diagnose their patients. As of today, Sophia Genetics is deployed in 58 countries worldwide and is helping to diagnose 1 patient every 5 minutes!”
For Fabrizio Lo Conte, CEO of eSMART developing intelligent and connected solutions for the real estate sector, “the Scale Up Vaud label brought us both visibility and credibility towards our customers, who are looking for innovative and reliable solutions”.
Other than their job creation strength, their success also enhances the image of Switzerland as an innovative country. “The progress of the scale-ups strengthens the positioning of the Canton of Vaud as an innovation hub; for example, in the autonomous vehicles’ domain with BestMile”, explains Patrick Barbey, Director of Innovaud. “For these entrereneurs, the label is also a recognition for all the efforts accomplished so far”.
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