The trend started slowly and unobtrusively, but this week it became obvious: more and more Swiss start-ups rely on external growth through acquisition.
Dear reader
In recent years, the number of start-ups acquiring other companies has slowly increased and it has now become part of everyday life. This week we reported on several acquisitions: Unique, the sales intelligence company founded by serial entrepreneurs Manuel Grenacher and Andreas Hauri, has taken over a start-up in Germany, Proton has acquired a company in Paris, and South Pole has bought four companies around the globe in recent months. External growth is driven by correspondingly large financing rounds; for example, South Pole announced this week that Swisscom had joined as investor and partner, while Unique doubled its seed round to USD 12 million.
The trend towards external growth is likely to continue if large sums keep going into Swiss start-ups; for instance, HR tech company beqom has generated USD 300 million and biotech start-up CDR-Life USD 76 million. In Basel, Versant Ventures and the university teamed up again to launch a spin-off, Cimeio Therapeutics, which has started with a commitment of USD 50 million from Versant. This means that Swiss start-ups generated significantly more than USD 1 billion in the first half of April alone.
There was also news on the exits side. Edtech company Coorpacademy went to Go1, one of the world’s largest corporate education content hubs based in San Francisco, and Climate-tech company Nispera has been acquired by Fluence, an energy storage company founded in 2018 by Siemens and US utility AES.
Looking ahead, the deadline for the Startup Days pitching battle is 22 April: 600 participants have already registered for the event on 19 May in Bern. The programme includes numerous panels; the startupticker panel will revolve around the question of how to successfully build, scale and ultimately sell a platform in Switzerland.
The next application date for biotech accelerator BaseLaunch is 25 April and registration for First Ventures, which supports members of universities of applied sciences with implementation of an innovative business idea, is open until 1 May.
Have a happy Easter and sunny spring weekend.
Stefan Kyora
Editor in Chief, Startupticker.ch
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