Top 10 Most Valuable Unicorns in Switzerland 2022
Switzerland is a global leader in invention and home to some of the world’s most powerful multinational corporations and notable unicorns. The country is regarded to be one of the most desirable places to live. Switzerland is one of the world’s wealthiest countries, with financial services and a pharmaceuticals-driven economy. The broad spectrum of successful startups in Switzerland shows the country’s friendly business environment.
There’s no denying that Switzerland’s startup scene is extremely unique. Over the years, the country has produced scores of successful enterprises and unicorns. Multibillion-dollar valuations have already been attained by some of them. Switzerland is identified as the world’s 15th best country for unicorn startups. The country’s unicorn enterprises have taken an average of 14 years and 11 months to reach a valuation of $1 billion, with 12 of them now valued at over $1 billion.
Switzerland has been named the most inventive nation for the 11th year in a row by the World Intellectual Property Organization. According to their Global Innovation Index 2021 study, one of the reasons for the ranking is that Switzerland is a regional leader in invention outputs, ranking first in Knowledge and Technology outputs and second in creative outputs. Even though the COVID-19 epidemic reduced Swiss GDP, the government expects a robust economic recovery in 2022 for the Swiss economy.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with fewer than 250 employees make up the wide majority of Swiss businesses and startups (more than 99 per cent). Switzerland is even home to one of the world’s biggest concentrations of Fortune 500 companies. Both of these elements have a powerful impact on Swiss corporate culture. Meanwhile, multinational and foreign-owned corporations account for about 5% of the country, with more than 580,000 registered businesses.
Although Switzerland does not have a minimum wage, its moderate remuneration is among the highest in the world. As a result, Switzerland’s cost of living is quite expensive. The business climate in Switzerland is acknowledged as beneficial to both new and established enterprises and startups. Its central European location has made it a centre of business since the Middle Ages, and it is today the obvious choice for global companies to establish their headquarters.
Switzerland is a developing startup scene and a world leader in innovation for entrepreneurs. Because the country is home to some of the world’s most prominent colleges, attracting top talent is simple, especially in sectors like science, technology, and medicine. To create a business in Switzerland as a foreigner, however, you must be a Swiss citizen or resident or have a Swiss legal partner.
The service sector of the nation accounts for roughly 74% of Swiss GDP, while the industrial accounts for 25%. The main trading partner in Switzerland is the European Union (EU). Swiss exports were predominantly chemicals and pharmaceuticals in 2019, according to the Federal Statistics Office (44.8 per cent). Machines and electronics came in second and third, respectively (14.4 per cent). Finally, watches account for 9.1% of Switzerland’s exports.
Geneva, the country’s second-largest city, is a global financial and diplomatic powerhouse, with the World Bank, the United Nations, and the International Olympic Committee among its many international organisations. Furthermore, the country has business-friendly lawmaking, excellent infrastructure, and political stability, and non-Swiss residents can start up a business reasonably fast and easily. As a result, the country is home to a thriving tech startup sector along with a slew of pharmaceutical and biotechnology unicorns.
Credit Suisse Group, Zurich Insurance Group, and Novartis Pharmaceuticals are just a few examples of globally successful Switzerland companies. Proptech startup Hegias, which has developed a virtual reality CMS solution for the construction and property sector, DeepCode, which is represented as ‘Grammarly for developers,’ and Gamaya, which uses drone technology and analytics to help farmers improve efficiency and sustainability, are among the ones to watch.
A company must have a competent and highly qualified group on board if it is to flourish. Switzerland’s population has the second largest percentage of persons with tertiary education in Europe, making it an excellent place for attracting top talent. Swiss cantons (the term used for member states of the Swiss Confederation) share economic power, and the country has one of the highest GDPs per capita in the world. Their labour market’s durability is illustrated by its constantly low unemployment rate, which has stayed around 4% since 2000.
Switzerland has been rated as the third-best country in Europe for startups and unicorns. Germany and the United Kingdom took first and second place, respectively. Switzerland placed third, up from fourth in the last year’s research and further strengthening its standing as a desirable area to establish a business.
These are the Most Valuable Unicorns in Switzerland in 2022.
1. MindMaze
Sector- Biotechnology Research, Healthcare, Therapeutics and Virtual Reality
Products & Services- Digital Neuro-therapeutics Solutions
Founder- Tej Tadi
Date Of Starting- 2012
Geographical Range- Europe
Company Stage- Series B
Number of Investors- 11
Key Investors- FIT, MedTech Innovator Venture Kick and Hambro Perks
Funding Rounds- 10
Total Funding Amount- $ 243 Million
Valuation- $ 1.5 Billion
Switzerland-based MindMaze is an international pioneer in digital neuro-therapeutics (DTx) solutions, with the purpose to help the brain recover, learn, and adapt more quickly. The startup is a VR-based neuro-rehabilitation solution provider. A mobile neurorehabilitation system for hospitals developed for early motor rehabilitation, along with a gamified neurorehabilitation system for both hospital and home, are among the unicorn’s services. The MindMaze team, all of whom have a neuroscience background, set out to create a system that could quickly intervene in neurological rehabilitation.
Its healthcare division, which has spent more than a decade working at the intersection of neuroscience, bio-sensing, engineering, mixed reality, and artificial intelligence, is tackling some of the most difficult problems in neurology, like stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease, by developing a universal platform for brain health and recovery along with novel digital therapeutic interventions. MindMaze, the first Swiss Unicorn, was founded in 2012 by CEO Dr Tej Tadi and has headquarters in Lausanne, Baltimore, London, Paris, and Mumbai.
The FDA-cleared and CE-marked neuro-digital treatments developed by MindMaze help patients recover faster from a variety of serious neurological diseases. The unicorn is an EPFL spin-off that has revolutionised neurological treatment with a virtual reality-based technology that facilitates and accelerates the rehabilitation of CVA (stroke) victims. MindMotionPRO is a platform that combines brain sensors, cameras, and artificial images to allow patients to complete a series of exercises, oversee their motions replicated on a screen by an avatar, and rectify them. Scores are displayed, just like in a video game.
This programme is presented in two versions: one for hospitals and the other portable for clinics or at-home rehabilitation. Both variants are presently in widespread use across Europe. MindMaze employs 75 people, about 60 of whom are based in Switzerland, and has recently opened sales headquarters in Germany and the United Kingdom. The unicorn has even opted to expand to the United States, albeit just for clinical studies at this time. Except for India, where founder and CEO Tej Tadi hails from, market availability is now limited to Europe.
Hinduja, an Indian conglomerate, has funded 100 million Swiss francs in MindMaze, allowing it to exceed the billion-dollar mark and become Switzerland’s first unicorn. The original MindMaze tool was released in 2011 at the CHUV while Tadi was still completing his thesis. Tadi was named Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year in the Emerging Entrepreneur category in 2016. In 2017, the startup achieved a turnover of 15 million Swiss francs, planning to provide systems for degenerative neurological illnesses and pain management in the future, along with establishing itself in the US market.
3. Acronis
Sector- Software Development, Information Technology, Cloud Security and Cyber Security
Products & Services- Cloud Data Services
Founder- Serguei Belloussov, Yokov Zubarev and Stanislav Protassov
Date Of Starting- 2003
Geographical Range- Global
Company Stage- Series E
Number of Investors- 14
Key Investors- Insight Partners, Open View, CVC Capital Partners and Almaz Capital
Funding Rounds- 4
Total Funding Amount- $ 427 Million
Valuation- $ 2.5 Billion
Based in Switzerland, Acronis offers service provider and IT professional deployment options for antivirus, backup, disaster recovery, endpoint protection management, and award-winning AI-based antimalware and blockchain-based data authentication technologies. In any setting, these solutions safeguard data, applications, and systems. Acronis endpoint solutions are meant to help businesses create a safe digital environment by providing all-encompassing protection.
Data security and cybersecurity are combined by Acronis to offer cyber protection that addresses SAPAS issues (safety, access, privacy, authenticity, and security). For organisations, corporations, and consumers of all qualifications, the unicorn company offers disaster recovery, backup and restore, partitioning, boot management, privacy, data migration, and other storage management tools. Acronis has offices in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and its products are sold through retail stores, resellers, and the Internet.
Over 5.5 million home users and 500,000 businesses, including 100 per cent of the Fortune 1,000, trust Acronis, which was founded in 2003 and incorporated in Switzerland in 2008. Acronis products are offered in over 150 countries and 40 languages through 50,000 partners and service providers. The company shifted its focus from disc partitioning and boot loader software to disc imaging-based backup and disaster recovery software after its initial launch.
SWsoft teamed up with Acronis in 2006 to market Acronis True Image Server as part of the SWsoft Plesk 8.1 control panel software. The programme is self-contained and compatible with various control panels, allowing service providers to include backup and recovery features in dedicated hosting plans. In 2014, Acronis was named Mobility Product of the Year at the Network Computing Awards. BackupAgent, a cloud backup startup, and nScaled, a disaster recovery software company, were bought by Acronis in 2014.
Acronis International or simply Acronis is a global technology business headquartered in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, and with a global headquarters in Singapore. Acronis creates on-premises and cloud software that combines backup, disaster recovery, cybersecurity, and endpoint management uniquely. Acronis has 18 offices across the world. Acronis Labs, the company’s research and development division, is situated in Bulgaria, the United States, and Singapore. The unicorn startup has 37 cloud data centres worldwide, including in the United States, France, Singapore, Japan, and Germany.
The startup offers cloud-based endpoint management and data backup solutions for businesses. Acronis purchased GroupLogic, Inc. in September 2012, allowing the company to connect mobile devices, including Apple, into enterprise environments through the purchase of software that became Acronis Access Advanced. The unicorns’ data protection on mobile devices was boosted as a result of the acquisition. Acronis’ customer base was given to GroupLogic.
Acronis began as a spinoff from virtualization software business Parallels, offering data recovery and backup solutions. Since then, the company has evolved to offer an all-in-one bundle of services that includes continuous data protection, patch management, anti-malware protection, and more. Through 50,000 partners and service providers in over 150 countries and forty languages, Acronis has offered products to over 5.5 million home users and 500,000 businesses.
Acronis was also named Best Backup and Disaster Recovery Vendor by ChannelPro Readers in 2015. Acronis, based in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, is a cybersecurity and data protection company. Through service provider and IT professional deployment models, the firm offers antivirus, backup, disaster recovery, endpoint protection management solutions, AI-based antimalware, and blockchain-based data authentication technologies. Acronis provides software for service providers, enterprises, and people.
4. Nexthink
Sector- Software, Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence, Network Security and
Products & Services- Software and Enterprise IT Management
Founders- Patrick Hertzog, Vincent Bieri and Pedro Bados
Date Of Starting- 2004
Geographical Range- Global
Company Stage- Series D
Number of Investors- 17
Key Investors- Index Ventures, Auriga, Permira and Daniel Glutenberg
Funding Rounds- 8
Total Funding Amount- $ 336 Million
Valuation- $ 1.10 Billion
Nexthink is a Lausanne, Switzerland-based private B2B IT software company. The company was created in 2004 when an artificial intelligence experiment at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne was commercialised. The startup submitted two patents in 2006, one for artificial intelligence of anomalous behaviours and the other for real-time visualisation of end-user behaviour. It creates software to manage traditional and virtual desktop environments as well as IT budgets.
Nexthink is a digital employee experience platform that is hosted in the cloud. It keeps track of the IT infrastructure and alerts users to problems, failures, crashes, and security concerns. It also records all local and network events at endpoints in real-time and converts end-user data into actionable insights. The unicorn startup offers a help desk, server monitoring, MTTR reduction, breach, and compliance management, as well as real-time analytics and visualisation tools. Western Union, Wipro, Express Scripts, PWC, and Adobe are among the company’s clientele.
Nexthink is the market leader in employee experience management software for digital employees. The company provides IT professionals with unmatched insight into employees’ daily technology interactions at the device level, allowing IT to move away from reactive problem solving and toward proactive optimization. Nexthink helps more than 1,000 customers deliver better digital experiences to over 11 million employees. The unicorn has 9 offices across the world, with dual headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland and Boston, Massachusetts.
Its software aids IT departments with real-time analytics, automation, and staff feedback, according to the company. Nexthink Experience, Nexthink’s cloud-native platform, gives businesses real-time visibility across their devices, applications, and networks. Nexthink Experience can discover technology difficulties, develop solutions, and automate the process of resolving them. Devoteam, Swisscom, Intertec Systems, Ahead, Bechtle, Econocom, and others are among Nexthink’s partners.
Nexthink’s software collects and analyses endpoint behaviour, network connectivity, and end-user feedback to automate the resolution of employee IT issues. In December 2014, Nexthink raised $14.5 million in a Series D investment headed by Auriga Partners, followed by $40 million in a Series E round led by Highland Capital Partners in April 2016. In December 2018, the unicorn raised an additional $85 million in a Series C financing headed by Index Ventures.
Nexthink is a digital workplace management software that helps companies manage end-user digital experiences more effectively. By enabling the construction of individualised ideal work environments and providing easy-to-use IT support tools, this solution aids in the promotion of corporate productivity and employee engagement.
5. Numbrs
Sector- Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Information Technology and Financial Technology
Products & Services- Cryptocurrency and Financial Services
Founders- Dennis Just, Boris Manhart, Martin Saidlerand Jahannes Huebner
Date Of Starting- 2013
Geographical Range- Switzerland and Germany
Company Stage- Series B
Number of Investors- 10
Key Investors- Investment Corporation of Dubai, Seven Ventures, Fin Venture Capital and Glenn Rock Israel
Funding Rounds- 9
Total Funding Amount- $ 230 Million
Valuation- $ 1 Billion
Cryptocurrency custodian services are provided by this Switzerland-based unicorn company. It enables users to keep their private keys private while providing great protection for their digital assets. Numbrs is a customer-centric, forward-thinking financial services startup that uses a digital solution to address some of the industry’s most pressing issues. Numbrs is a Switzerland unicorn with Swiss shareholders that adheres to Swiss privacy, neutrality, and stability standards.
Numbrs Personal Finance (formerly Centralway Numbrs) is a financial technology company in Switzerland. Numbrs, the company’s app, aggregates bank account and credit card information to make mobile banking and personal financial planning easier. Dennis Just and Johannes Hübner started the company in 2012 as part of a corporate accelerator run by Martin Saidler’s company, Centralway. The Mint app, a bank account aggregation app available in the United States at the time, was the inspiration for the company’s offering.
It aspires to promote global asset preservation for the twenty-first century by developing and providing an industry-leading, highly secure storage solution for digital currencies. The startup wants to exceed its clients’ expectations while preserving a unique business culture by consistently questioning the status quo. The unicorn startup is always on the lookout for world-class individuals with a willingness and aptitude to grow and share expertise in crypto and blockchain technology.
Even though Numbrs was formed in Switzerland and its core team now controls the unicorn from its Swiss headquarters, it is a completely remote organisation. An all-remote structure means that each team member can build their workspace in a way that best suits them, in a location that is convenient for them, resulting in an environment where the best performance can be produced. It is a corporation that operates entirely from the comfort of one’s own home.
The business debuted its app in Germany in 2014 after demonstrating it at a financial technology conference in 2013. The software could be used for mobile banking, aggregating any number of bank accounts, processing banking transactions, classifying expenditure information, and creating financial plans when it was originally released in 2014. It received four stars out of five stars in the Apple app store in November 2014.
Early in 2017, the startup secured arrangements with three German banks, Postbank, Norisbank, and SWK Bank, allowing users to evaluate the terms of various banking-related offerings and apply for an account, a loan, or a credit card straight through the app. The company had raised $125 million as of January 2017 from investors such as Saidler’s family office, which was the majority shareholder, Marcel Ospel, Sir Ronald Cohen, Josef Ackermann, Alan Howard, and the Investment Corporation of Dubai, the unicorn company also claimed that 1.5 million accounts had been entered into the app at the time.
Numbrs’ business model had been to make money by getting compensated by banking partners when users generated new business through the app, and this was the startup’s first round of such deals. Centralway was the previous name for Numbrs. Centralway was a firm builder in the financial technology sector from 2011 to early 2014. Centralway’s Zurich headquarters grew from 5 to 100 employees. Numbrs shifted its concentration to banking software development.
6. Scandit
Sector- Image Recognition, Software Development, Augmented Reality and Machine Learning
Products & Services- Barcode Scanning Software
Founders- Christian Floerkemeier, Samuel Mueller and Christof Roduner
Date Of Starting- 2009
Geographical Range- Global
Company Stage- Series D
Number of Investors- 15
Key Investors- GV, Atomico, Warburg Pincus and NGP Capital
Funding Rounds- 8
Total Funding Amount- $ 273 Million
Valuation- $ 1 Billion
Scandit is a mobile computer vision and augmented reality (AR) technology platform for businesses based out of Switzerland. The company’s software can read barcodes, detect text and objects, and show real-time information as AR overlays on any app on any camera-equipped smart device, from smartphones to wearables to drones and robots. It assists customers and employees in finding items on store shelves using their smartphones, and as things get more contactless, its services will become more important.
App-based programme for scanning barcodes, text, IDs and other items is provided. With its mobile app, sellers may scan product barcodes and pay with their smartphones. Customer involvement, order management, marketing tools, and other capabilities are included. A cloud-based enterprise mobility and data capture platform based on proprietary computer vision, augmented reality, and machine learning technologies is also available. It offers APIs and SDKs for barcode scanning in a variety of industries, including retail, manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and more.
This unicorn startup is a technology platform that provides users with smart data capture and barcode scanning software. It is the market leader in smart data capture, providing actionable insights and automating end-to-end operations for workers, customers, and enterprises. Smart devices, such as smartphones, drones, digital eyewear, and robots, can interact with physical products using its Smart Data Capture platform, which captures data from barcodes, text, IDs, and objects with unrivalled speed, precision, and intelligence.
Scandit powers apps like mobile shopping, self-checkout, inventory management, proof of delivery, and asset tracking for companies in retail, transportation, logistics, and manufacturing. It enables innovation that reduces costs, boosts employee retention, and improves consumer loyalty. It works with customers at every stage of the process, including trials, solution design, integration, and customer success.
It scans up to 3 times faster than specialised scanners in difficult light or at angles, on damaged labels, and across multiple codes on any smart device. It is trusted by industry leaders in retail, transportation and logistics, healthcare, and manufacturing, including Instacart, Levi’s Strauss, Sephora, NHS, and FedEx. The system is interactive and makes searching for reserved products easier.
The unicorn’s solutions aren’t limited to software for computers, smartphones, and tablets, it also works with augmented reality glasses, drones, logistics-management robots, and even fixed cameras. Visual data is given as an alternative to management systems based on Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID). Customers, sales associates, and logistics personnel can use the company’s technologies to search for products by scanning different barcodes and labels, with the results being indicated by augmented reality.
Sephora, Louis Vuitton, Macy’s, Nike, and Clarks are among the companies that employ Scandit’s technology. The Swiss company that specialises in exploiting barcodes to create augmented reality applications for purchasing and administration has announced a $30 million (€25.7 million) funding round. The cash will be used to speed the startup’s international expansion and to build new camera-equipped laptops and mobile devices. GV led the second round, which featured new investors like NGP Capital and return investors like Atomico.
This new round of funding will not only allow the company to continue its quick expansion, but will also pave the way for the global adoption of computer-assisted vision, mobility, and augmented reality in the workplace, which will streamline operations and reduce costs. Scandit solutions reduce operational costs and time while also improving employee and customer satisfaction. 7-Eleven, Alaska Airlines, Carrefour, Hermes, Johns Hopkins Hospital, La Poste, Levi Strauss & Co, Mount Sinai Hospital, Sephora, and Toyota are among the companies that have worked with this unicorn.
7. Sophia Genetics
Sector- Artificial Intelligence, Biotechnology, Analytics and Bioinformatics
Products & Services- Radiomic and Genomic Analysis
Founder- Jurgi Camblong
Date Of Starting- 2011
Geographical Range- Global
Company Stage- Public
Number of Investors- 23
Key Investors- 360 Capital Partners, Credit Suisse, Venture Lab and Balderton Capital
Funding Rounds- 7
Total Funding Amount- $ 249 Million
Valuation- $ 1.1 Billion
Sophia Genetics (stylized as SOPHiA GENETICS) is a biotechnology business based in Saint-Sulpice, Switzerland, and Boston, Massachusetts. It started as a research tool for hospitals and federally controlled health care labs, then grew to include biopharmaceutical companies. For hospitals, laboratories, and biopharmaceutical companies, it delivers genomic and radiomic analyses. In 2017, the MIT Technology Review named the company one of the top 50 smartest companies in the world. In 2021, the startup went public on the Nasdaq, with a market capitalization of $1.1 billion.
This unicorn is a provider of a bioinformatics platform for genomic analysis based on artificial intelligence. The platform processes and analyses genomic data from patient DNA sequence data obtained by the NGS platform using machine learning methods. In addition, the company certifies genetic tests and provides services to hospitals and laboratories. The portal gives users access to information about disease diagnostics and precision medicine. Radiomics, for example, helps with precision medicine diagnostics and medical imaging for cancer illness identification.
Sophia DDM, its other product, has tools for data organising, medication development, and domain modelling. The technology was created to assist hospitals in processing and storing enormous genetic data sets, but studies revealed that data accuracy was a more serious issue. That became the platform’s main focus after that. The unicorn startup combines extensive knowledge of biological sciences and medical fields with advanced data computing capabilities. Oncology, hereditary malignancies, metabolic diseases, paediatrics, cardiology, and rare illness studies all are available on the platform.
Its goal is to help healthcare professionals by bringing data analytics solutions to market and utilising the power of Data-Driven Medicine. This aim is accomplished by the widespread deployment of Sophia AI, which is constructed utilising statistical inference, pattern recognition, and machine learning approaches. This allows Sophia to give equitable benefits to all users, bring specialists together in a gold-standard health-tech platform, and encourage expert knowledge sharing for long-term patient impact. All collaborating institutions have access to the platform’s insights.
The unicorn wishes to contribute to the long-term viability of the global healthcare system. It is convinced that digital technologies are the key to unlocking the Data-Driven Medicine future, in which safe data pooling and knowledge exchange will be tremendously beneficial to patients. Patients all across the world can benefit from better diagnoses and treatments by assisting healthcare professionals in leveraging their expertise and collaborating as a community. It assures that the data used to aid patients today will also benefit patients’ future by combining the first two pillars of Data-Driven Medicine, Genomics and Radiomics.
In September 2017, the unicorn launched the Sophia DDM Platform (Data-Driven Medicine), an analytical software platform that aids in the interpretation of circulating tumour DNA and circulating tumour cells in the blood, cerebrospinal fluid, and other liquid samples. The Sophia DDM Platform is a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service that provides genomic insights to doctors and researchers from complicated multimodal datasets using machine learning and AI algorithms. As the user base grows, the AI becomes smarter and more accurate as more data is sent to it.
The company collaborated with hospitals to benchmark DNA samples evaluated through their sequencing methods and then developed their algorithms to automate the diagnosis process and discover key patterns in the genome data. The algorithms were created from the ground up using raw FASTQ data. The startup raised $110 million in a Series F round of fundraising in October 2020. The financing was led by aMoon, an Israeli health-tech and life sciences venture fund, and Hitachi Ventures, the Japanese Hitachi Group’s venture arm.
Sophia Genetics went public in 2021, trading on the Nasdaq under the symbol SOPH. J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Cowen, and Credit Suisse all backed the unicorn in its IPO, which garnered $234 million. It is a data-driven medicine-focused healthcare technology startup. To assist health professionals in identifying potential signs of cancer and hereditary illnesses, the business collects genomic data and uses AI and predictive analytics. It also includes a programme that uses medical pictures and clinical data to predict tumours.
8. Beekeeper
Sector- Enterprise Software, Telecommunication, Software and Saas
Products & Services- Software and Cloud Computing Services
Founders- Andreas Slotosch, Flavio Pfaffhauser, Daniel Sztutwojner and Christian Grossmann
Date Of Starting- 2012
Geographical Range- Global
Company Stage- Series B
Number of Investors- 23
Key Investors- Atomico, Swisscom, Btov and Plug and Play Tech Centre
Funding Rounds- 7
Total Funding Amount- $ 86 Million
Valuation- $ 2.3 Billion
Based in Switzerland, Beekeeper is a mobile-first communication platform that uses real-time messaging and customised streams to reach every shift, location, and language. Managers maintain frontline workers’ busy and low turnover by automating procedures and measuring engagement using an analytics dashboard. Beekeeper interfaces with operational systems, allowing them to be accessed from a single location. It is revolutionising the way frontline companies operate. Its frontline operating system enables businesses to eliminate paper and manual processes to boost employee engagement, retention, and productivity.
Andreas Slotosch, Christian Grossman, Daniel Sztutwojner, and Flavio Pfaffhauser founded Beekeeper, an information technology company based in Zurich, Switzerland, that provides an operational communications platform. Beekeeper is used by companies all across the world to connect their teams, unite their systems, and propel their organisations forward. The startup believes that employees should have direct access to the people, processes, and systems they require to perform at their best.
The unicorn is an enterprise communication platform provider for a variety of sectors. It enables users to communicate with coworkers and employees. Secure one-to-one and group messaging, private and personalised updates to individuals, content management, chatbots, information sharing, employee surveys, engagement metrics, and feedback polls are some of the features. It also has intelligent automation features like workflow-based communication and internal message campaign scheduling.
Beekeeper closed their series B funding round on September 16, 2019, with $45 million from hayer Ventures (lead investor), Swisscanto Invest by Zürcher Kantonalbank (lead investor), Atomico, Alpana Ventures, Edenred Capital Partners, Fyrfly, Hammer Team, Investiere, HighSage Ventures, Keen Venture Partners, Samsung NEXT, Swiss Post, and Swisscom. The Series B round was co-led by Thayer, a travel-focused venture capital firm, and Swisscanto, an asset manager through its growth equity fund. To date, the unicorn has raised $71 million.
The unicorn, an hourly worker communications platform, has raised an additional $45 million in funding. The Zurich-based business has clients in 26 industries, but hotel chains such as Hyatt are among its most enthusiastic early adopters. Hourly workers without desktop computers, such as housekeepers, can use the programme to stay current. Online training programmes, payroll services from firms like ADP and SAP, and other workplace tools can all be integrated with the system.
Until today, many hotels and other service businesses communicated with hourly and overnight operating workers using email or several chat groups on platforms like WhatsApp. Beekeeper standardises the process in a consumer-grade interface with a 90 per cent activation rate, and workers use the app three to five times each day on average, according to the company. Managers usually require employees to submit requests for shift shifting three days in advance. Workers may view schedule changes on their mobile devices after implementing the startup’s solution and can request shift adjustments.
Beekeeper is commonly used to keep track of shift scheduling. The company isn’t in the schedule management industry. However, Beekeeper’s staff-to-staff chat system (like Slack) integrates with task management platforms like Expedia’s Alice and Amadeus’ Service Optimization Software (previously known as HotSOS), which allow hoteliers to track assignments and talk with customers.
9. Get Your Guide
Sector- Travel and Tourism
Products & Services- Travel Agency Services
Founders- Martin Sieber, Johannes Reck, Pascal Mathis and Jochen Mattes
Date Of Starting- 2009
Geographical Range- Global
Company Stage- Series E
Number of Investors- 35
Key Investors- SVB, Battery Ventures, KKR and Highland Capital Partners
Funding Rounds- 10
Total Funding Amount- $ 789 Million
Valuation- $ 1.5 Billion
GetYourGuide is a mobile app that allows you to book outdoor tours and activities. It collects and categorises tours and activities from tour providers, including price coupons, last-minute specials, and regular packages. On the portal, travellers can search for tours by entering their travel destination and dates. It helps users to keep track of their reservations and payments. The unicorn was founded in Zurich, Switzerland. In 2012, the new company moved its headquarters to Berlin. The German capital was also one of the nascent European startup ecosystem’s main centres.
Johannes Reck and Tao Tao, co-founders of GetYourGuide, came up with the concept in 2007. When they went to Beijing for a student conference with ETH MUN, they found it challenging to navigate a new city as tourists. A business strategy for a peer-to-peer Internet platform that connected tourists with amateur guides was established based on that experience. It was later improved and expanded into an online booking platform where travellers could book professional tours and activities in major cities around the world.
It is on a mission to enable people around the world to have exceptional travel experiences. It is an online travel agency and marketplace for tour guides and excursions situated in Berlin. There is a web application and a mobile application for iOS and Android. GetYourGuide sells tickets to a variety of tourist locations, as well as tours and excursions, and activities such as culinary courses. It has over 40,000 products available all around the world.
It is the most popular platform for booking vacation experiences. It helps travellers find joy in the true, remarkable depth and character behind a pin on the global map by linking them to a destination’s top activities and attractions. This is why, since 2009, it has earned millions of people’s trust and established itself as the go-to source for exceptional experiences all around the world. By assisting visitors in discovering a destination’s top activities and attractions, its varied staff is altering the way people connect to the places they visit.
GetYourGuide announced $14 million in Series A fundraising in January 2013. The unicorn startup has raised over $883 million in funding so far and employs over 600 people in offices throughout the world, thanks to the support of renowned venture capital investors. GetYourGuide received a $484 million investment from SoftBank Group in April 2019. This inflow of cash pushed the company’s valuation beyond $1 billion, establishing it as a unicorn.
GetYourGuide’s business model dictates that it does not conduct its tours or activities, but rather serves as a middleman between clients and providers. Customers can use the service for free, but the tour provider must pay the startup a percentage of their sales. Potential clients can examine the quality of tour providers using an online customer review system. The software could extract information from over 23,000 tours and activities from 2,200 global places that were then available on GetYourGuide’s platform, showing them as a stack of thumbnails at first.
The unicorn company began selling tours under its brand name in August 2018. The company analysed client preferences based on 15 million excursions sold since its inception nearly a decade ago. It created defined standards for how to execute a tour based on that knowledge. The software may also detect the user’s location and provide related recommendations. An operator must agree to follow GetYourGuide’s best practices for meeting sites, check-in protocols, start times, duration, and other aspects to be called a GetYourGuide tour. In exchange, the merchant will direct more customers to the operator.
10. Kandou Bus
Sector- Semiconductor Manufacturing and Electronics
Products & Services- Chord Technology Solutions
Founders- Amin Shokrollahi
Date Of Starting- 2011
Geographical Range- Europe, Asia and North America
Company Stage- Series D
Number of Investors- 14
Key Investors- FIT, Bessemer Venture Partners, Kreos Capital and Walden International
Funding Rounds- 8
Total Funding Amount- $ 253 Million
Valuation- $ 1 Billion
Based in Switzerland Kandou, which was founded in 2011, is a leader in high-speed, energy-efficient chip-to-chip link technologies that are critical to the electronics industry’s future. Kandou makes the world a better place to live by providing revolutionary technology through licencing and standard goods that enable the gadgets we use every day to become smaller, more energy-efficient, and less expensive.
Kandou Bus transmits data across wired chips using a revolutionary process of spatial coding. The essential idea is to introduce correlations between the signals provided through the interface and to select the correlations wisely to reduce power consumption, increase speed, and reduce footprint. It’s a broadening of differential signalling (which sends correlated signals on two wires). Dr Shokrollahi’s lab at the Swiss Federal Technical Institute in Lausanne has spun out of the company.
Kandou is a semiconductor unicorn firm based in Lausanne, Switzerland, with locations around Europe, North America, and Asia. It creates programmable IPs that are optimised for use in in-package applications. These IPs are part of the Glasswing IP family and can be utilised in short-range multi-chip modules and data interfaces with high throughput. It is a member of the IEEE, JEDEC, and OIF industry organisations. Memory link, Backplane link, and 2.5D integration are all Kandou applications.
Kandou Bus has raised a Series A round of funding and created a product plan to address applications as diverse as high-speed networking, memory linkages, short chip-to-chip interposers, and low-power, high-speed communication across TSVs. The unicorn company is even involved in the OIF-CEI and IEEE standards organisations, where one of its technologies is being offered as a solution to many industries’ interconnect challenges.
Chord signalling has been integrated into industry specifications by JEDEC and the OIF, and Kandou has a significant IP portfolio. These advancements and implementations represent a considerable step forward in interconnect technology, lowering power consumption and improving chip link performance, encouraging new capabilities for consumer devices and systems.
To date, new and current investors have funded a total of $207.8 million in the startup. The money raised in Series D will go toward the production of Kandou’s first silicon product, the Matterhorn, a USB multiprotocol retimer solution with USB4 support for consumer and networking applications in electronic devices. The money will be further used to develop product and technology roadmaps, like new silicon devices and Chord signalling intellectual property (IP) for ultra-short and long-reach signalling applications.
Kandou Bus is a remarkable interface technology firm based in Lausanne, Switzerland, that specialises in the creation, design, licencing, and implementation of unequalled chip-to-chip link solutions. Chord technology from Kandou reduces power consumption and increases overall semiconductor performance, allowing new capabilities in electronic devices and systems.
The unicorn is reinventing wired communication with more speed and efficiency. Kandou is a visionary leader in high-speed, energy-efficient chip-to-chip link solutions to change the way the world connects and transmits. It makes the world a better place to live by providing disruptive technology in the form of licences and standard goods for smaller, more energy-efficient, and cost-effective electronic gadgets. Kandou’s IP portfolio includes Chord signalling, which has been adopted by the OIF and JEDEC standards groups.
The startup offers fundamental breakthroughs in interconnect technology that reduces power consumption and increases chip link performance, allowing customers’ devices and systems to achieve new capabilities. Kandou is a fabless semiconductor firm with operations in Europe, North America, and Asia. It was founded in 2011 and is based in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Conclusion
Doing business in Switzerland is not inexpensive. Switzerland’s relatively high cost of doing business reflects its progressive economy, high cost and high standards of living, and a concentration of a highly competent workforce, with specialists requiring greater compensation than in nations where doing business is inexpensive.
Starting a business in Switzerland may be more expensive for startup owners, but when balanced against the available benefits, it is an indisputably good choice. And, given the increased emphasis on health, welfare, and employee perks, launching a startup that is destined to succeed will necessitate a fairly important investment in human resources regardless of location.
edited and proofread by nikita sharma
