“Kick Ass Globally”: Inside Project Switzerland’s First Community Gathering

On April 30, 2026, the country’s most accomplished tech founders and the ten Scale-ups selected for the inaugural Project Switzerland cohort sat down together for the first time. The setting was ON Labs in Zurich. The format was deliberately not a conference. One hundred and five days after the public launch of the initiative, Deep Tech Nation Switzerland’s flagship Scale-up program shifted from architecture to motion.

The Room Answered in Red Marker

A whiteboard aggregates the answer to one question: Why is Project Switzerland needed? The answers, written by the Role Models as they introduced themselves, became the most honest articulation of the program’s purpose to date.

Among them: keep Swiss success stories in CH. Make entrepreneurship omnipresent. Create a new PayPal mafia. The founder journey is lonely. Write a Swiss playbook for scaling. Make Switzerland visible as a tech nation. Giving back is needed. No female tech CEOs. Not only dreams but execute.

Each line carries weight on its own. Read together, they describe a country that produces world-class technology and then routinely loses control of the companies that commercialize it. The “PayPal mafia” reference points to what is missing: a tightly networked generation of operators who reinvest expertise, capital, and talent into the next generation. The closing entry on the board, not only dreams but execute, set the contract for the evening.

The Setting: A Proof Point in the Room

The choice of ON Labs as venue was not incidental. On grew from a Swiss running brand into a global publicly listed company with operations spanning Zurich, New York, Shanghai, and beyond. It is the kind of trajectory Project Switzerland was built to multiply.

Christoph Aeschlimann, CEO of Swisscom and Chairman of the DTN, opened the evening alongside DTN CEO Joanne Sieber. Swisscom co-founded the Foundation with UBS in 2024, and the active engagement of the founding partner’s CEO underlines the institutional weight behind the program.

Three Lessons from Caspar Coppetti

The keynote slot was held by Caspar Coppetti, co-founder of On. He delivered three lessons on scaling, drawn from building one of the most successful Swiss companies of the last two decades.

1- Dream big. Then roll back the future to today to know your first step toward the big dream.

The framing matters. Switzerland’s culture of precision and modesty produces excellent companies, but rarely the kind of audacity that builds global category leaders. Coppetti’s point was not to dream for its own sake, but to use the dream as a navigation tool: define the destination, then work backward to identify the next concrete step.

2- Build a strong team of leaders and make yourself redundant so you can focus on the next big building block of your business.

The hardest job at the scaling stage is the one founders are least prepared for: replacing themselves. Coppetti described the discipline of disrupting one’s own team every twelve to eighteen months, bringing in stronger operators from outside, and accepting that the founder who built the product is rarely the founder who can scale the company that sells it.

3- Focus on your growth, not your investors’ returns

The bluntest of the three. Swiss deep tech founders often raise too little, structure too cautiously, and try to fail small. Coppetti’s argument was that under-capitalization is itself the failure mode. Investors run portfolios. They expect some companies to fail. The job of the founder is to swing for the dream, not to protect the cap table.

These three lessons reframed the room. The cohort was not there to be told what scaling looks like in theory. They were there to learn from someone who has done it, and who set the bar at a level higher than most of them had been allowed to consider.

The Room: 18 Role Models, 10 Scale-ups

Around the keynote sat the country’s most accomplished operators and the ten companies selected to learn from them. The Role Models present included serial entrepreneurs and unicorn founders such as Bettina Hein, Cristian Grossmann of Beekeeper, Tobias Rein of GetYourGuide, Samuel Müller of Scandit, Vincent Bieri of Nexthink, Dorian Selz of Squirro, Kevin Sartori of Auterion, Déborah Heintze of Lunaphore, and Sandra Tobler of Futurae, who joined as a Role Model alongside her cohort participation.

The 2026 Scale-up cohort was represented by its CEOs: Armin Koller of KEMARO, Armon Bättig of Ledgy, Cyrill Gyger of QUMEA, Johannes Tiefenthaler of Neustark, Laurent Coulot of Insolight, Michael Waldner of Pexapark, Nicolas Weber of Voltiris, Remco van Erp of Corintis, Sami Arpa of Largo, and Sandra Tobler (Board and Co-Founder) for Futurae.

The cohort enters the program with serious traction. Combined funding raised stands at CHF 270.2 million. Combined headcount is approximately 550. Combined 2025 revenue is CHF 56.6 million, growing at an average year-on-year rate of 133%. These are not early-stage bets. They are companies at the inflection point where good decisions compound and bad ones become irreversible.

Experience Sharing at Eye Level

The format itself was the second piece of the message. There were three rotating dinner rounds, each twenty-five minutes, with curated pairings designed to put each Scale-up across a different combination of Role Models over the evening. Conversation prompts sat on the menus. A whiteboard at the entrance also captured what the Role Models said they expected from the format: good discussion. Curiosity. Give back and share experience. Everyone needs to be a Role Model, even Scale-ups. Exchange on eye level. Get one step closer to closing the founding gap. Kick ass globally.

The contract is two-way. Scale-ups bring real challenges, not curated narratives. Role Models bring lived experience, not theoretical frameworks. The setting is closed by design, which is the only way to get the candid exchange the program was built to produce. Kick ass globally was the line that closed the green column on the whiteboard. It is also the standard the cohort has now been measured against.

What This Kicks Off

The community gathering is the visible part of a program that runs largely behind closed doors. Each Role Model commits two hours per month directly to Scale-ups in the cohort. Five peer sessions over the year address the specific scaling challenges the founders identify. A second community gathering will close the cycle later in 2026. Between now and then, the work happens in calendars, on calls, and in the operational decisions Scale-ups make with sharper inputs than they had before April 30. Interested parties can learn more about the program at Startup-Days on May 21.

The Community Gathering was just the beginning. Now, the one-to-one exchanges between Role Models and scale-ups are starting. They are working together on high-priority topics for each scale-up.

Michael Sauter, responsible for Project Switzerland at Deep Tech Nation Switzerland

For the ecosystem, the gathering closed a loop that opened on January 15 with the public launch and continued with the cohort announcement on March 31. The program is now operational. The next test is not symbolic. It is whether ten companies, with combined revenue slightly beneath CHF 60 million today, build the foundations to compete with global category leaders within the decade.

From Inventors to Scalers

Switzerland has long been described as a nation of inventors. The Project Switzerland thesis is that the next chapter requires a nation of scalers. On April 30, eighteen of the country’s most accomplished founders sat down with ten of its most ambitious Scale-up CEOs and made that thesis concrete in a single room. The whiteboard captured the gap. Caspar Coppetti’s three lessons gave the cohort a higher bar to aim for. The format ensured the exchange happened at eye level rather than from a stage.

The cohort accepted the bar. The Role Models committed the time. The ecosystem partners aligned behind the mission. Now ten companies have twelve months to turn Swiss invention into Swiss industrial weight, and Project Switzerland has the operational foundation to do this again, every year, with a new cohort, until Switzerland’s bench of operators is as deep as its bench of inventors.