For the first time, Switzerland’s scale-ups have been counted company by company. The Swiss Scale-Up Report 2026, published on September 16, 2026 by Deep Tech Nation Switzerland, Swisscom Ventures, SIX Swiss Exchange and startupticker.ch, identifies 265 Swiss scale-ups with a combined valuation of CHF 26.6 billion. They come out of laboratories, sell worldwide and keep their headquarters in Switzerland. The capital that carries them to scale increasingly comes from abroad.

A New Layer of the Economy, Counted for the First Time

Every conversation about the Swiss startup ecosystem now ends at the growth stage, where policy has had the least data to work with. The report works with three nested populations: 75 scale-ups surveyed in depth between May and July 2026, 265 identified by name in the startupticker.ch database, and an estimated 400 to 500 nationwide.

Zurich alone hosts 89 of the 265 identified scale-ups, followed by Vaud, Zug, Basel-Stadt and Geneva; these five cantons hold 85% of the population. Life Sciences leads the vertical mix at 41%, and almost half of the companies were founded between 2016 and 2020.

Born in the Lab, Jobs at Home

The academic engine is visible across the population: 115 of the 265 identified scale-ups (43%) are spin-offs, with ETH Zurich and EPFL accounting for 42 and 41 institutional links respectively. Among the 75 surveyed companies, nearly nine in ten employ at least one PhD holder, 61% own patents, and seven in ten have more than a quarter of their staff in R&D. Together they account for roughly 2,700 R&D positions, about 4.5% of all private-sector research employment in Switzerland (Federal Statistical Office, reference year 2023). Extrapolated to the full population, the figure reaches 14,000 to 18,000, an upper bound that still shows a few hundred companies carrying a research share out of proportion to their number.

These companies do not offshore. 71% keep most of their workforce in Switzerland, and even among those with 100 or more employees, 13 of 19 employ the majority of their people here. In more than half of the surveyed companies, non-Swiss citizens form the majority of the team. “For technical roles, Zurich was a great advantage,” says Péter Fankhauser, co-founder and CEO of the ETH Zurich spin-off ANYbotics. “The harder roles were in commercial, marketing, product management, and people functions.” Deep tech companies report a recruiting challenge far less often than the rest of the cohort (16% against 44%).

Global by Design

Three in four surveyed companies (57 of 75) earn most of their revenue outside Switzerland, and 79% operate at least one foreign entity, almost always to reach customers rather than to leave. Of the twelve companies with no European revenue, not one has reached CHF 10 million in sales. The commercial performance justifies the label: 49% grew faster than 50% year over year, and 23% more than doubled. 60% still run below break-even, a reinvestment choice in a venture-backed cohort rather than a sign of distress.

The report’s case studies show how that is built. Scandit grew from a Zurich startup into a computer-vision company of more than 400 employees by pursuing North America early: entering the US took no more effort than building the Swiss market, for a vastly larger customer base. Flyability, the EPFL spin-off, sells its inspection drones into 68 countries and opened its first foreign office in Denver only after it was already selling into more than 50 markets; its US customers Cargill, Chevron and Dow later became investors. Nexthink scaled to unicorn status with its entire executive team in Lausanne, where its product core still sits.

“We never chose between local and global. The core stayed in Lausanne because that is where the culture and the values were built. But the global mindset had to be there from day one. You can innovate locally and start locally. You never scale locally.”

Vincent Bieri, Co-Founder, Nexthink

The Companies Have Scaled. The Investors Have Not.

Since 2012, the identified scale-ups have raised more than CHF 13 billion across 348 later-stage rounds, after a median of 5.6 years from founding to a first later-stage round. The money increasingly comes from abroad. Swiss investors provided 27% of attributed later-stage capital in 2019 to 2022 and 13% in 2025; they kept pace with the market until 2022, and since then foreign capital has recovered faster. The Swiss Deep Tech Report 2026 finds the same dependence at the top end, where foreign investors supply 88% of deep tech capital in rounds of USD 100 million and above.

Foreign capital is an asset: it makes large rounds possible and opens markets. The concern is the limited Swiss participation alongside it, since investment decides who benefits when companies increase in value. Alexander Schläpfer, Managing Partner at Swisscom Ventures, puts it in one line: “The companies have scaled. The investors have not.” Switzerland lacks growth-stage funds able to lead CHF 50 to 100 million rounds. Emile de Rijk, co-founder and CEO of the EPFL spin-off SWISSto12, reaches the same diagnosis: “Switzerland is one of the countries in the world that invests most in innovation, but frequently loses on the opportunity to collect financial returns on those investments.”

Two-thirds of surveyed founders expect an exit within five years. 79% would consider a foreign acquirer and 41% an IPO abroad, against 39% for a Swiss acquirer and 27% for a SIX listing. The Swiss route stays open where the cap table is Swiss: among companies with at least one third Swiss investors, 49% are open to a Swiss acquisition and 33% to a SIX listing; among the rest, both fall to 13%. What begins as a financing gap ends up as an ownership question.

Founders Ask for Execution, Not Subsidy

Asked which reforms would help them most, founders put domestic growth capital first. 73% name easier pension-fund investment in startups and venture funds, rising to 93% among companies citing growth capital as a top challenge. Standardized employee equity follows at 61%, and 84% among companies with 100 or more employees. Faster work permits (48%) and stamp-duty abolition (44%) complete the top four.

None of the four is new. All sit in the Startup-Agenda Switzerland adopted by the Swiss Startup Association and eighteen partners in February 2026. The legal room for pension funds to invest in unlisted Swiss companies has existed since 2022, and the Swiss VC Fund Return Study puts Swiss venture returns on par with the European benchmark. Andy Yen, founder and CEO of Proton: “For scale-ups, employee equity is not a perk; it is how we compete for talent against larger companies with much deeper pockets.” What remains is execution.

“The next generation of Swiss scale-ups will be born in the lab and raised in the market. These companies will not wait to be discovered. They will follow the market, recruit globally, and raise capital wherever they are truly understood. Switzerland’s urgent task is to cultivate that understanding at home.”

Prof. Edouard Bugnion, Vice President for Innovation and Impact, EPFL

A Decision, Not a Diagnosis

Switzerland has led the European Innovation Scoreboard for nine consecutive years. The Swiss Scale-Up Report 2026 shows what that leadership has produced at the growth stage: a few hundred companies, most of them deep tech, that keep their engineering at home and sell to the world. The open question is financial: how much of the value they create will be held and reinvested in Switzerland.

The report does not describe an exodus: two-thirds of surveyed founders have never seriously considered relocating. What it describes is more subtle, returns on Swiss science moving elsewhere, one round or one exit at a time. Sonar, founded in Geneva in 2008, went eight years without outside capital, became a unicorn several times over and is still headquartered there; co-founder Olivier Gaudin calls patience a strategy and asks that the next generation be given the same choice. Whether Switzerland carries its scale-ups to maturity is a decision, not a diagnosis. The founders have said what it takes.