Swiss Venture Capital Steadies at $1.58 Billion in H1 2026 as Hardware Sets a Record

Swiss venture capital returned to a familiar level in the first half of 2026. Startups raised $1.58 billion (CHF 1.245 billion) across 123 financing rounds, down 15.5% from a strong first half of 2025, according to the newly published Swiss Venture Capital Report 2026 Update. The headline dip, caused by the non-repeat of 2025’s large biotech rounds, sits above a more encouraging picture: a record half-year for hardware, record seed economics, a doubling of strategic investments, and investor sentiment that improved on nearly every measure the survey tracks.

Figures are shown in US Dollars with Swiss Francs in brackets, converted at the H1 2026 average of 1 CHF = 1.27 USD. Year-over-year comparisons use the report’s original CHF figures.

A Softer Headline in Context

The decline compared with the first half of 2025 reflects what did not repeat rather than any broad weakening. Last year’s total was lifted by a cluster of large biotech rounds that did not recur in 2026, and no large AI financings emerged to fill the gap. That absence is itself instructive; the report observes that global AI investment is driven by a very small number of enormous rounds that do not take place in Switzerland or comparable countries. The mega-rounds inflating headline figures elsewhere are simply not part of the Swiss picture. The CHF 1.245 billion also sits against CHF 1.47 billion in the first half of 2025, itself the third-highest half-year on record, so this year’s comparison runs off an exceptionally high base.

What held steady matters more than the dip. The number of financing rounds barely moved, slipping from 124 to 123, which suggests the multi-year contraction in deal count has bottomed out. The composition of the top 10 points to a maturing ecosystem: this year’s largest rounds went mostly to established companies with substantial revenue, including Oviva and SWISSto12. The three largest rounds each exceeded CHF 170 million, a concentration rare by historical standards. That is a sign of depth, though it also shows that closing large rounds remains difficult and that investors are acting selectively.

Hardware Sets a Record, and Vaud With It

The standout of the half-year was hardware. Swiss hardware startups attracted more than $411 million (CHF 324 million), the most ever raised in any single half-year; the previous high, set in the second half of 2021, stood at just over CHF 200 million. The strength was broad rather than the product of one deal, with four different hardware companies among the 10 largest rounds. Zug-based terralayr, which builds and operates grid-scale battery storage, raised $226 million (CHF 178.3 million). Kandou, an EPFL spinout making energy-efficient connectivity chips for the AI era, raised $225 million (CHF 176.98 million).

This concentration in chips, energy, and space hardware underscores Switzerland’s depth in the Future of Compute and Aerial & Space sectors, where research is converting into fundable companies. It also reshaped the cantonal map. Vaud vaulted to the front on invested capital with more than $419 million (CHF 330 million), a total on par with the record years of 2021 and 2022. Of the four hardware companies that reached the half-year’s 10 largest funding rounds, three are Vaud-based, among them EPFL spinout SWISSto12, which drew $32 million (CHF 25.2 million) to industrialize its HummingSat satellite, and Lausanne’s PAVE Space, which raised an exceptionally large seed round for a vehicle designed to move satellites rapidly between orbits. Zurich, by contrast, recorded its weakest half-year since 2018, held back by the absence of large biotech rounds and stagnant ICT financing.

Seed Holds Up While the Late-Stage Gap Persists

Against the general trend, seed investment jumped 68.8% to $198 million (CHF 156 million). With the number of seed rounds unchanged, the median round size rose to a record $3.4 million (CHF 2.7 million); founders are still starting companies and still finding backers, even as investors stay selective. Early-stage investment fell 29.1% year over year but remained the second-highest first half of the past decade, so the pipeline feeding future growth rounds looks healthy.

The persistent constraint sits higher up the ladder. Late-stage investment fell 12.6%, and a longer view shows this is where Switzerland repeatedly comes up short; late-stage amounts were larger in six of the past 10 years. That gap mirrors a structural feature documented in the Swiss Deep Tech Report 2026, which found foreign investors supply 88% of Swiss late-stage funding of $100 million and above, with domestic capital contributing just 12%. A thin domestic growth-stage layer remains the clearest obstacle to a sustained rise in total investment.

Exits and Strategic Investments Point to a Turn

“The most important prerequisite for a revival of the venture capital market is exits.”

Swiss Venture Capital Report 2026 Update, SECA and startupticker.ch

On that measure, the half-year offered early signals even though exit volume stayed low. Strategic investments rose to 14, twice the number recorded in both 2023 and 2024, with corporate participants including ENGIE, Johnson & Johnson, and UBS. Because strategic investments often precede acquisitions, the increase supports the survey’s optimism about liquidity ahead. Two exits stood out: the sale of LimmaTech Biologics (lmtbio.com) to Eli Lilly for up to $780 million (CHF 613 million), and Amazon’s acquisition of RIVR, a delivery-robot startup spun out of an ETH Zurich lab. The RIVR deal drew global attention to Zurich as a hub for robotics, reinforcing a lead the Swiss Deep Tech Report 2026 quantified: Switzerland creates 3.5 times more venture-backed robotics startups per capita since 2020 than the United States, five times more than the United Kingdom, and six times more than Germany. High-profile acquirers such as Bruker, Zeiss, and Hamilton Medical rounded out the buyer list.

Investor Confidence Rebuilds

For the sixth consecutive year, the report surveyed the Swiss investor community; 73 of roughly 300 venture capitalists responded, and their sentiment turned markedly more positive. Three-quarters rate the business environment as good or very good, and 82% plan to invest more over the next 12 months, up from 72% a year earlier, while 90% expect more investment opportunities and 78% anticipate increased exit activity. Fundraising remains the hardest part of the market, but even there the picture brightened; the share of managers not actively fundraising fell to 12%, and capital available for deployment is solid, with 74% holding dry powder above 40% of their fund’s original size and 11 new funds launched in the half against nine a year earlier. Investors also expect firmer pricing; 53% anticipate valuations rising by up to 25% over the next 12 months, and close to a quarter expect gains of between 25% and 50%, up sharply from 8% a year earlier.

This combination of active fundraising, larger deployment targets, and exit momentum creates positive feedback loops. Successful exits return capital to limited partners, demonstrating venture returns and enabling subsequent fund commitments. This available capital supports continued investment into Swiss startups across all stages.

How Investors See AI and SaaS

Investor attention to AI is less about deploying capital at any price than about where value will ultimately hold. Globally, venture funding is increasingly concentrated in a small number of AI mega-rounds, most of them in the United States, and Switzerland’s own AI investment is comparatively modest. When Swiss fund managers do back AI startups, they do so primarily at home, which accounts for 26% of their AI activity, followed by Germany at 18% and the United Kingdom at 16%, with less exposure to North America at 12%; high foreign valuations often demand minimum ticket sizes that smaller Swiss funds cannot easily meet. Sentiment on those valuations is guarded, with two-thirds of surveyed investors viewing the current AI pricing environment with varying degrees of skepticism.

The second concern is what AI does to existing software business models. Swiss ICT startups lean heavily on B2B software, and slightly more than half of respondents see AI as a real threat of displacement to the Software-as-a-Service model. Investors point to a few defenses that improve a startup’s odds: vertical or domain specialization and regulatory positioning, cited most often, followed by proprietary data moats, and then deep workflow integration with high switching costs. The signal for founders is that defensibility, rather than raw AI capability, is what Swiss investors now underwrite.

Conclusion

The first half of 2026 is best read as recalibration rather than retreat. The headline decline reflects the non-repeat of an exceptional biotech year and the absence of the mega-rounds that lift totals in other markets, not a loss of appetite. Beneath it sit genuine building blocks: a deal count that has stopped falling, a record half-year for hardware, record seed economics, a doubling of strategic investments, marquee exits in biotech and robotics, and an investor base that is more confident and better capitalized than a year ago.

The binding constraint is well understood; a sustained rise in total investment depends on deeper domestic late-stage capital and a steadier flow of exits. That is the gap the Deep Tech Nation Switzerland Foundation is working to close on the way to its target of CHF 5 billion in annual venture investment by 2033, the same structural theme running through its coverage of a maturing Swiss investor layer. For a country that already leads Europe on research output and channels a world-leading 63% of its venture capital into deep tech, the half-year confirms a familiar profile: a compact, resilient ecosystem producing world-class companies, now waiting on the growth-stage capital to match them.