Switzerland: A Leading Global Scale-up Hub

More money has flowed into all Swiss scale-ups per capita than into scale-ups in the US or Israel. This is backed by a ten-year growth story and important success factors that the Swiss start-up ecosystem fulfils.

In all start-up ecosystems, there are three groups of companies: start-ups that develop into SMEs, unicorns and a group of scale-ups in between that are growing strongly but have not yet reached a billion- dollar valuation. These scale-ups are often key drivers of job creation and economic growth because they develop dynamically and are also numerous. In Switzerland, there are around 350 such scale-ups, while only around 20 companies have made it to unicorn status.

Swiss Startup Radar, an established annual series of data-based reports, focuses on scale-ups in its latest edition. This category of start-ups has experienced exceptional growth in Switzerland in recent years.

Between 2015 and 2024, the amount invested in Swiss scale-ups increased almost fivefold. Even the crisis following the pandemic caused only a minor setback in 2022 – and 2023 and 2024 saw new record highs in invested capital.

The continuous development between 2015 and 2024 is unique. In a country comparison, Sweden shows the second largest increase in invested capital, having tripled in value. The increase in the UK in 2024 compared with 2015 was 140%, while in the US it was 62%.

Thanks to their strong momentum, Swiss scale-ups have closed the gap significantly with leading countries. In 2015, the gap between this country and countries such as Israel, Singapore and the US was still substantial. At that time, US start-ups attracted two and a half times more funding in total than Swiss companies on a per capita basis. By 2019, this difference had narrowed to just 36%, and finally, in 2024, Switzerland overtook the US in terms of capital invested per capita. In countries such as Singapore and Israel, less money per capita flowed into all scale-ups combined than in Switzerland.

Success Factors

The authors of Swiss Startup Radar wanted to know how Switzerland was able to achieve this leading position. To determine the reasons, they used a regression analysis to identify the success factors for particularly large investments.

The most important prerequisites identified were (1) the participation of a unicorn investor, (2) deep tech products or services, and (3) the earliest possible completion of the first financing round.

In Switzerland, some 300 investment rounds took place with participation from investors who had previously invested in unicorns. Per capita, this represents more investments than in the UK, for example, and twice as many as in Sweden. However, Israel, Singapore and the USA performed better.

Switzerland is a global leader in deep tech, as the Swiss Deep Tech Report and the European Spin-out Report have shown. Startup Radar uses the number of scale-ups with at least one founder with a doctorate as an indicator. In Switzerland, 36% of scale-ups meet this criterion, compared to only 19% in the USA and 13% in Israel.

In terms of speed to closing the first round of financing, Swiss scale-ups are also ahead of their counterparts in the USA and Israel. However, the differences in this criterion are small.

The three success factors show that Switzerland’s leading position in scale-ups is no coincidence. It is due to the country’s outstanding scientific base, its openness to top-class investors and an ecosystem that, through a variety of targeted support measures, manages to make deep tech start-ups investment-ready quickly.

In the Swiss Startup Radar scale-ups are defined as start-ups that have raised a total of USD 20 million or more. Our data analyses show that this simple criterion is sufficient to distinguish faster-growing companies from the multitude of start-ups.

Swiss Startup Radar is an annual publication that has been published since 2018 and compares the Swiss startup ecosystem with similar countries on the basis of data. The authors of the publication are Stefan Kyora, editor-in-chief of the Startupticker information platform, and Michael Rockinger, professor of finance at the University of Lausanne.

The Swiss Startup Radar can be downloaded from the website of Startupticker.ch: https://www.startupticker.ch/index.php/en/swiss-startup-radar