Backed to the Future

Three Companies That Almost Stopped Running

Nils Granath invests in the growth stage of the Swiss market, and it is the part where the money tends to run out. Seed capital exists. Series A exists. But by Series B or C, when a company has a product and real revenue and now needs fifteen, twenty, fifty million to turn a national success into a global one, the domestic room thins out fast. This is the band the Swiss Growth Fund was built for, and it is where Nils has spent the better part of a decade as a board member rather than a spectator. Ask him for his favorite investments and he does not reach for the cleanest returns. He reaches for the three companies that almost did not make it.

SWISSto12: “The Elon Musk of Switzerland”

The first is SWISSto12, an EPFL spin-off making radio-frequency hardware for satellites, and Nils does not undersell it. “The founder is like the Elon Musk of Switzerland,” he says. Swisscanto invested in 2019, one of the fund’s first deals. The company was doing around three million in revenue. Last year it did 110 million, reached break-even,and just opened a thousand-square-meter clean room in Renens, outside Lausanne.

The line from one number to the other was not straight. When Swisscanto came in, SWISSto12 was 3D-printing high-performance antennas for satellite constellations, the kind of low-orbit networks that were supposed to blanket the earth in connectivity. The business plan was to sell those antennas at scale. It failed. The targeted big constellations either never materialized or never bought. OneWeb, the British constellation that was a natural customer, went bankrupt. A deal with Telesat, a Canadian government backed satellite operator, came down to performance, and SWISSto12 had the best of it, but mattered little as the contract was awarded to a Canadian state-backed competitor instead.

What happened next is the part he tells with something close to awe. Rather than keep selling components into a difficult market, the company pivoted to building the whole product: small geostationary satellites, the kind that until then came from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Airbus. Then it did something no startup had done before. It sold one to Inmarsat, a fifty-year-old satellite operator, a real customer with real money, not a government grant or a demonstration launch.

“It’s like selling to Swisscom or UBS,” Nils says. “Someone who really knows this stuff, and they bought the satellite. I think that’s just amazing.” The orders followed. He compares the turnaround, through the work of CEO Emile de Rijk and his team, to winning a gold medal at the Olympics.

Beekeeper: The Heavy Lifting

The second story is Beekeeper, the Zurich workforce-communication platform, and it makes a point Nils returns to often: a good American investor is worth more than the money it brings. Swisscanto put in the largest share of the Series B, alongside Thayer Ventures and, later, Energize Ventures out of the United States. Nils sat on the board as an observer for several years. Beekeeper went on to its exit through exactly the international visibility those investors opened up.

The mechanics of that partnership are worth slowing down on, because they cut against the instinct that local companies are best served by local money. A Swiss startup trying to sell into the United States has a hiring problem before it has a sales problem.

“How do you hire good salespeople in the US?” Nils asks. “You can go over and meet them.” But the real advantage, he says, comes from the investor’s own network: the people he knows from previous portfolio companies, the ones he can call and tell, this is a great opportunity. “You get a completely different type of candidate.” The same doors open toward customers. American investors, he says, made introductions to big American clients that no Swiss board seat could have produced.

It runs the other way too, and this is where Swisscanto earns its place on the cap table. The American funds did not know the ground in Switzerland. They could not easily check who was who, walk into the Zurich office, run down a concern.

“They knew where Switzerland was on the map. They liked Beekeeper,” Nils says. “But we could do the heavy lifting on the due diligence, the background checks. If there was some issue, the Beekeeper office is over there, I can go and talk to them. That’s why you need both.” He frames the whole thing as a kind of division of labor, and it is also, in his telling, a four-eyes principle at the level of the syndicate: two investors from two markets, each seeing what the other cannot, neither writing the check alone. The American funds told him outright they would not have invested without Swisscanto doing the local work first.

Beekeeper joined forces with LumApps in 2025, in a deal that valued the combined business at around USD 1.1 billion. What convinced Nils to back it years earlier was simpler than any of that. “It was a great team,” he says. “High energy, high ambition, global ambitions.”

Ecorobotix: Smaller is Sometimes Better

The third story is Ecorobotix, the agricultural-technology company from Yverdon-les-Bains, and Nils turned it down more than once before Swisscanto backed it. In its early form it was a four-wheeled rolling robot that drove itself across a field spraying weeds. He passed. The economics and the form factor did not convince him. What changed his mind was the company abandoning the robot that gave it its name and mounting its precision-spraying technology on the back of an ordinary tractor instead.

That redirection, away from the standalone robot and toward the crop-science AI underneath it, is the part of the Ecorobotix story Nils thinks actually mattered. It was set in motion by an accomplished CEO who came in with a wider vision for the company. Then, in June 2023, that CEO, Simon Aspinall, unfortunately died in an accident.

What kept the company running through the loss was already inside it. Dominique Mégret, who had built Swisscom Ventures over nearly two decades, wrote Deep Tech Nation’s inaugural book, and sat on the Ecorobotix board, stepped in as operational CEO in early 2024. Nils had known him for twenty years.

“It’s a big step, jumping from running Swisscom Ventures to becoming the operational CEO,” Nils says. He had several conversations with Mégret before and after the move. Mégret went on to carry the company through its next growth round, backed by Highland Europe, and to extend rather than abandon the vision his predecessor had started.

All three companies tell a story of resilience and the type of stamina needed to achieve the growth stage so very few Swiss startups actually reach. And more importantly, they tell a story of times where survival was less of a guarantee and just a mere hope. But what sets them apart is the ability to pivot and grow into a market that was actually addressable.

The race is long, and the bad kilometers are guaranteed. What Nils invests in is the ability to run through them.

In part three, “A Matter of Scale,” Nils turns from his own portfolio to the system around it, and to the question of why Swiss companies so often have to leave home to finish the race.