Start-ups raise record levels of capital in 2021

As was the case across the whole of Europe, Swiss start-ups also generated record levels of investments in 2021, banking 3.1 billion US dollars in total. As a result, the venture capital invested in Swiss start-ups has risen by a factor of 3.7 since 2016.

The total value of the Swiss start-up ecosystem now amounts to 149 billion US dollars. This is a finding of a survey carried out by Dealroom.co, a global supplier of data and information on start-ups and tech ecosystems headquartered in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. The survey was published under the title: “The Swiss start-up ecosystem in numbers”.

As the data also reveals, a significant portion of this value is attributable to the country’s leading health and biotechnology start-ups in addition to spin-offs from universities. Over the previous six years, a total of 7 billion US dollars or 50 percent of all venture capital was invested in HealthTech start-ups alone.

Despite being a relatively small country, there is a strong sense of entrepreneurialism in Switzerland. In this context, it has “more start-ups per capita than its bigger, more headline-grabbing start-up neighbors”, according to the Dealroom.co report. At European level, Switzerland and Sweden boast the most unicorn start-ups per million inhabitants, namely three. This means that there are six times as many unicorns in Switzerland than in France, while the start-up density in Switzerland is also three times higher than that of Germany.