May 17, 2024
Support and investment
Dear reader
Four years after its foundation, Oxyle is in the market launch phase. A strategic partnership with a global Belgian company has been announced and it is working to achieve a similar goal with a number of other companies in Europe. Along the way, the cleantech start-up, led by CEO Fajer Mushtaq and CTO Silvan Staufert, has won awards, secured non-dilutive funding from various sources and completed a financing round.
The history of Enerdrape is very similar to that of Oxyle: it is also in a phase of global market expansion. Find out more in our article about a large installation in Aigle and projects in Madrid and the US.
Cowa is celebrating its first success on the market with its heating storage solution, and has now raised CHF 1.9 million from investors for current and future scaling steps and a new test centre.
In contrast to Oxyle and Enerdrape, 8inks is only a year old. The start-up, whose technology can reduce the production costs of lithium-ion batteries by 30%, has now completed a financing round of EUR 3 million. The capital raised in the pre-seed round will be used to develop a pilot plant in order to assess the feasibility of production on an industrial scale. As with the other two cleantech start-ups, 8inks has already secured financial support.
The road to market is long, particularly for cleantech and other hardware start-ups with capital-intensive products. That’s why support makes sense and is best when return-orientated business angels and VCs are involved at the same time. These four examples show that collaboration works in Switzerland.
If a start-up is successful on the market, further financing options quickly become available to it. Auxivo, for example, has been able to secure a non-dilutive growth loan to finance its expansion, following a rapid increase in the sales volume of its wearable exoskeletons.
Speaking of awards and support, the winner of the Prix Perl, venture’s Top 18 and the start-ups selected for the next edition of Tech4Eva’s programme were announced this week. And Dominique Gruhl-Bégin was appointed as the new director of Innosuisse: as former head of the Start-ups and Next-Generation Innovators division at Innosuisse and CEO of Serpentine Ventures, she has first-hand knowledge of the sponsor and investor perspective.
The first EO Zurich Entrepreneur Summit will take place next week in Zurich, and I will be at the Seca Venture Capital Workshop. The award ceremony of the first Prix Fit Impact will take place on 23 May. I would also like to draw your attention once again to Startup Days on 30 May. Applications are open for ClimateLaunchpad and the Swiss Sustainability Challenge until the end of May. The application phase for Venture Leaders Cleantech has just opened.
Have a good long weekend.
Stefan Kyora
Editor in Chief, Startupticker.ch
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The new Swiss Venture Capital Report was published on 26 January. It analyses 304 financing rounds closed in 2020 and includes further article such as an interview with Michael Hengartner, President of the ETH Board, and a list of Swiss "soonicorns". 
