From banking to luxury watches, Switzerland has many claims to global excellence. But now it can add another: a generation of entrepreneurs and founders who have become a driving force behind global unicorns. Since 2010, the country’s small but world-class community of domestic tech founders has built close to $60bn in value – a remarkable achievement for a country with a population of fewer than 9mn.
Swiss entrepreneurs living abroad have created more than $100bn in value alone over the past decade. “People now talk about the Swiss founders’ diaspora,” says Steve Salom, Partner at ACE Ventures, the Swiss venture capital firm with a global outlook. “Switzerland has achieved a critical mass of talent, and that talent density has created an inflection point.”
That diaspora includes entrepreneurs behind some of the world’s most successful tech companies. Guillaume Pousaz founded Checkout.com, a British fintech unicorn; Severin Hacker co-founded Duolingo, the world’s most popular language-learning platform; Steve Anavi, who studied in Switzerland, helped launch Qonto, a French digital bank for SMEs; and Daniel Yanisse, another Swiss-educated founder, co-founded Checkr, a US company using artificial intelligence to modernise background checks. These global successes highlight the growing reach of Swiss entrepreneurial talent – and increasingly, many of those founders are choosing to return home.
Silver lining to small markets
Salom, who previously built and ran the operations of global tech company Uber in France, Switzerland and Austria, says that one factor setting Swiss entrepreneurs apart from their European counterparts stems from the lack of scale in Switzerland itself. “To build a venture-scale company, founders need access to large markets. In Switzerland, that means thinking internationally from day one,” he explains.
While countries like France, Germany or the UK offer bigger domestic markets, Swiss entrepreneurs often develop a global mindset early, which can be a real advantage.
Several other factors that are specific to Switzerland’s growing ecosystem, have nourished that expansionist mindset and increasing depth of entrepreneurial talent. First, the country has top-quality universities that have nearly tripled numbers of both undergraduate and graduate STEM graduates over the past decade, as well as the number of engineers.
Led by the country’s two federal technical universities – EPFL in Lausanne and ETH in Zurich – the cohort of students taking computer science and engineering degrees has rocketed in recent years. In ETH Zurich’s case, enrolment numbers in 2024 were 143 per cent higher than in 2000. In terms of fomenting the country’s start-up ecosystem, Péter Fankhauser, CEO and co-founder of ANYbotics,
The influx of these tech powerhouses has fostered a virtuous cycle, whereby talent from tech giants ‘recycles’ into new start-ups, feeding a positive flywheel of serial entrepreneurship.
A global leader in AI-driven robot inspection solutions, tackling critical industry challenges in safety, efficiency and sustainability, credits ETH Zurich’s investments in entrepreneurship and incubation as instrumental to its growth.
“ETH Zurich has played a key role by fostering a culture of entrepreneurship and spinning out world-class start-ups,” says Fankhauser, who completed his doctorate in robotics at ETH Zurich. “The university’s pioneering research in AI, such as the deep reinforcement learning that powers our ANYmal robot, has positioned Switzerland as a leader in robotics by combining traditional mechanical engineering excellence with cutting-edge AI research.”
Second, the country has attracted the world’s leading technology companies to establish a physical presence. Google’s Zurich campus is one of the giant technology company’s largest offices in continental Europe, with about 5,000 employees from 85 countries. Over the past decade, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Meta, Salesforce and, more recently OpenAI and Anthropic, have all established offices in Zurich.
Cross-pollination of talent
Salom, who leads ACE Ventures’ team of operators, engineers and investors, focusing on the Swiss founders’ diaspora for its early-stage investments, says the presence of cutting-edge companies in Switzerland’s ecosystem has created a dynamic cross-pollination of talent. This, he explains, creates jobs for Swiss graduates, as well as a pool of top talent to inspire and strengthen the local ecosystem.
An interesting characteristic of the Swiss founders’ diaspora is that many leave to gain international success, networks and knowledge – and, eventually, return. Their return contributes to dynamising the ecosystem, and brings first-hand success stories and mentorship to the next generation. One example is Theodoros Rekatsinas, VP of Machine Learning at Axelera AI in Zurich. He co-founded Inductiv, a generative-AI start-up focused on data-error correction, which was acquired by Apple in 2020. At Apple, he led teams working on on-device intelligence and Knowledge Graph machine learning.
He later returned to Switzerland and taught computer science at ETH Zurich before joining Axelera AI.
Switzerland already has many of the key ingredients to lead the next decade of AI-driven innovation.
“But to go from research excellence to building global leaders, we need a step change in how innovation is funded and scaled. AI is capital-intensive and, without stronger local funding and policy support, we risk training top talent only to watch it leave or abandon entrepreneurship and work for non-Swiss tech.”
So, what does the future hold? With Switzerland’s deep industrial expertise – ranging from precision chemistry to medical technology – and a growing ecosystem led by the diaspora, Salom is optimistic that companies such as ACE Ventures can support the next wave of Swiss founders, providing not only capital but also operational expertise.. Through its newest fund, ACE Swiss Tech Outliers, ACE Ventures has invested in seven start-ups in Switzerland or founded by Swiss alumni abroad. “We’re excited about what they’re doing,” he says. “They’re all solving meaningful problems across a wide range of industries and sectors – and they’re all led by Swiss founders.”
