Venturelab has released its annual ranking of the year’s Top 100 Swiss Startups, among which 14 fintechs.
The 100 names were unveiled on September 4 at the Top 100 Swiss Startups Award night, an event that brought together more than 700 international investors, startups, corporates and startup experts to celebrate Switzerland’s top-ranked startups.
The 100 startups were picked by a panel of 100 leading investors and startup experts. Each nominated ten of their favorite Swiss startups that’s less than five years old and which they believed had the most commercial potential.
Among the 14 fintech companies that made the 2019 list, several had already been named last year, including Advanon, Crypto Real Estate, PriceHubble, Loanboox and Apiax.
Here are the 14 fintechs that made the Top 100 Swiss Startups 2019 list:
#9 – Advanon
Description from Top100startups.swiss:
Advanon is an online platform for invoice financing for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). By selling their invoices on the platform, companies can easily manage their cash flows in a quick and flexible way, allowing them to focus on their core business.
#13 – Ledgy
Description from Top100startups.swiss and Crunchbase:
Ledgy is an online share register platform that can manage companies’ employees incentive plans, model the next financing round, and send reports to their investors. The platform brings together all stakeholders of a cap table. Employees can see how many shares they have already vested, investors can track their portfolio performance. Consistency-checks guarantee that a company’s cap table is error-free, at any time in the company’s history.
#17 – Crypto Finance
Description from Top100startups.swiss:
Crypto Finance provides blockchain-related services through its three subsidiaries:
- Crypto Fund AG (Asset Management), a FINMA-regulated asset manager in Switzerland for crypto asset funds;
- Crypto Broker AG, which provides crypto prime and agency brokerage and compliance services to qualified and institutional investors, offering professional, 24/7 crypto trading services; and
- Crypto Storage AG, which offers proprietary infrastructure solutions for financial intermediaries and professional entities to enable top-tier storage for digital assets.
#39 – AlgoTrader
Description from Top100startups.swiss:
AlgoTrader is an institutional-grade algorithmic trading software solution for conducting quantitative research, trading strategy development, strategy back-testing and automated trading for both traditional securities and crypto assets.
AlgoTrader has more than 25 employees and is headquartered in Zurich with additional offices in four different countries including New York and Singapore.
The company is considered to be one of the top 100 global wealthtech companies in the world and one of Switzerland’s global players in the digital assets community with 80 satisfied clients around the globe. It has onboarded many quantitative trading clients including Bitcoin Suisse AG and Sygnum, two Crypto Valley-based crypto asset brokerage companies.
#41 – Loanboox
Description from Top100startups.swiss:
Loanboox, the Swiss Fintech Award winner of 2018, is an independent debt capital market platform. Loanboox offers the leading online platform for big ticket loans, with the mission to make financing and investing simpler, more transparent, more secure and reduces costs. Its clients are public-sector authorities, banks, large corporations and institutional investors.
Loanboox is active in four countries, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and France, and has recorded more than 26 billion Swiss francs being requested through its platform since going live in 2016, 1,500 active borrowers and 400 lenders.
#48 – PriceHubble
Description from Top100startups.swiss:
PriceHubble is a proptech company set to radically improve the understanding and transparency of real estate markets based on data-driven insights. PriveHubble aims to enable smarter real estate decisions by bringing the latest in machine learning, big data analytics and ultra-convenient data visualization to market participants along the entire real estate value chain.
#53 – AAAccell
Description from Top100startups.swiss:
AAAccell is a leading quantitative fintech specialized in risk and asset management, and a spin-off company of the University of Zurich. The company develops and provides quant-solutions helping financial institutions, banks, insurances, and asset managers including UBS, Zurich, SwissRe, SIX or Rothschild to stay ahead of their competition.
AAAccell is a Top 5 European Award Winner in Fintech and Portfolio Management (2018), a SEF HIGH POTENTIAL SME, a Top 50 Swiss Startup by Bilan (2018), a Top 3 at Swiss Start Up Day (2017), a winner at Digital Switzerland/Kickstart Accelerator 2017, a Top 10 AI company selected by Google (2018) and was ranked in 2017 as a Top 5 Swiss Fintech company.
#54 – Diamond Digital
Description from Top100startups.swiss:
DiamondCoin (DMC) is a cryptocurrency fully backed by high-quality diamonds. It is issued on the Ethereum blockchain, and follows both the ERC20 standard for interoperability and the suggested ERC621 standard for increasing and decreasing token supply.
Ethereum smart contracts guarantee that there cannot be more DiamondCoins in the system than diamonds used as collateral. As a consequence, DiamondCoins can always be redeemed for diamonds that back them up.
#59 – Apiax
Description from Top100startups.swiss:
Apiax is a regtech pioneer, headquartered in Zurich. The company’s vision is to become a digital lighthouse in a regulated world by making compliance lean, easy and efficient.
With the team’s in-depth understanding of the needs of the financial service industry and by combining comprehensive legal and compliance expertise with state-of-the-art technology, the company helps clients to transform complex regulations into easy-to-use digital compliance rules. This results in unfrozen resources that empower clients to focus on their core business and to always be at the forefront of the competition by delivering digital innovations.
#63 – Crypto Real Estate
Description from Top100startups.swiss:
Crypto Real Estate is a proptech company that provides blockchain-based fundraising software for real estate companies. With our technology, real estate companies can raise funds cheaper and faster.
SwissRealCoin, a security token backed by Swiss real estate, is the company’s pilot project. Though SwissRealCoin did make a lot of buzz last year, no news of any development has been made since May 2018.
#76 – Sonect
Description from Top100startups.swiss:
Sonect is a location-based match making platform that connects those who want to withdraw cash with those who want to deposit cash – typically, a local shop owner.
Sonect does this by converting every shop into a “virtual” ATM – as a virtual ATM any shop can pay out cash to their customers via its app solution. The solution aims to democratize the process of cash distribution so that a significant portion of the value chain can be eliminated in order to make the process faster, cheaper and safer.
Sonect became the single largest cash withdrawal network in Switzerland in just 18 months and already secured EMI license for pan EU roll-out in 2019.
#81 – Crowdhouse
Description from Top100startups.swiss:
To date, owning high-quality Swiss yield real estate had been a privilege that was reserved for institutional and quite affluent investors. Swiss fintech company Crowdhouse.ch aims to bridge the entry barriers that exist in this market and open the doors for anyone to become listed in the land register as real co-owners of property.
Acquiring co-ownership of a property is possible on Crowdhouse.ch starting at a minimum amount of CHF 25,000. Real estate experts at Crowdhouse.ch continuously place properties on their platform that are selected based on strict criteria and are diligently checked. Following that, anyone has the chance to participate in purchasing the property with a self-determined amount and to jointly acquire it with other buyers. This type of investment form lets buyers not only share the purchasing price but also the risk and returns. The yield is generated by the rental income and is paid to the joint owners every quarter.
#92 –Sygnum
Description from Sygnum:
Sygnum is the world’s first digital asset bank. With its Swiss banking licence, Sygnum empowers institutional and private qualified investors, corporates, banks and other financial institutions to invest in the digital asset economy with complete trust.
The company is the first to offer an independently controlled, scalable and future proof regulated digital asset banking solution. Sygnum’s interdisciplinary team of banking, investment and distributed ledger technology (DLT) experts is shaping the development of a trusted digital asset ecosystem. The company is founded on Swiss and Singapore banking heritage and operates globally.
#98 –FinanceApp (FinanceFox)
Description from Top100startups.swiss:
FinanceApp, doing business as FinanceFox, is a startup based in Berlin, Zurich and Barcelona. Founded in November 2014 in Switzerland, FinanceFox combines many years of experience in the insurance industry with the world of digital technology.
With its FinanceFox app, the startup enables clients to manage their finance products cleverly and efficiently. This is achieved by combining consulting expertise from the traditional insurance business with advanced technology.
Since launching in September 2015, FinanceFox has collected a volume of insurance premiums worth over CHF 11 million on the Swiss market in record time. The company is already cooperating with numerous insurance broker companies in Switzerland and is constantly expanding its network. FinanceFox launched on the German market on November 1st, 2015. The company employs over 70 people.
Digital signature, identity and verification startups that made the list and which are worth mentioning:
#32 – PXL Vision
Description from Top100startups.swiss:
PXL Vision provides a technology platform for secure identity verification and the creation and management of trustable digital identities.
In the US$20 billion identity verification market, PXL offers highest security, full automation and a customizable, yet highly scalable SaaS solution, based on machine learning and computer vision.
The company was founded by former key people of Dacuda AG after the exit to Magic Leap. Within just two years of foundation, PXL has created a significant footprint in the industry and won 10+ significant customers, including Sunrise and SwissSign with the SwissID.
#73 – Skribble
Description from Skribble:
Skribble, founded in March 2018, is a Swiss provider of electronic signatures with offices in Zurich (CH) and Karlsruhe (DE). The startup enables electronic documents to be signed simply and legally. The basis is the “qualified electronic signature” (QES) – the only form of electronic signature equivalent to a handwritten signature before the law. Swisscom supplies the state-approved certification technology for QES. Existing customers include the Canton of Fribourg. Skribble has 14 employees.
#74 – Futurae Technologies
Description from Top100startups.swiss:
Futurae founded by Sandra Tobler, Claudio Marforio and Nikos Karapanos, provides a strong two-factor authentication (2FA) suite that offers a high level of security to businesses and individuals to protect their accounts and sensitive user data, while at the same time improving the customer experience.
The 2FA suite is developed by two PhDs from the System Security Group of ETH Zurich. The technology behind Futurae products has been tested and challenged by the best cybersecurity researchers of the world.
#100 – OneVisage
Description from Top100startups.swiss:
OneVisage is a Swiss cyber-security company founded in 2013 by 3D computer vision experts, banking software veterans and executive managers.
The company aims to become the first B2B digital identity solution provider by offering the strongest authentication solutions to large cybersecurity, financial services and IAM integrators, helping them to drastically reduce identity fraud and improve user experience.
Featured image: Top 100 Swiss Startups Award Night, September 4, 2019, by Venturelab.
