Venturelab Announces a Fund for Its Venture Leaders

(CONNECT) At the celebrations marking the 20th anniversary of the Venture Leaders programme held on 24 June at the startup space in Schlieren, Venturelab announced the funding of the Swiss Champions Fund. According to a press release, this fund will become the main sponsor of Venture Leaders and will invest exclusively in companies from this program. He will serve as the lead or co-investor in Series A and Series B funding rounds. The fund's target size is approximately 100 million Swiss francs, and the first investments are scheduled to take place in 2027.

Each year, four to five of the most promising startups are expected to receive an initial investment of 3 to 5 million Swiss francs. The Swiss Champions Fund will be the first Swiss fund to focus specifically on this growth phase and the Venture Leaders pipeline. It is managed by the venture capital firm TIE Advisory Partners, based in St. Gallen.

As Venturelab calculates in its press release, venture capital invested in Swiss startups has more than tripled since 2016, rising from about 940 million to 3 billion Swiss francs. However, access to larger funding rounds and international lead investors remains one of the key challenges facing the Swiss startup ecosystem. This forces many founders to relocate to London, Berlin, or the United States, thereby giving up significant stakes in their companies. The Swiss Champions Fund is intended to fill this gap.

“Switzerland doesn’t have an innovation problem, but rather a problem accessing scaling capital,” Christian Winkler and Michael Wieser, the managing partners of the Swiss Champions Fund, are quoted as saying in the press release. “World-class companies have been emerging here for years. With the Swiss Champions Fund, we aim to become the growth partner for the most successful Venture Leaders companies and support them during their critical growth phases.” ce/mm