Top 17 Swiss Fintech Startups 2020

The 10th-anniversary edition of Venturelab’s Top 100 Swiss Startup Award has been released where the award show was live-streamed for the first time.

The 100 most innovative and promising Swiss startups are picked by a panel of 100 leading investors and startup experts. Each one nominates 10 Swiss startups that are less than five years old and show the greatest commercial potential.

Among the 17 fintech companies that made the list this year, seven of them are new additions while the rest had already been named last year.

Here are the fintechs that made the Top 100 Swiss Startups 2020 list:

#11 – 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.

#16 – 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.

#19 – 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.

#23 – 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.

#24 – 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.

#28 – 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.

#33 – Neon

Description from Top100startups.swiss and Neon:

Neon is an app-based mobile banking solution, in which users can open a bank account and get a free Mastercard.

In September last year, Neon had closed its Series A funding round with by raising 5 million CHF where lead investor Tamedia, also Zurich-based Backbone Ventures and several existing investors increased their engagement in Neon.

More recently in August this year, the Helvetia Venture Fund invested and holds a stake in neon, its first fintech investment, following a past partnership between the two entities.

#35 – Yova

Description from Top100startups.swiss:

Yova is a digital platform for investing with a sustainability impact. Their customers can invest directly into companies that help to solve global problems, eg by fighting climate change or by promoting human rights. All investments are professionally diversified portfolios that are designed for an attractive financial return.

#39 – Yokoy

Description from Yokoy Linkedin:

Yokoy enables companies to automate their expense and credit card processes using artificial intelligence. The entire process from the photo to the correct booking and payment to the employees is thus possible in a few clicks.

#45 – 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.

#46 – 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.

#58 – Archilyse

Description from Top100startups.swiss:

Archilyse makes architecture and real estate quality measurable, comparable and understandable for everybody. Our software-as-a-service solution processes real estate data into a variety of analytical results. Thus, Archilyse provides holistic, qualitative insights and support real estate decision-makers in digitising, evaluating and optimising properties and in simplifying processes in the planning and management of real estate. Unique simulations provide in-depth understanding of an object’s quality in terms of position (sun, views, location, noise) and functionality (floor plan quality). All digital, automated, saving cost, time and CO2-emissions.

#64 – Legartis

Description from Top100startups.swiss:

Legartis is a Swiss legaltech startup. The startup provides an artificial intelligence (AI)-based solution to make legal document analysis convenient and efficient by allowing companies to identify, classify and understand contracts within seconds.

#77 – Instimatch Global

Description from Top100startups.swiss:

Instimatch Global is a cash deposits trading platform that allows short-term liquidity to circulate more efficiently between institutional borrowers and lenders. The platform significantly increases transparency and the number of available counterparties for treasurers. Instimatch Global, as a result, provides crucial innovation in an important part of finance, which up to now has relied on outdated processes. With its offering, it is on an impressive global expansion and growth trajectory.

#86 – Sygnum

Description from Top100startups.swiss:

Sygnum is the world’s first digital asset bank. With its Swiss banking and securities dealer license, as well as its capital markets services license in Singapore

#87 – Taurus

Description from Top100startups.swiss:

Taurus is a Swiss-based company specialized in digital assets and distributed ledger technology. Taurus aims at building one of the first regulated digital asset exchanges for securities.

#95 – Sonect

Description from Top100startups.swiss:

Sonect provides a platform that makes financial services easily accessible from anywhere. Through Sonect, every cash register can become an ATM, and thanks to its mobile app, cash withdrawals are simpler, faster, and more cost-efficient.