News from Silicon Valley: Swisscom investing in two Swiss start-ups

Ava and Crowd have spent the last week in Silicon Valley, together with Archilogic, Gamaya and Monetas. The aim of the mentoring programme was to establish contacts with potential partners and investors, further develop the individual companies’ business models and gain inspiration from past success stories. Silicon Valley continues to prove attractive to tech start-ups, as there is a culture here that believes in opportunities for success. This fact was confirmed by tech guru Robert Scoble in a workshop held for the winners. The streets here, however, are not paved with gold; start-ups have to fight hard for starting capital in pitches to investors. The winners learned all about this when they gave their pitches to Artiman, one of the major investment firms in Silicon Valley. Four venture capitalists took time out of their busy schedules to take a closer look at three of the winners and their products. The main lesson that the start-ups learned from this was that you need more than a flashy presentation to raise capital. The potential investors quickly took control of the meeting and enquired about all of the key aspects of each company and product, from the positioning in relation to competitors all the way to the technical background of the start-up companies. The start-ups were also told of the importance of developing the right network. In all of the pitches, the experts offered to introduce the start-up companies to important players in the industry. “The quality of the winners of this year’s Swisscom StartUp Challenge even managed to impress the hard-to-please audience in Silicon Valley,” says Beat Schillig, Managing Director of venturelab, who accompanied the finalists and provided support throughout the week in his role as mentor. “Swisscom introduced the start-ups to many important people in the industry and allowed them to get their feet in the door with investors. The start-ups now have their hands full in closing out the deals they lined up.” Roger Wüthrich-Hasenböhler, initiator of the Swisscom StartUp Challenge and Head of the SME division, also strikes a positive note: “The winners demonstrated their potential. We will follow their further development with great interest.”