It has been two years since UK based TechCrunch co-editor Mike Butcher has payed the Swiss startup scene a visit. My recordings of the elevator pitches have been viewed over 5000 times. Some more often like Poken, with over 600 views, others with only 14 views. Now that two years have passed, I thought it might be a good idea and look back. Were any of the startups successful? Are they still around? Have some exited or joined the dead pool? To answer this questions I have created the following list with a quick status update for each startup, which presented. The list is in no particular order.
- OptionRating: fabware, creating iPhone apps
- FundExplorer: renamed to ETFexplorer?
- Sobees: developed clients for Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and others for various devices (iPhone, iPad, web)
- mixin: never heard much of them, no real update since May 2009
- groops: no progress or big update, seems to have stopped
- dixero: not sure, page still asks for pre-registrations, not a very active twitter feed, blank pages on website
- CulturePod: active, creating new interview and videos
- Cassiber: doing fine
- babyZbook: dead pool? no information found
- Zattoo: sold to Swiss news paper group TA Media
- yes: online radio with chat? still great domain name (yes.com)
- wuala: joined French based LaCie (manufacturer of hard drives), stores over 200 million files
- webnode: still running, not sure if this counts a Swiss startup
- W2ML: no idea…
- trigami: still located in Basel, still in the same business
- swisspoll: no clue, they don’t have a CEO or anything
- SwarmCast: no clue, last press release is from September 2009
- Starfruit: create/buy goods in Second Life and let them deliver to your real life, dead?
- six signs: no idea, no information found, dead?
- Semacle: no updates since August 2009, dead?
- routeRank: alive, no idea how well they are doing
- Profession Web: not sure, blog?
- procedural: doing pretty well, I suppose
- poken: personally still not a fan, funding over 2 million Swiss francs, now based in San Francisco
- playyoo: on autorun, last blog entry from August 2009
- NewsCred: still active in creating custom online newspapers
- LiberoVision: doing great, big presence in the 2010 World Cup
- kleWel: active, no idea how well they are doing
- key lemon: selling their software for CHF 19.95
- holistis: no idea, not a clue
- gbanga: product launched, expanding
- Faircustomer: selling stuff
- doodle: reporting 6 million unique users a month
- bluewatchdog: still active, product works on new devices/phones
- amiando: not really swiss startup, but doing great
- amazee: launched their white label product
- Supertext: doing very well
Cassiber is still in operation. And you forgot Supertext, which is alive and kicking too 🙂
hmm how could I miss Supertext 😉 Did you pitch? Was going trough my videos.
Thanks for the infos though, Remy.
Actually, no, we didn’t pitch during the meetup. But we were in some blog post. It’s a start for us 🙂
Maybe we should start a Swiss Startup director, kinda like the CrunchBase.