Agrolinera in Desafía Switzerland 2025: Exploring the Swiss market

In Spring 2025, the Swiss edition of the Desafía program brought nine Spanish scaleups to Switzerland for an intensive two-week roadshow. Designed to accelerate international expansion and test the competitiveness of innovative deeptech solutions on a global scale, the program was supported by ICEX and Red.es in collaboration with Venturelab and the Economic and Trade Office of the Spanish Embassy in Bern. Participants benefited from tailored meetings with investors, corporates, and ecosystem leaders, as well as mentorship, networking, pitching opportunities, and company visits.

Following its 2024 launch, the 2025 edition welcomed a second cohort of deeptech companies, including Agrolinera, led by Gutierrez Canseco, which leveraged the program to explore potential collaborations and refine its international expansion strategy.

Company Name: Agrolinera
Location: Asturias, Spain







What was the most surprising difference you noticed between the Swiss startup ecosystem and the Spanish one?
How much the corporate and institutional actors own the process. In Switzerland, accelerators, public bodies, and corporates operate as a coordinated pipeline, and each knows its role and actively pushes startups into the next relevant layer. A clear example: we visited Unlimitrust, the private innovation campus in Lausanne promoted by SICPA (the world leader in passport and banknote inks), which runs a structured soft-landing program offering six months of free office space to selected foreign startups. That level of operational commitment from a private industrial leader is rare in Spain, where the relationship between startups, corporates, and institutions is more fragmented and less systematic.

What are the biggest challenges you faced when exploring the Swiss market for your product or technology?
The Swiss market rewards long-term trust-building, which translates into intensive follow-up after the first contact. For a startup at the right stage, this is an investment; for a bootstrapped early-stage company, it is a real risk. Spreading attention across a second geography before domestic scalability is locked in can dilute focus and lead to overcommitment. For us, this meant being disciplined about keeping Switzerland contacts warm, as a prepared future beachhead rather than an active front.

Which part of the Desafía Switzerland program (mentorship, networking, pitching, company visits) was most valuable for your startup and why?
The combination of the reach from the Spanish consulate and commercial office with the country immersion and networking designed by Venturelab. It allowed us to understand exactly what kind of support each type of actor ( corporate, public body, association, investor ) is set up to provide, and to test those conversations face-to-face in the same trip. This saves months of trial and error compared to approaching the Swiss ecosystem cold from Spain.

Did you identify any concrete collaboration opportunities with Swiss companies, investors, or research institutions during the program? If yes, which type of collaboration?
Yes. We are in active discussions with a Swiss utility with biomethane operations in Spain around a pilot project and a longer-term cooperation (confidential at this stage). In parallel, we opened and kept warm relationships with Agridea, the Schweizer Bauernverband (SBV), and the Schweizerischer Alpwirtschaftlicher Verband (SAV) to embed ourselves progressively in the Swiss innovation ecosystem as a platform for later DACH market entry.

How did participating in Desafía influence your international expansion strategy?
It gave shape to a sequenced international strategy: build early traction and visibility in Spain first, then use Switzerland as a beachhead into the DACH region, which is a core target market for us and a central element of our capital markets narrative for our upcoming equity round. Desafía also gave us the first serious conversations with the corporate partners that could anchor that sequence.

What advice would you give to startups considering applying to Desafía Switzerland in the future?
Prepare well in advance, be ready to follow up, and, above all, be ready to commit time and resources afterwards if you actually want this to work. Go in with clear, differentiated asks for each type of stakeholder, and don't expect to close commercially
during the program itself; the real value compounds after you leave.

Describe Desafía in one word.
Eye-opening.