TOP 100 - Meet the 5 Best Swiss Software Startups of 2019 Ranking

1. BESTMILE, Lausanne, #5
AT THE HEART OF MOBILITY
Less traffic, thanks to intelligently coordinated vehicles – the software from Bestmile promises relief for gridlocked cities and the climate. The accolade came from the WEF. Bestmile was not only a guest at Davos in 2019, but the start-up was also appointed to a World Economic Forum think-tank, the Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in San Francisco. There, the Lausanne- based company will discuss the future of self- driving cars and urban mobility with industry greats, such as Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber. The two founders, Raphaël Gindrat and Anne Mellano, must have dreamed of this, because their intention is to be at the forefront of the great mobility transformation. Founded in 2014 as an EPFL spin-off, Bestmile’s software controls vehicle fleets, both autonomous and driven. The Fleet Orchestration Platform takes over the job that dispatchers at a taxi company do today when deciding which car picks up which passenger. “One of the advantages of our technology is that it is very flexible,” explains CEO Gindrat. Bestmile’s software can be used across all vehicle brands and fleet operators, autonomous vehicles or those controlled by a driver. The optimisation potential for mobility providers is enormous, thanks to the algorithms, particularly in the ‘ride-sharing’ business. A study carried out in Chicago found that 200 vehicles would be sufficient to carry out the 30,000 daily journeys in the city, for which today’s taxi companies use more than 2,000 vehicles. These findings, according to Gindrat, may also be applicable to major European cities.Such a prospect also convinced the Global Cleantech 100 Awards, which named Bestmile ‘Company of the Year’ this spring. According to the rationale, the platform enables mobility providers to transport more people and goods with fewer vehicles, and thus cover fewer kilometres: “This reduces emissions by up to 10 times.”

2. LEDGY, Zurich, #13
Ledgy has developed software for the digital management of share registers and employee stock ownership, and which also facilitates communication with investors. In the medium term, it wants to digitise transactions, and thus become the leading online platform for the digital settlement of equity transactions in private companies.
Several hundred customers from Switzerland and Germany use Ledgy’s services for the digital management of share registers, employee stock ownership, the preparation of investments (cap tables) and for their investor relations. Virtually almost all start-ups use the equity software. “For them, the need is the greatest,” says co-founder Ben Brandt (right). After all, fast-growing start-up companies need to keep their company documents up to date at all times, be it for due diligence, bank talks or discussions with a new investor. In the medium term, as an infrastructure provider, Ledgy wants to enable private companies to digitally process equity transactions. Thus, it is working together with another start-up on tokenised shares in order to implement online share trading of non-listed companies. At the end of last year, a financing round brought in EUR 1 million from well-known venture capital companies and business angels. “As a result, we now have strong partners and a broad network to make our equity software the European standard,” says Brandt.

 

3. EXEON ANALYTICS, Zurich, #21
Today, it often takes weeks or even months for a hacker attack to be detected and the resulting data leak plugged. Exeon software can detect unauthorised data outflows in traffic, thus enabling them to be stopped faster. The software from the ETH spin-off is already being used in the financial services industry, and expansion into Austria and Germany began this year.

4. ORBIWISE, Plan-les-Ouates GE, #26
Long Range Wide Area Networks (LoRaWAN) are now used worldwide in the Internet of Things. Applications that receive data or control devices over these networks often run on OrbiWise’s virtual network servers; for example, the world’s largest LoRaWAN network in India – used, inter alia, to transfer data from power meters and control smart street lights.

 

5. IMVERSE, Plan-les-Ouates , #29