Swiss Hardware Took the H1 2026 Tech Funding Ranking

Switzerland’s top-funded tech companies in the first half of 2026 were chip, battery and device makers, and they took most of a haul above €1.1 billion.

The ten largest rounds accounted for around two-thirds of that total. The national venture book still shrank: the Swiss Venture Capital Report, issued with SECA, the Swiss Private Equity and Corporate Finance Association, logged CHF 1,245.03 million across 123 rounds, 15.5% below the first half of 2025.

What Swiss Tech Companies Raised in H1 2026?

Disclosed tech rounds put Swiss technology firms above €1.1 billion between January and June, with capital bunched in a few industrial bets. Semiconductors drew around €281 million, energy €223 million and healthtech €220 million. Fintech, software and other digital trades produced more deals, at much smaller tickets.

Four hardware companies reached the ten largest rounds, spanning energy storage, connectivity chips and space systems. That mix is what the ranking actually is: physical plant, silicon and clinical devices, not a broad software boom.

THE TEN LARGEST SWISS TECH ROUNDS, H1 2026

Series A looked large only because a few outsized cheques sat in that bucket. Seed and pre-seed activity was spread across many smaller rounds. Grants, growth equity, debt, convertibles and crowdfunding were thin slices of the mix.

Kandou Sold Copper Links Into the AI Buildout

Kandou AI, a fabless chip firm in Saint-Sulpice and an EPFL spinout founded in 2011, closed an oversubscribed $225 million round on 23 March 2026. Maverick Silicon led. SoftBank Group, Synopsys, Cadence Design Systems and Alchip Technologies joined, with several existing holders coming in again. Chief executive Srujan Linga, a former Goldman Sachs managing director, put the post-money valuation at $400 million.

The company sells high-speed, low-power connectivity for AI racks, data centres and consumer gear: chip-to-chip interconnects, PCIe and USB4 retimers, switches and IP built on Copper MIMO signalling. The pitch is that data movement between processors and memory is the bottleneck as models scale, and that copper can still do that job at lower power than optics on many links. More than 20 million silicon units have already shipped on its technology.

The new money is for production of AI connectivity chips, deeper work with hyperscale customers, and the next generation of chips and IP. Company counsel and investor counsel both described the round as a Series A, a fresh share class on a firm that has been raising for years.

This funding round is a clear validation of our vision from our partners and customers. It accelerates our goal of transforming AI hardware through products built on our groundbreaking copper-based interconnect and system IP.

Srujan Linga, Co-Founder and CEO, Kandou AI, 23 March 2026

On 9 September 2026, Venturelab’s Top100 Swiss Startup Award gave Kandou the largest-fundraising honour of the night, months after the round closed. The hardware cheque still sat on the podium. Software names in the same ecosystem were not the story.

🏆 Meet the winners of this year’s Top100 Special Awards!

Tonight at the Top100 Swiss Startup Award 2026, for the first time, three additional standout achievements are being celebrated:

💰 Largest Fundraising: @kandoubus

With CHF 178 million raised, Kandou AI takes home the… pic.twitter.com/9CnUtPOOZF

— Venturelab (@venturelab_ch) September 9, 2026

Terralayr’s Cheques Go to German Grid Storage

Zug-based Terralayr is the second name on the Swiss list and a German energy company in practice. On 19 January 2026 it closed €192 million of growth equity in two tranches, including an €80 million upsizing option. Eurazeo’s infrastructure arm led. RIVE Private Investment, Creandum, Earlybird, Norrsken VC and Picus Capital followed on.

The firm owns and runs grid-scale battery storage and sells flexibility through its LAYR software, which virtualises capacity so utilities and traders can book it. Tolling deals with RWE and Vattenfall already sit on part of the book. Co-founder and chief executive Philipp Man said the raise is meant to speed asset growth in Germany, which is what makes the software side scale.

We are very happy to welcome Eurazeo to our shareholder base and appreciate the continued support from existing investors like RIVE. Their backing is essential in allowing us to accelerate the build-out of much needed flexibility infrastructure in Germany.

Philipp Man, Co-Founder and CEO, terralayr

Melissa Cohen, co-head of infrastructure at Eurazeo, said the company is building kit Germany’s grid actually needs, a solid asset base under a virtual marketplace. Terralayr employs around 50 people and wants one of Germany’s largest battery fleets by the end of 2027.

THE GERMAN STORAGE BOOK

• In operation or build: More than 150 MW of assets are running or under construction in Germany.
• Ready to build: Close to 200 MW is shovel-ready, part of it already backed by tolling contracts.
• Secured pipeline: An 8 GW stack from in-house work and co-development sits behind those sites.
• Market backdrop: Terralayr says German utility-scale storage is likely to expand more than five times by 2030.

On 18 February 2026 the company took full control of Big Battery Deutschland, a greenfield joint venture, and with it a development book above 1 GW. The Swiss ranking is counting a cheque that will be spent on German substations.

Three Device Makers Split the Healthtech Money

Healthtech’s €220 million was not a platform-software story either. It was an insulin patch already on sale, a mitral-valve device heading into trials, and a copper radiopharma extension. Biotech as a whole had a poor half on the national books, so these three names did the heavy lifting for the medical column.

THE DEVICES BEHIND THE HEALTHTECH POT

• CeQur Simplicity: A wearable mealtime insulin patch, worn under clothing, that delivers rapid-acting insulin on demand through a flexible cannula with no tubing and no programming.
• Polares MRace: A transcatheter posterior leaflet replacement aimed at mitral regurgitation, sitting between repair and full valve replacement for a wider set of anatomies.
• NUCLIDIUM CuTrace: Tumour-seeking molecules paired with Copper-61 for imaging and Copper-67 for therapy, with lead programmes in metastatic prostate and breast cancer.

Horw-based CeQur, founded in 2008, closed a $100 million Series E round on 9 June 2026. President and chief executive Bradley Paddock said the firm now has the commercial machine, new clinical evidence and a pipeline, and that the capital is there to push growth. The money expands field sales and pays for extended-wear and extra dosing versions of Simplicity. The US Food and Drug Administration has cleared the patch for up to seven days of wear, with 1-unit and 2-unit options. Better than 85% of claims are covered as a pharmacy benefit, at an average copay under $45 a month, and nearly 90% of patients in company-cited data said they followed their insulin regimen better than with multiple daily injections.

Polares Medical, a clinical-stage structural heart company founded in 2017, raised $50 million of Series C money on 3 March 2026 to widen operations and push MRace studies in the United States, Europe and Australia.

Basel and Munich-based NUCLIDIUM closed an oversubscribed CHF 26 million (EUR 28.4 million) Series B extension on 27 May 2026, taking the CHF 105 million Series B total. Kurma Growth Opportunities Fund, Angelini Ventures, the EIB co-investment facility Aurea, Wellington Partners and Neva SGR led the add-on, with DeepTech and Climate Fonds, Bayern Kapital, Vives Partners and NRW among the new names. The cash funds expanded Phase I/II work on NU101 and NU201 and a production network in Europe and North America.

Canton Vaud Pulled Ahead of Zurich

Hardware start-ups set a half-year record of about CHF 324 million, more than 60% above the previous six-month mark of just over CHF 200 million, set in the second half of 2021. The products, the report says, make data centres more efficient and open work in aerospace. Three of the four hardware names in the top ten rounds were from canton Vaud. Kandou, SWISSto12 in Renens and Lausanne’s PAVE Space sat on that map. Terralayr, the fourth, is in Zug.

Vaud collected more than CHF 330 million, a cantonal total last seen in the record years of 2021 and 2022. Zurich had its weakest half since 2018. Large biotech cheques did not repeat, and ICT financing stayed low. Biotech drew only about CHF 184 million, a drop of more than 70%, and the number of biotech rounds halved. The report treats that as timing: strong 2025 rounds filled pent-up demand that did not come back in the first six months of 2026.

SWISS VENTURE CAPITAL, FIRST HALF

Deal count barely moved, from 124 to 123, which the report reads as the multi-year slide in round numbers finding a floor. The CHF 1,245.03 million total sits near 2023 and 2024. The 15.5% drop is a comparison against an unusually strong 2025, itself lifted by those biotech rounds that did not return.

Seed Rounds Got Bigger as Software Cheques Stayed Thin

Seed investment rose 68.8% to CHF 156 million, and the median seed round reached a record CHF 2.7 million, with the number of seed deals unchanged. Early-stage founders are still getting paid. They are not the names on the ranking.

Fintech and software, which usually fill Swiss deal lists, showed up as a larger number of generally smaller transactions. The exception inside the top ten is Zurich’s BLP Digital, which took $50 million from Goldman Sachs Alternatives in April 2026 for agentic AI that runs document-heavy finance, procurement, sales and logistics work on existing ERP systems. Chief executive Tim Beck has said finance chiefs want tools that hit the numbers, not more experiments. One software firm in the ranking does not rewrite the half.

The constraint the Swiss Deep Tech Report 2026 has already measured sits further up the ladder. Foreign investors supply 88% of Swiss late-stage funding of $100 million and above, with domestic capital at 12%. Kandou’s SoftBank cheque, Terralayr’s Eurazeo lead, BLP’s Goldman money and SWISSto12’s ESA package all fit that pattern. Strategic investments doubled to 14, with corporates including ENGIE, Johnson & Johnson and UBS, and 21 exits matched the year-earlier count. Late-stage depth is still imported.

After the half closed, the same split kept showing. xorlab, a Zurich email-security company, raised EUR 5 million in a Series A+ in early September, a useful product round that would not have moved the H1 ranking. The large cheques of the year still belonged to copper, batteries and devices.

Space Tugs and ESA Satellites Fill the Rest

SWISSto12 in Renens secured €73 million in ESA member-state support through the HummingSat ARTES Partnership Project, backed at the 2025 ministerial conference by Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Norway and associate member Canada. That package is public industrial money to build and industrialise a smaller geostationary telecom satellite with a reconfigurable software-defined payload, and to push phased-array antennas for orbit and for ground terminals. The venture tally counted a thinner industrialisation round of CHF 25.2 million for the same company. First launch is scheduled for 2027.

PAVE Space, founded in 2024 in the Vaud towns of Lausanne and Villeneuve by chief executive Julie Böhning and chief technology officer Jérémy Marciacq, closed a $40 million seed round on 25 March 2026. Visionaries Club and Creandum led, with Lombard Odier Investment Managers, Atlantic, b2venture and others in the syndicate. Its LYOBA heavy-lift kickstage is designed to haul payloads of up to five tonnes from low Earth orbit toward medium Earth, geostationary or lunar paths in under 24 hours. IBEX is a smaller high-mobility platform. Böhning has said a demonstration mission, GRAZE, is due to launch in October 2026 on a SpaceX rocket. The company has reported eight reservation agreements with operators and manufacturers.

Planetary, a biomanufacturing firm, raised nearly €23 million to roll out fermentation-derived ingredients and license BioBlocks kit to agro-industrial partners. Acutronic raised $25 million for new products, plant capacity, working capital and planned defence-technology acquisitions, across motion simulation, servo-actuators, micro-turbines and stabilised platforms.

THE HALF-YEAR’S LARGE CHEQUES

1. 19 January 2026: Terralayr closes €192 million of growth equity led by Eurazeo for German battery storage.
2. January 2026: SWISSto12 receives €73 million of ESA-backed HummingSat support.
3. 3 March 2026: Polares Medical raises $50 million Series C for mitral-valve trials.
4. 23 March 2026: Kandou AI closes $225 million with Maverick Silicon, SoftBank and chip-tool vendors.
5. 25 March 2026: PAVE Space closes a $40 million seed round for orbital tugs.
6. April 2026: Goldman Sachs Alternatives invests $50 million in BLP Digital.
7. 27 May 2026: NUCLIDIUM adds CHF 26 million and takes its Series B to CHF 105 million.
8. 9 June 2026: CeQur closes $100 million Series E for Simplicity commercial growth.

PAVE Space still has GRAZE booked for October 2026. HummingSat is aimed at 2027. The ranking for the first half is already in: chips, German batteries and devices took the money, and the national total still fell.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on disclosed private-company funding rounds and on figures published in the Swiss Venture Capital Report. It is informational only and is not investment advice, a solicitation to invest, or a recommendation to buy or sell any security, fund interest or other financial instrument. Readers who are considering an investment in private technology companies, venture funds or related products should consult a qualified financial adviser, licensed asset manager or other professional authorised to advise on private-market investments in their jurisdiction. Amounts, round labels, valuations and operating figures reflect the company statements and the SECA report cited here as of the dates of those documents and may be revised as later filings appear.