You Want to Found a Start-up? The Hasler Foundation has helped innovators for years in supporting their ideas with significant amounts of money. The conditions: 1. You are a startup based in Switzerland, typically out of a university. The founders have only recently completed their education, be it a PhD or a Master’s degree. 2. Your company’s offering is an innovation in ICT itself and not only an innovative application of ICT. The intellectual property rights are with your company either through a licence from the university, based on your own patents, or trade secrets thus giving you a technological USP. 3. The market potential of your offering is clear. You have a business plan on how you want to enter the market and already have a proof of concept of your technology and its application. 

For more than 10 years, the Hasler Foundation has been supporting start-ups in the ICT sector with considerable amounts as part of its innovation promotion program. In most cases, these companies have emerged from the results of research work in the context of a dissertation or master’s thesis in computer science, communications engineering or electrical engineering. The startups are based on a unique technological innovation in ICT and are not only users of state-of-the-art ICT.

One example, was our support of the EPFL startup Faceshift, which had developed innovative algorithms in computer vision to recognize facial expressions – without specific markers – in real time and thus animate the faces of avatars. This company was acquired by Apple in 2015 and its technology is now found in the latest generations of iPhones.

Startups worthy of support do not necessarily have to be active in the software sector. It is also conceivable to support startups with hardware innovations, be they new chip architectures or communication technologies.

You will find more information about our program and the exact conditions of participation on our website.