Robotics in Switzerland: 217 companies, but the big money comes from the USA

Switzerland is home to at least 217 robotics companies employing around 7,000 people, with just over half of the actual robot manufacturers being university spin-offs, particularly from ETH and EPFL. This is shown in an analysis published by Raiffeisen on September 29. Since 2020, the country has produced 3.8 venture-backed robotics startups per million inhabitants, more than in the USA or Great Britain.

However, the picture changes when it comes to major funding. In financing rounds exceeding 100 million dollars, only 12 percent of capital originates from Switzerland, while 54 percent comes from the USA. Those seeking to grow here must seek funding abroad, along with the risk that companies and value creation may later relocate.

Gravis Robotics demonstrated what this looks like in practice in August. The ETH spin-off, which enables construction machines to drive autonomously, raised 200 million dollars, solely from SoftBank, at a valuation of one billion. It was Switzerland's first unicorn in robotics, financed entirely from Japan. Just over five months earlier, Amazon had acquired RIVR, the Zurich-based delivery robot company that emerged from the ETH project Swiss-Mile. And ABB's robotics division, for decades the country's industrial flagship, is switching to SoftBank for 5.4 billion dollars. The latest example also fits the pattern: Embodied AI from Lausanne launched in September with an international investor consortium led by a foreign venture capitalist.

The study also explains why this is the case. Eighty-seven percent of Swiss robotics companies employ fewer than 100 people. Of the 109 companies whose core business is robotics, two-thirds are classified as startups or scale-ups, plus around 50 suppliers and 30 integrators. The scale-ups now provide approximately 2,000 jobs, more positions than established international corporations with around 1,600 full-time employees. New companies continue to be founded regularly; since 2020, 50 new firms have been established, with at least ten emerging in each of the last three years. Geographically, the industry is tightly concentrated: Zurich and Vaud together house around three-quarters of companies.

Notably, very little of this is classical factory automation. Around 70 percent of core companies work in professional service robotics, with drones, autonomous mobile robots, and medical robotics strongly represented. Industrial robotics accounts for just 17 companies with around 920 employees, while similarly many companies focus on software and AI for robots. In terms of deployment, Switzerland is still well-positioned. With 29 industrial robots per 1,000 industrial employees, it ranks among the ten most automated countries, and leads Europe in professional service robots.

In global comparison, however, Swiss funding rounds appear small. In the third quarter of 2026 alone, according to Crunchbase, 159 billion dollars in venture capital flowed globally, with as many rounds exceeding one billion as ever before, and robotics again raised over ten billion. Such sums rarely come together in Switzerland, and so the major checks almost inevitably go to American, Japanese, or Chinese investors. ETH did record 46 spin-offs in 2025 with around 540 million Swiss francs in financing, distributed across over 40 rounds. For a humanoid or robot fleet at industrial scale, that is merely seed capital.

"Switzerland is well-positioned," is Raiffeisen's conclusion nonetheless, and there is indeed little to quibble with regarding the breadth of the scene. The authors do not expect robots to primarily replace jobs here. Although over 30 percent of the workforce operates in professions with above-average potential for robot deployment, occupations with labor shortages precisely demand specialized expertise and human contact. The machines are likely to assist rather than displace workers there. The question remains: who will own the companies building these machines.