As deep tech pioneers scramble to rewire their workforce, global talent markets are taking on a new shape.

Switzerland remains a magnet for top candidates, but is the Deep Tech ecosystem still a benchmark for European Excellence? DeepRec.ai are exploring in more detail below.

Big Investment

The funding frenzy may have cooled in recent years, yet Deep Tech is still one of Europe’s largest investment categories. Switzerland is one of its most resilient strongholds, as seen in the steady flow of capital into its robotics, AI, and geospatial markets.

It’s time to put our investment goggles on and see what Swiss Deep Tech is getting up to in 2025:

Unique (Zurich) - $30 Million, Series A

Agentic AI pioneers, Unique, bagged $30 million in series A funding to scale its platform. It’s essentially a digital workforce that automates sales and operations in critical sectors like banking and financial services.

Sparta (Geneva) - $42 Million, Series B

Sparta provides AI-powered, real-time market intelligence to commodity traders. This mammoth funding round will help them expand out of oil and gas and into other volatile markets that thrive on live data.

Voliro (Zurich) - $23 Million, Series A Extension

Voliro make aerial inspection robots designed for industrial application – they can tilt, hover, apply force, and stay stable while interacting with complex infrastructures like wind turbines and offshore rigs. Their tech is revolutionising the way the world approaches industrial resilience, and this funding round will help them accelerate global deployment.

Meteomatics (St. Gallen) - $22 Million, Series C

Meteomatics develops high-resolution weather forecasting technology, supported by a proprietary fleet of autonomous weather drones. Its platform delivers hyper-local weather data to clients across sectors like aviation, logistics, and energy. The new funding will support model development and expansion into the U.S. market, where demand for precise, real-time forecasting is growing.

SAEKI (Zurich) - $6.7 Million, Seed

SAEKI is living up to its exquisite tagline, ‘We manufacture the impossible,’ as the developer of autonomous micro factories. The company combines AI, robotics, and advanced additive manufacturing to enable on-demand production of highly complex metal parts with little to no human input. This seed round will support scaling and development.

What’s with the Global Deep Tech VC Dip?

Deep Tech’s funding cycles are on the slower side in the early stages of investment. While they tend to go into warp speed at around series B, the growth-by-any-means approach no longer cuts the virtual mustard. Investors are cautious, and they’re prioritising commercialisation and defensible IP over raw momentum.

Combine this with a massive helping of global economic uncertainty, and even the most promising Deep Tech startups are being held to tougher standards.

TL, DR:

  • Longer development timelines
  • CapEx Intensive
  • Risk and Compliance Challenges
  • Highly Susceptible to Skill Shortages
  • Global uncertainty

The Talent Market

According to our LinkedIn data, Switzerland’s AI/ML talent pool has grown by 16% in the last 12 months, which reflects the nation’s enduring demand despite downright bizarre global conditions. The fastest-growing skills in the last year point to a maturing ecosystem that’s shifting from research to real-world application (mirrored by the current drive to operationalise everything):

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning – up 105%

Data Pipelines – up 92%

Large Language Models (LLM) – up 90%

Generative AI – up 87%

Modelling – up 86%

These trends suggest a push toward scalable, cloud-based infrastructure, as well as growing interest in advanced AI capabilities like generative design and domain-specific LLMs.

It’s also telling that the median tenure for AI/ML professionals in Switzerland sits at just one year, a symptom of the ongoing talent retention challenge in a competitive and highly fluid market.

Why Switzerland?

From Zurich’s AI labs to St. Gallen’s autonomous robotics, Switzerland’s academic fervour matches perfectly with its expertise and maturity in high-impact sectors, which include the life sciences and financial services.

Sectors like this stand to gain an incredible amount from digital transformation, especially when they’re in an environment that understands both precision and innovation.

It helps to have a world-class talent pool too. The nation is home to engineers and data scientists who’ve cut their teeth solving serious technical challenges, but demand is outpacing supply.

For founders and hiring managers, the difference between shipping and stalling often depends on who you can bring in and how fast you can do it.

If you’re building in Swiss Deep Tech and talent is your bottleneck, we should talk: Nathan@DeepRec.ai.