zurich
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Leoni Runge and the things a label cannot tell you
Before founding Zaya Care, Leoni Runge worked on the paper trail behind fine wine and the interface behind blockchain. Her career turns on a practical question: how do you build something other people will trust enough to use?
Fahri Diner and the trouble with the last two metres
He helped send light across continents, then found the internet falling short inside the house. The Plume co-founder’s next chapter returns to photonics, with a vineyard and some formidable bicycle rides along the way.
Bluelion asks for your time. Your equity stays yours.
Zurich’s nonprofit startup hub pairs a free accelerator with paid workspace, corporate introductions and a route to city-backed climate grants. The useful part is what happens between the introductions.
The Zurich Startup That Turned Bitcoin Into a Stock Ticker
Hany Rashwan and Ophelia Snyder built 21.co on a contrarian bet: that the fastest way to get crypto into a portfolio was not an app, but a boring ticker symbol your bank already knows how to buy.
UBS
How a 163-year-old Swiss bank became the world's largest wealth manager - by absorbing the rival that nearly took the whole system down with it.
On
On is a Swiss performance sportswear company founded in Zurich in 2010 that designs premium running shoes, apparel, and accessories. Built around its patented CloudTec cushioning - a sole of hollow rubber pods engineered to feel like 'running on clouds' - On grew from a specialty-running startup into a NYSE-listed brand (ticker ONON) with roughly $3.3 billion in projected 2025 revenue. Backed by tennis great Roger Federer since 2019, it competes with Nike, Adidas, and Hoka through design-led innovation, a fast-growing direct-to-consumer business, and manufacturing bets like robot-sprayed LightSpray uppers.
Mario Vitale
Mario Vitale is CEO of Resilience Cyber Insurance Solutions and President of Resilience, a cyber risk company that fuses cybersecurity, insurance and incident recovery into a single offering. A native New Yorker with more than 40 years in insurance, he previously ran Willis North America, Zurich's Global Corporate business and Aspen's global insurance operations before coming out of semi-retirement to help build Resilience alongside military-veteran founders Raj Shah and Vishaal Hariprasad.
Classtime
Classtime is a Zurich- and US-based education technology company building a web-based platform for formative and summative assessments. Teachers use it to create and grade quizzes, run collaborative challenges, and watch student understanding update in real time across any device. Founded in 2016, it serves hundreds of thousands of teachers and learners in more than 60 countries, with a free library of 30,000+ standards-aligned questions and a focus on grounding its design in learning science.
Valentin Ruest
Valentin Ruest is the co-founder and US co-CEO of Classtime, a Zurich-born edtech company building a formative and summative assessment platform used by educators and learners in more than 90 countries. A University of St. Gallen and Harvard-trained economist who once ran mortgages at a Swiss fintech, he traded banking for classrooms, splitting his life between Santa Barbara and Zurich while teaching personal finance in public schools and arguing that software should help teachers decide, not decide for them.
Cowbell
Cowbell is a Pleasanton-based insurtech that sells adaptive cyber insurance to small and mid-sized businesses, using an AI-driven continuous underwriting platform that scores cyber risk and can issue a policy in under five minutes.