HOST_A: Welcome back to Clawd Talks. It's our monthly Swiss startup roundup, and this time we're covering May 2026 — and honestly, Ryan, this might be the biggest month we've had to talk about yet.

HOST_B: It really is. We've got a near-billion-dollar pharma exit out of Zurich, two huge biotech raises in the same month, and a funding report that tells a really interesting story about where the money's actually going right now.

HOST_A: Let's start with the macro picture, because the headline number is a bit deceptive. According to the Swiss Venture Insights report, Swiss startups raised a total of CHF 202 million in May, across 36 rounds.

HOST_B: And on the surface that looks like a down month — CHF 202 million versus CHF 320 million in May of last year, so that's a 37 percent drop year-over-year.

HOST_A: Right, but here's the twist. The number of rounds actually went UP — 36 rounds this May versus 29 a year ago. That's a 24 percent increase in deal volume.

HOST_B: So smaller checks, more of them. Which honestly tracks with what we've been seeing all year. The mega-rounds get all the headlines, but underneath that there's just a steady churn of smaller seed and Series A deals happening across the country.

HOST_A: And compared to April, May was actually a big jump — up 45 percent month-over-month. April came in at CHF 139 million, so May's CHF 202 million is a solid rebound.

HOST_B: And that rebound has one name attached to it, really — Windward Bio.

HOST_A: Yes! Let's get into it. Windward Bio AG closed a $165 million round in May — that's roughly CHF 129 million — and on its own that's almost two-thirds of the entire month's funding total.

HOST_B: This is a Basel-based biotech working on long-acting antibodies for asthma and COPD. The pitch that caught my eye is they're going after Amgen's territory in the TSLP space — Amgen has Tezspire, which is a blockbuster asthma drug, and Windward Bio is positioning a twice-yearly shot as a real alternative.

HOST_A: Twice a year versus — what, Tezspire is monthly injections?

HOST_B: Exactly, it's a once-a-month subcutaneous injection. So if Windward Bio can get a long-acting version through trials, that's a massive quality-of-life improvement for patients, and a massive commercial opportunity. $165 million is a serious bet from investors that they can pull it off.

HOST_A: It's also just a great example of something we keep coming back to on this show — Switzerland's biotech bench strength. You don't raise rounds like this without a deep pool of people who've done drug development before, and Basel has that in spades because of Roche and Novartis.

HOST_B: Which brings us neatly to the second big biotech story — Nuclidium, also Basel-based, closed an oversubscribed CHF 26 million Series B extension in May, which brings their total Series B to CHF 105 million.

HOST_A: And Nuclidium is in radiopharmaceuticals — specifically copper-based radiotheranostics. For listeners who don't know that word, "theranostics" is this combination of therapy and diagnostics — you use a radioactive isotope to both find the cancer and then treat it with a related isotope.

HOST_B: It's one of the hottest areas in oncology right now globally, and Nuclidium's lead programs are for prostate cancer and metastatic breast cancer. The round was led by existing investors — Kurma Growth Opportunities Fund, Angelini Ventures — plus some new names like an EIB co-investment vehicle and a couple of German funds.

HOST_A: What I find interesting is both of May's biggest raises are in this overlapping Basel biotech-pharma cluster — immunology and oncology, both areas where Big Pharma desperately needs new pipeline. These aren't speculative moonshots, they're filling very real gaps that Roche, Novartis, Lilly and the rest are actively shopping for.

HOST_B: Which is the perfect segue to the exit of the month — and honestly, maybe the exit of the year so far. LimmaTech Biologics, based in Schlieren just outside Zurich, agreed to be acquired by Eli Lilly.

HOST_A: And the number here is enormous. Up to $780 million — that's the figure Lilly disclosed, inclusive of an upfront payment plus milestone payments. Swiss Venture Insights logged this exit at CHF 612 million.

HOST_B: LimmaTech's whole platform is vaccines against bacterial pathogens — and not the usual suspects. We're talking Staph aureus, the leading cause of surgical-site infections, plus gonorrhea and chlamydia. Their lead candidate, LTB-SA7, is in Phase 1 for Staph aureus.

HOST_A: The framing from Lilly's chief scientific officer was really striking — he talked about antimicrobial resistance eroding our ability to treat bacterial infections, and that a vaccine-led prevention strategy could change the whole trajectory of these diseases. This isn't a "nice to have" — it's genuinely important public health infrastructure.

HOST_B: And for the Swiss ecosystem, this is a massive proof point. LimmaTech was backed by Novo Holdings among others, and now it's being folded into one of the biggest pharma companies on earth. That's the kind of outcome that makes LPs want to write the next check into a Swiss biotech fund.

HOST_A: There were two other exits noted in the report too — NIRLAB Forensics at CHF 18 million and curli AG at CHF 10 million. Smaller, but it shows the exit pipeline isn't just one outlier — there's a steady drumbeat of acquisitions happening.

HOST_B: Now let's talk sectors, because the breakdown for May really tells you where the energy is. Biotech led with CHF 141 million across 9 rounds. Medtech was second with CHF 43 million across 6 rounds. And then ICT — which is the catch-all for software and tech — came in at just CHF 11 million, but across 10 rounds.

HOST_A: That ICT number is the one that jumps out at me. Ten rounds, but only eleven million francs total. That's an average of just over a million per round.

HOST_B: Yeah, that's pure seed and pre-seed territory. And honestly, I don't think that's a bad thing — it just tells you the software side of the Swiss ecosystem right now is dominated by very early-stage activity. Lots of small bets being placed, nothing has broken out into a big Series A yet this month.

HOST_A: Which is a very different picture from biotech and medtech, where the checks are an order of magnitude bigger because the capital requirements for clinical trials are just so much higher. It's not that software is unloved — it's that the two ends of the spectrum are structurally different businesses.

HOST_B: Let's talk about a couple of the smaller stories too, because they're relevant if you're a software person sitting in Zurich wondering "where do I fit into this." Avian, a Zurich-based startup, raised €2.2 million for what they call always-on AI thermal monitoring to prevent industrial fires.

HOST_A: I love this one. It's such a clear example of "boring industry plus AI equals defensible business." Industrial fire prevention isn't sexy, but it's a real pain point with real insurance and safety budgets behind it, and slapping continuous thermal-camera monitoring with AI anomaly detection on top of that is a genuinely useful product.

HOST_B: It also fits a pattern we've talked about before on this show — industrial AI, especially anything safety or compliance adjacent, is having a moment across the whole DACH region right now, not just Switzerland.

HOST_A: The other one worth a mention is Stellar Alpina, which raised CHF 3.5 million for detonation-based propulsion for mobility. That's properly deep tech — using detonation engines, which are more efficient than traditional combustion, for some kind of mobility application.

HOST_B: Very early stage, small check, but it's another data point for something we keep seeing — Swiss deep tech founders are increasingly comfortable pursuing genuinely hard physics and engineering problems, not just software wrappers.

HOST_A: Which actually ties into the bigger regional picture. We were looking at the broader DACH news for the same window — late April into May — and the scale of what's happening in Germany right now is honestly staggering. Helsing, the Munich defense AI company, is closing a $1.2 billion round at an $18 billion valuation, making it Germany's most valuable startup.

HOST_B: And SAP just agreed to put more than a billion euros into Prior Labs, a Freiburg AI lab that's only fifteen months old, to build out frontier AI for enterprise data. The pattern across the whole region is capital rotating hard from generic SaaS into physical infrastructure, defense, space, and deep tech.

HOST_A: So if you're a software engineer in Zurich right now — and we know a lot of our listeners are — what do you actually do with all of this?

HOST_B: A few things. First, if you're thinking about biotech or medtech adjacent tooling — software for clinical trials, lab automation, anything that plugs into the Basel pharma machine — that's where the big capital is flowing, and the LimmaTech exit just proved the exit market is real.

HOST_A: Second, for pure software plays, expect to raise smaller and prove more before your first big round. Ten rounds for eleven million francs in ICT this month tells you the bar for getting from pre-seed to Series A hasn't gotten easier — you need real traction.

HOST_B: And third — look at what Avian did. Take an unglamorous, regulated, real-world industry, and bolt modern AI onto a genuine pain point. That's a much easier story to fund right now than "another AI wrapper for knowledge workers."

HOST_A: My honest opinion? May 2026 was a really healthy month for Switzerland, even though the headline number was down year-over-year. A near-$800-million pharma exit, two biotech raises north of CHF 25 million, and a broad base of small ICT deals — that's actually a pretty balanced ecosystem.

HOST_B: Agreed. The thing I'll be watching for in June is whether any of those small ICT seed rounds start converting into bigger Series A's — because right now the gap between "lots of tiny software bets" and "biotech mega-rounds" is pretty stark, and closing that gap is what would really signal the next leg up for Swiss tech.

HOST_A: That's our wrap for May 2026. Thanks for listening to Clawd Talks — we'll be back next month with June's numbers, and hopefully an update on whether any of these small bets have started to pay off.

HOST_B: See you then.