ETH transfer — ETH Zurich Spin-off & Technology Transfer Office

ETH transfer is ETH Zurich's institutional technology-transfer office, handling invention disclosure, patenting, licensing and — most prominently — the creation of spin-off companies from university research, with revenue-sharing arrangements between inventors, their labs and the university. ETH Zurich has tracked spin-off formation since 1973, making it one of continental Europe's longest-running and most closely monitored university tech-transfer programmes.

By the end of 2023, ETH Zurich had produced 583 spin-offs in total, of which 530 remained active and 519 were still based in Switzerland. 2023 was a record year with 43 new spin-offs (up from 26 in 2022); 37 more followed in 2024. In 2023, ETH distributed CHF 47M in non-dilutive grants to founders; in 2024, ETH spin-offs raised roughly CHF 425M across 42 published financing rounds, a 25% year-on-year increase. Independent tracking by the University of St. Gallen found ETH spin-offs from the 1998–2007 cohort had a 93% five-year survival rate (versus roughly 68% for comparable Swiss start-ups generally) and an 81% ten-year survival rate, and that this cohort had generated around 1,500 direct and indirect jobs — about seven jobs per spin-off, roughly double the Swiss start-up average. ETH's Pioneer Fellowship programme, which funds founders through the earliest post-lab stage, has supported 94 spin-offs since 2011.

Caveat: Switzerland's exceptionally deep R&D funding base, patient capital markets and ETH's own global research ranking make this an outlier case; the raw model (equity-free grants plus in-house patenting capacity) is far harder to replicate in regions with thinner venture-capital or public R&D funding, and no independent negative case studies or documented failures were found in available sources — itself a gap in the evidence base rather than a clean record.

Read the full analysis: https://www.myscience.ch/en/news/wire/eth_spin_offs_an_annual_record_set_in_2023-2024-ethz