Methodology
Release evaluation · 7 Oct 2026 · does not rewind · data as of 9 Oct 2026 · release r11
What this is
Every Swiss AG that raises its share capital must publish the change in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce (SHAB). Kapitalradar reads those entries from 1 Aug 2025 to 9 Oct 2026, rebuilds each company’s capital history, and asks which increases look like a startup financing round. Every entry links to its SHAB publication.
How a capital increase is classified
A pre-filter keeps capital increases of AGs and drops restructurings and reductions. Rules score what the gazette states: the amount, the share nominal, the company’s age and purpose, new preferred classes, how the increase was paid. Then claude-opus-5-5 (prompt version 1) reads the same facts, with person names removed, and returns a score. An increase is shown as a likely financing at a score of 0.60 or more; between 0.35 and 0.60 it is undecided. The score is not a calibrated probability. Thresholds were frozen on development data before the evaluation sets were opened.
Rules
| Rule | Kind | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| The increase is an odd amount in small-nominal shares, as priced rounds usually are. | positive | 1.0 |
| The company was founded less than six years before this capital increase. | positive | 0.5 |
| The company's purpose describes technology or life-sciences development. | positive | 0.5 |
| A new class of preferred shares was created. | positive | 1.5 |
| A round increase in a holding company. | negative | -1.0 |
| A small increment typical of employee share options. | negative | -1.0 |
| Paid entirely by converting existing claims, with no new money. | negative | -1.5 |
| Paid with assets or shares contributed in kind, with no new money. | negative | -1.5 |
| Shares issued out of conditional capital, as when options are exercised. | negative | -1.0 |
| Paid out of the company's own reserves, with no new money. | negative | -1.5 |
| Part of converting the company from a GmbH into an AG. | negative | -1.0 |
| Capital was reduced and re-increased in the same entry, a restructuring. | hard negative | excludes |
| Nominal capital decreased. | hard negative | excludes |
Rules-only counts an increase as a financing at a rules score of 1.0 or more.
Confirmed rounds
Confirmations are matched automatically, every weekday, against the financing news on startupticker.ch. An article confirms a round when it links the company by its exact legal name, names it in the title, and the company has exactly one capital increase from 120 days before to 180 days after the article date. That increase is shown as a confirmed round. When the match is ambiguous (several increases in the window, or several companies named in the title) the increase is marked as a possible confirmation instead. Only round news counts: articles about grants and prizes, loans or listings never confirm, and acquisitions only when the title also reports money raised. The site shows the article’s date and a link to it; no article text is copied.
Evaluation
| System | Precision | Recall |
|---|---|---|
| Rules + Claude | 10%–100% (unverifiable counted as false / true); 95% interval 2%–100%, n=17 | 16 of 30 announced rounds |
| Rules only | 7%–97% (unverifiable counted as false / true); 95% interval 1%–99%, n=29 | 18 of 30 announced rounds |
Counting undecided increases as hits, rules + Claude finds 17 of 30.
Recall is measured on 30 financing rounds announced in the press and sealed before any threshold was set. Precision is measured on a stratified sample of the system’s positives, each checked by hand against outside evidence. Confirmed rounds play no part in either measure.
Limits
The SHAB states capital, shares and how they were paid. It does not state the amount raised, the price per share or the investors: those fields read “not in the SHAB”. GmbH capital changes are not covered. Company history before 1 Aug 2025 comes from each company’s own publications and is labeled when partial. Parser version 4.