NativeAI at venture 2026: top 10 in Business & Finance

venture received 451 submissions in 2026. Sixty teams were selected for the semi-final, and NativeAI Guard was one of ten in the Business & Finance category. We were also nominated for the Aperture Spotlight Award.

What venture is

venture (venture.ch) is the largest startup competition in Switzerland. It is carried by a group of Swiss institutions, among them Innosuisse, the Swiss innovation agency. Teams submit a complete business plan, and the selected teams present it to a jury of investors, operators and industry experts.

The competition is not a pitch event with a prize attached. The written submission is reviewed first, the jury reads the plan before the room is entered, and the questions come from people who have built and financed companies in the sector.

Why Business & Finance

NativeAI Guard is a Swiss trust layer for AI use: data loss prevention for employees working with LLMs, and protection for the AI systems an organisation runs itself. It runs on our own servers in Switzerland, with no public cloud in the path.

Our first buyers are banks, insurers and clinics, where an AI prompt containing client data is not a policy question but a legal one, under Art. 47 of the Swiss Federal Banking Act (BankG) and Art. 321 of the Swiss Criminal Code (CP). That is why we entered in Business & Finance rather than in a technology category.

What we take away from it

The jury feedback was the valuable part. Sharp questions about the market, about who pays and about how the company scales beyond a first cohort of Swiss customers. That kind of feedback is hard to buy, and uncomfortable in the way that is useful.

The second part is the network. venture puts founders in the same room as investors, corporate partners and other teams solving adjacent problems, and those contacts reach further than the competition itself.

We are grateful to the jury for the time and the honesty, and to the venture team for running a process that takes startups seriously. To any founder weighing up whether the written submission is worth the effort: it is. Write the plan properly, and take the feedback even when it stings.

Book a demo of NativeAI Guard. 45 minutes, live software. See what is possible today, what a safety net for AI use looks like, and how easy it is to protect the AI use of your employees and your AI agents.