How to Track Swiss Companies That Just Raised Capital

2026-08-09

A Swiss company files a capital increase with its cantonal commercial register. Within hours the notice appears in the SHAB (Schweizerisches Handelsamtsblatt), the official gazette that logs every commercial-register mutation in the country. If you sell to Swiss businesses, that notice is one of the strongest buying signals you can get. The company just brought in new money. Someone approved a budget. And the publication is public, timestamped, and free.

Most salespeople never see it. The ones who do usually find it a week later on a news aggregator, after three competitors have already called. This guide shows you how to read the notice, why the timing matters, and how to turn it into a call list the same morning.

What a capital increase notice looks like in the SHAB

Every SHAB entry follows a predictable format. The gazette is published online at shab.ch each business day, and each notice sits under a cantonal section. A capital increase typically appears under Mutations (changes to existing entries) rather than new registrations.

The notice itself is dense legal text, but the fields that matter for sales are always in the same place:

Company name and legal form (e.g. "Beispiel Technologie AG"). The legal form tells you whether you are looking at a corporation (AG), a limited-liability company (GmbH/Sàrl), or something else.
CHE number (e.g. CHE-123.456.789). This is the unique company identifier in the Swiss commercial register. You can look it up at zefix.admin.ch to find the full registration, including the company's address, purpose clause, and list of authorized signatories.
Registered office (municipality and canton). A Zurich AG raising capital lands differently than one in Appenzell.
Old and new share capital. The notice states the previous share capital and the new total. The difference is the amount raised. A jump from CHF 100,000 to CHF 500,000 tells a different story than CHF 100,000 to CHF 120,000.
Number and type of shares. Registered shares (Namenaktien) vs. bearer shares (Inhaberaktien), their par value, and whether they are fully paid up (liberiert).
Changes in authorized signatories. A capital increase often comes with new board members or a new managing director. These names show up in the same notice.

Example: "Aktienkapital bisher CHF 100'000.00, neu CHF 250'000.00, Liberierung neu CHF 250'000.00, 2'500 Namenaktien zu CHF 100.00." That single line tells you CHF 150,000 of new money is in the account, the shares are fully paid, and the company now has enough capital to back a serious growth phase.

Why capital increases matter for B2B sales

Money changes behavior. A company that just raised capital is about to spend it. The board did not approve an increase to let the cash sit in a UBS savings account. They raised it because they have plans that require funding.

The company is growing

Capital increases fund expansion. Hiring, new offices, product development, equipment purchases, marketing campaigns. If you sell any of those things, the company just signaled that it has budget for them. The signal is particularly strong when the increase is large relative to the existing capital. A company going from CHF 100,000 to CHF 1,000,000 is making a structural move.

There may be new decision-makers

Fundraising often brings new investors onto the board. The SHAB notice will list anyone who gained or lost signing authority. New board members may not have existing vendor relationships. They are reachable in a way that someone who has been at the company for eight years is not.

The timing advantage is real

SHAB publications happen the same day the cantonal register processes the entry. There is no embargo. There is no delay between the legal filing and the public notice. If you see it on shab.ch at 7:30 in the morning, the rest of the world sees it at the same time. The salespeople who act on it today have an advantage over those who find it next week on LinkedIn or in a press clipping service.

In practice, most companies do not issue a press release about a capital increase. Mid-market and smaller firms rarely announce it at all. The SHAB is often the only place the information appears publicly.

How to read the key fields

The legal language in SHAB notices trips up people who are not used to reading them. Here is what to look for and what to ignore.

Share capital vs. contribution

The "Aktienkapital" (share capital) for an AG or "Stammkapital" (for a GmbH) is the registered capital. It is not the same as the total investment. A company can issue shares at a premium above par value. When the notice says the capital went from CHF 100,000 to CHF 200,000, the actual money that changed hands could be several multiples of that. For sales purposes, the registered-capital increase is a floor, not a ceiling.

Liberierung (payment status)

Swiss law allows shares to be partially paid up. If the notice says "Liberierung CHF 50,000" on a capital of CHF 200,000, only a quarter of the capital has been paid in. Full liberation ("voll liberiert") means the money is in the bank account now. Partial liberation means some of it is still owed. For qualifying the lead, fully paid-up capital is a stronger signal.

Conditional capital (bedingtes Kapital)

Some notices mention "bedingtes Aktienkapital" or "genehmigtes Kapital." Conditional capital is authorized but not yet issued. It exists so the board can issue shares in the future without calling another shareholder meeting. It means the company is planning further growth but has not executed it yet. Worth noting, but less immediately actionable than an ordinary increase.

Signatory changes

Look for lines starting with "Eingetragene Personen" or entries listing new names with their signing authority ("Einzelunterschrift", "Kollektivunterschrift zu zweien"). A new person with sole signing authority is likely in a senior role. If a new name appears alongside the capital increase, that person may be the investor or the new hire the money is paying for.

Timing: same-day publication

The SHAB publishes Monday through Friday. Each edition goes online at shab.ch early in the morning. The notices reflect entries that the cantonal commercial registers processed the previous business day.

This means the gap between the legal act and the public record is typically one business day. Compare that to other market signals. A job posting stays live for weeks before it tells you anything. A press release is written by the company and timed to suit its PR calendar. The SHAB notice is involuntary, prompt, and standardized.

You can also verify and enrich the SHAB notice by checking the full register entry on Zefix, the federal company index. Zefix links to the cantonal register extract, which contains the company's articles of association, purpose clause, and the complete list of people with signing authority. Between the two sources, you can build a decent profile of the company without leaving your desk.

Turning a capital increase into a call list

Reading the SHAB every morning is straightforward. Turning what you find into qualified calls takes a process.

Step 1: Filter by relevance

Most capital increases are not relevant to your business. A dental practice in Thun raising its capital from CHF 20,000 to CHF 30,000 is probably not your target account. Define your filters before you start reading. Geography, sector, and increase size are the obvious ones. Legal form matters too: if you sell enterprise software, you are likely looking at AGs with substantial increases, not sole proprietorships converting to GmbHs.

Step 2: Enrich with Zefix and the cantonal register

Once you have a short list, look up each company on zefix.admin.ch. The purpose clause (Zweck) tells you what the company does. The signatory list tells you who to call. If the capital increase came with new names, look those people up on LinkedIn. A new CFO or a new board member from a VC firm tells you something about how the money will be spent.

Step 3: Check for other signals

A capital increase rarely happens in isolation. The company may also be hiring (check jobs.ch, LinkedIn, or the company's own career page). It may have changed its purpose clause to reflect a new line of business. It may have moved its registered office to a larger city. Each additional signal strengthens the case that this company is in an active growth phase and is worth a call.

Step 4: Act the same day

The value of SHAB data degrades fast. On day one, you are the first person calling about the capital increase. By day five, someone on a news aggregator has picked it up and written a paragraph about it. By day ten, three of your competitors have called. Your conversion rate on day one is measurably higher than on day ten. Speed is the whole point.

The manual process and its limits

You can do everything above by hand. Visit shab.ch each morning, scan the mutations section for your cantons, read each capital-increase notice, look up the interesting ones on Zefix, cross-reference with job boards. It works. It takes about 45 minutes per day if you cover three or four cantons, longer if you cover all 26.

The problems are consistency and coverage. Skip a Monday and you miss the weekend filings. Go on holiday for a week and you come back to 80 unread notices. Cover only Zurich and Vaud and you miss the medtech startup in Basel-Stadt that just tripled its capital.

Some salespeople set up email alerts or RSS feeds from shab.ch. These help with consistency but not with filtering or enrichment. You still get every notice in your inbox, and you still have to look each one up on Zefix yourself.

How Prospex automates this

Prospex reads the SHAB every morning and extracts every capital increase across all 26 cantons. Each notice becomes a row in your feed, dated and linked to the original SHAB publication.

The feed is filterable by canton, by sector, and by the type of signal. Capital increases are one signal type among several. You can also see leadership changes, new company registrations, purpose-clause amendments, job postings, and website changes for the same companies. When a company raises capital and posts three engineering roles in the same week, both signals show up together.

Each company in the feed is enriched with its Zefix data: the registered purpose, the authorized signatories, the address, and the sector. You do not need to leave the feed to qualify the lead.

Prospex also runs every morning before you start work. There is no manual step. You open your feed, filter to capital increases in your territory, and start calling. The companies you see raised capital yesterday or the day before. Nobody else has a faster source, because the SHAB itself is the original record.

The practical test is simple: can you name every Swiss company that raised capital last week in your target cantons? If you can, you do not need this tool. If you cannot, the information exists and you are leaving it on the table.