Düsseldorf/Berlin/Munich — Four Swiss companies are among the ten nominees for The Spark technology award: Jua, terralayr, Proxima Fusion, and Sphere Energy. It is awarded by *Handelsblatt* and McKinsey to startups that have the potential to bring about fundamental and sustainable change in markets.
(CONNECT) The German business newspaper“Handelsblatt”and the consulting firm McKinsey have announced the finalists for their Spark Award – The 2026 Technology Award Announced. Among them are Jua.ai from Zurich and terralayr from Zug, two startups founded in Switzerland in 2022. In addition, two German companies—Proxima Fusion (Munich/Villigen AG) and Sphere Energy (Grossaitingen/Zurich)—are represented; both maintain important subsidiaries in Switzerland.
This year marks the 11th time the Spark Award has been presented to exceptional and innovative startups from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland whose ideas have the potential to fundamentally and sustainably transform markets. The awards ceremony will take place on November 5 in Munich.
Jua.ai is working on creating a universal simulation engine for the physical world. The startup already operates a weather forecasting model, which is now being expanded to cover the entire Earth system—for example, to model fluid dynamics around vehicles and turbines and to simulate wildfires and floods.
Terralayr, headquartered in Zug with a branch office in Berlin, develops and operates large-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) and received 192 million euros in financing in 2026. Terralayr is not only the fastest-growing BESS operator in Germany, but its LAYR platform also makes energy flexibility tradable and scalable. This contributes to grid stability and helps balance electricity prices.
Proxima Fusion is Europe's highest-valued stellarator company and the first spin-off from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. In 2026, it received 411 million euros in funding for its development of fusion power plants based on QI-HTS stellarators. At its facility at the Switzerland Innovation Park Innovaare (Villigen), Proxima Fusion has been working with the Paul Scherrer Institute since 2024 to develop high-temperature superconducting magnet technology for the stellarator.
Sphere Energy has created an operating system and an associated data platform that use artificial intelligence to make industrial product development almost as fast as software development. To do this, the startup combines distributed development data from test benches or simulations with field data and makes it usable.
Also nominated are the Berlin-based startups Apheris, deepset, and Qdrant, as well as Focused Energy (Darmstadt), Lidrotec (Bochum), and Q.ANT (Stuttgart). ce/mm
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