On December 16, 2020, ESA Space Solutions Center Portugal celebrated its 6th anniversary.
We launched the project in November 2014, at the Lisbon Science Pavilion, with the presence of institutional partners such as ESA, FCT, the Ministry of Science and the Ministry of Economy. The aim was simple, to build and boost a dowstream and new space space community in Portugal. With academia, incubators, investors and public entities, our stakeholders, and focused on scouting talent and helping makers and founders to make it happen. The list of organizations which have supported us along this path is too long to be fully mentioned here, but one has to highlight ESA, Portugal Space, FCT, Anacom, Centro Regional Coordination and Development Commission, University of Coimbra, DNA Cascais and UPTEC incubators that were essential in this 1st phase.
After 5 years, the first phase of the program, we have 30 firms founded and supported, more than 120 jobs created, 4.6 M euros in annual turnover (data from 2019) with 78% of this for exports. Regarding the space-to-Earth technology transfer (ESA Brokers), we had 6 success stories recognized by ESA and almost 30 space technologies identified for commercialization. And in the Ambassador Platform, in the last 5 years we support 16 projects (feasibility studies) that achieved a private investment of 2.5M €.
We can therefore say that there is a clear “product-market fit” and we are a scale-up now 🙂
And now, as we finished 2020, we have 12 more companies in the portfolio (most of them created this December) and 15 (fifteen!) Incubators that have joined the ESA BIC network.
To read the full article and know all the details about the online event, visit: https://bit.ly/2JhJAE0
