The Repsol Foundation Entrepreneurs Fund has announced the four ideas and the four projects selected to become part of the Fund of Entrepreneurs in its 6th edition.
This business accelerator, launched six years ago, aims to support the most innovative projects in energy and mobility, and to enable them to reach the market as soon as possible.
The event was held at the Repsol Campus and was attended by Antonio Brufau, President of Repsol and Repsol Foundation and Ignacio Egea, Vice-President of the Repsol Foundation.
The start-ups selected in this sixth edition of the Entrepreneurs Fund have been selected from among the 354 proposals received. After an exhaustive evaluation and selection process, eleven proposals became finalists. Of these eleven, an expert jury has selected the eight most innovative, four in the category of projects and four in the category of ideas.
The projects that will start the acceleration program will receive up to 144,000 euros for one year and the ideas will be supported with 2,000 euros per month for 12 months. In addition to economic support, the projects and ideas will be accompanied by a team of mentors during the acceleration phase, and will also receive technical and legal advice, specialized training appropriate to their needs and access to potential investors.
Selected ideas and projects
All the selected proposals stand out for their degree of innovation in the field of efficiency, digitization and new materials in the energy and chemical industry; in the distributed generation and storage of electricity, as well as in the field of mobility.
The selected proposals, which come from both Spain and other countries, are the following:
Ideas:
Finboot (Barcelona): digital platform to automate the way of doing banking transactions, using the so-called smart contracts.
Inanoenergy (Portugal): autonomous micro-generators that use the residual energy to generate electricity, especially to feed the sensors that monitor the pipe networks in industrial installations.
Manganese Flow Batteries (UK): ultra-efficient manganese and hydrogen based batteries that provide energy for longer and at lower cost.
Projects:
CE-BOND (Norway): device to improve the integrity and safety of oil and gas wells, providing correct cementing.
Muon systems (Bilbao): a muon beam tomography system to check blast furnaces and combustion equipment without stopping production. This initiative was supported by the Entrepreneurs Fund as an idea in the previous call.
Place to plug (Tarragona): a unique and collaborative platform for the management and use of electric car recharging points. This online platform allows drivers to locate and activate both public and private recharging points from a mobile phone.
The Entrepreneurs Fund in figures
As part of its commitment to a more sustainable energy future, Fundación Repsol launched the Entrepreneurs Fund in 2011 with the aim of promoting talent and supporting the best technological and sustainable solutions in the field of energy and mobility.
Since its launch, 36 start-ups have been accelerated, to which these eight, newly selected, initiatives are now being added. The group of accelerated companies has obtained almost 16,5 million euros of public and private investment, have made more than 140 prototypes and in 2016 alone, invoiced 2 million euros.
