The Business Incubation Centre of the European Space Agency (ESA BIC) in Portugal, coordinated by the Pedro Nunes Institute (IPN), has opened new applications for startups with business projects based on space industry technologies and data.

The programme envisages supporting up to 12 national companies per year, each with a financial incentive of 50 thousand euros and access to technical and business support.

This year, ESA BIC Portugal increased its network from three to 15 incubators throughout the country, including the Azores and Madeira, with the aim of supporting companies that integrate space technology into land applications, in areas such as health, energy, transport, security and urban life, but also companies that intend to enter the commercial space market.

The selected companies can develop work in the following incubators: Startup Braga; IPN Incubadora (Coimbra); NONAGON, TERINOV and Incuba+ (S. Miguel, Terceira and Santa Maria, Azores); PACT (Évora); PARKUrbis and UBImedical (Covilhã); SANJOTEC (São João da Madeira); Startup Lisboa; Startup Madeira (Funchal); UA Incubator (Aveiro); UALG TEC START (Faro); UPTEC and CEiiA (Porto and Matosinhos).

In the last five years, when it had only three poles, ESA BIC Portugal incubated 30 companies, created more than 100 new jobs and generated a total turnover of about five million euros.

Companies such as Stratio, which applies space sector technology in heavy vehicles to predict and anticipate the occurrence of wear and tear and serious breakdowns, have already passed through ESA BIC Portugal; Theia, which is responsible for creating an application that allows the state of road infrastructures to be monitored using satellite data; Tesselo, which has developed technology capable of monitoring the state of agricultural crops and the health of forests and woodlands using satellite images, or Undersee, which has a device capable of turning any boat into a maritime satellite for the purpose of environmental monitoring.
In 2014, the Pedro Nunes Institute became the first Space Solutions Centre of the European Space Agency (ESA), among the 21 existing centres in Europe, to bring together the three technology transfer programmes promoted by ESA: ESA BIC Portugal, the Innovation Partners Network and the Applications Ambassadors Platform (ESA Business Applications).

Startup Braga, InvestBraga's innovation hub, was recently selected to join ESA BIC Portugal's incubator network.

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