There is a clear need to stimulate European start-ups and SMEs in the robotics sector to develop novel and innovative technology with the potential to open new markets at the international level. The aim of the Robot Union acceleration program is to discover, support and fund innovative projects in the robotics industry.
Robot Union will address the two major barriers that hinder the development and market uptake of robotics technologies for entrepreneurs and start-ups: the elevated setup costs and the lack of awareness of potential benefits of robotics.
This is a unique opportunity for the SMEs to use robotics and enter the world of artificial intelligence. “The Robot Union accelerator will bring the top researchers and entrepreneurs together to stimulate new robotics innovations in Europe”, says the Technical Coordinator of the project Ali Muhammad at VTT.
The 20 start-ups and SMEs, selected in each of the 2 open calls, to be launched by Robot Union, will enter into an acceleration program of 6 to 12 months.
Each selected company will receive up to 223,000 euros equity free for its initial funding stages.
The best performing companies participating in the programme, will obtain an additional 1 million euros of private investment from the Chrysalix Venture Capital and Odense Seed & Venture.
Wide networks
The programme will bring together research centres, large corporations and innovative start-ups and SMEs by overcoming the elevated costs associated with market entry and the development of specific technologies.
There will be an extensive technical support provided by the leading institutes in robotics R&D in Europe: VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, the Danish Technological Institute, TU Delft, Tecnalia and PIAP.
The participants will also have access to a wide international network of recognized mentors from Google, Airbnb, Ikea, Yahoo, Prisa and Microsoft, among others.
The entrepreneurs will also have direct contact with leaders of the manufacturing, agri-food, health and civil infrastructure industries via the participation of organizations including MADE, Ferrovial Servicios, Arla Foods and Fenin.
Robot Union will further boost the visibility of start-ups and SMEs in the robotics sector through their participation in top international events such as 4YFN Barcelona, Slush and the Web Summit. It will be publicly presented for the first time during Barcelona Mobile Week and 4YFN 2018, both events are organized by Mobile World Capital.
Its first call for start-ups and SMEs is planned for launch in April 2018.
The acceleration project is launched under the framework of the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Programme.
PeakSpan Capital leads, joined by Vertex Ventures and Horizon Capital, as commercial and operations leaders…
New Sinamics G series creates a seamless platform for continuous-motion applications Security by Design helps…
See Samtec’s solutions in Hall B2, Booth 107 Samtec, Inc., the service leader in the…
Acquisition adds NeuReality's AI inference technology and world-class systems and silicon engineering team, compressing the…
The edgeRX Starter predictive maintenance (PdM) solution is now available at DigiKey.com DigiKey, the global…
The global distributor will also demo top products from Arduino, DFRobot, SparkFun and more DigiKey,…