ESA BIC Czech Republic presented its startups at Space2Business30/11/2022|Press releasesThis year, five unique start-ups using specific space technologies and satellite data have been selected for the Prague and Brno branches of the European Space Agency's business incubator. Since the beginning of this incubation programme, i.e. since 2016, 43 start-ups have been supported. These start-ups performed together with those already incubated in the so-called demo day where they introduced themselves to the space industry and at the competition organised as part of the Space2Business event, which is part of the Czech Space Week festival. The start-up World from Space won the national round and the European award went to the start-up SPiN. "The Czech space industry is growing every year. Currently, there are more than 50 businesses and 20 research institutes directly involved in space projects and dozens more involved in subcontracting. I would also like to highlight the success of the Czech Presidency of the Council of the EU, during which we managed to reach an agreement with the European Parliament and the European Commission on the proposal for a regulation on secure connectivity, the EU satellite megaconstellation, now named IRIS. Its mission will be to provide secure satellite communications for government and non-government purposes," says transport minister Martin Kupka. Since 2021, the incubator has born the name ESA BIC Czech Republic and combines the activities of the Prague and Brno branches. Since its founding, the incubator has supported 43 start-ups, of which 30 are based in Prague and 13 in Brno. The field of activity of every start-up is very different. Almost half of them focus on satellite navigation and Earth observation. Other areas include unmanned aerial vehicles and drones, space technology, software simulations and the ground segment. Currently, 13 start-ups are incubating, the rest have already completed their incubation. The most important companies that have been incubated so far are without any doubt Festka, Vrgineers, Dronetag, Spacemanic, World from Space, GROUNDCOM, Varistar or Hydronaut. All supported start-ups, including information about their projects, can be found on the website esa-bic.cz. "As part of this year's Czech Space Week festival and the two-day Space2Business event, we organised an international start-up competition. This is a completely unique event in the Czech and European environment and is attended by the best European space start-ups. It was the first of such competitions in which start-ups from different ESA BICs, of which there are already 26 in Europe, are competing. The competition showed that we do have start-ups in Europe that are among the world's top," says Tereza Kubicová, Deputy for Technology Development at CzechInvest and founder of the Czech Space Week festival. On the first day of the event, 28 November, the national round of the competition took place. Start-ups incubated from ESA BIC Czech Republic were the participants. The winner was the start-up World from Space, which advanced to the international round held the following day. "Space2business is a great opportunity for us to get to know our customers and competitors from abroad. If we want to be a successful global company, we need to have strong local foundations and events like this help us build these foundations. We are happy to have the opportunity to start cooperation with businesses with a strong market position and become an integral part of the Czech space industry," said co-founder Jan Labohý. The national round was also a demo day to introduce not only the starts-up already incubated but also newly selected start-ups that are just starting their incubation. Five start-ups were selected in 2022. The first one is Statotest from Liberec that has established a branch in Prague and offers long-term monitoring of building safety using data from state-of-the-art sensors, IoT technologies and in the future also navigation satellites. Corac Engineering, a Prague-based company, provides access and communication between satellites and ground stations. The second Prague-based start-up is ICEE.Space Czechia doing analogous missions for simulating space flights. In addition to the two Prague-based start-ups, two Brno-based start-ups were also selected: SPACERACE and VisionCraft. SPACERACE is developing electromechanical components that will be used for ground testing of mechanical parts of satellites. VisionCraft is developing among other things, the RoadVisNet system designed to detect the road surface based on IoT data. This information can then be used for example for analysing the condition of the road or identifying occupied parking spaces. The international round was attended by start-ups from European ESA BICs, namely Austria, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Sweden and Hungary, as well as start-ups that have succeeded in competitions organised by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Union Space Programme Agency (EUSPA). The winner was SPiN (Space Products and Innovation), a German start-up incubated at ESA BIC Bavaria, which took home a prize amounting to EUR 10 000. The activity of the Czech Space Incubator started in 2016 under the name ESA BIC Prague. Its aim was to support start-ups working with space technologies. Start-ups can either utilise existing space technologies and satellite data for the “non-space” industry or introduce new innovative technologies to the space market. The operator of this programme is the CzechInvest Agency for Enterprise and Investment Promotion. Other partners that have supported the establishment of ESA BIC include the Ministry of Transport, responsible for space activities, the Ministry of Industry and Trade and the City of Prague. In 2018 the second branch of ESA BIC was opened in Brno, which is also operated by CzechInvest, and its local partners are the South Moravian Innovation Centre (JIC) and the South Moravian Region.