The winners of the MyGalileoSolution & MyGalileoDrone were announced at Entrepreneurship Day, organised by the GSA in March 2021 to promote EGNSS-based creativity and business opportunities. The goal was also to raise awareness of the role of downstream space in achieving the EU’s common goals. The winners spoke about their experience during the competition and how it was helping to take their ideas to the next level.
During the press conference of the Entrepreneurship Day, the GSA Executive Director Rodrigo da Costa said that the winning teams had shown particular excellence in terms of innovation, use of Galileo, and market potential. “The downstream space market is expected to grow by over 70% in the next 10 years. This means reaching a value of 65 billion euros by the end of the decade,” da Costa stated, adding that one of the main goals of the MyGalileo competitions was to tap into this market potential.
Christoph Kautz, Acting Head of Unit for Development and Applications from the European Commission Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space noted the need for a strong dynamic and globally competitive EU space industry both upstream and downstream. “The future of the European space industry is a combination of strong institutional leadership and an industrial New Space” he said.
Galileo: faster, safer, greener
Giuseppe Tortora from the team Abzero (Italy), winner of first prize in the MyGalileoDrone competition for Nautilus, a unique tracking solution for the autonomous delivery of medical goods, highlighted the importance of a civil satellite navigation constellation. “This means we can rely on the system all the time. Galileo helps make our system simpler, faster, safer and greener,” he said, adding that the Nautilus solution needed a GNSS that could interact with its Artificial Intelligence to offer a reliable and safe system to guarantee on-time delivery.
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“The MyGalileoDrone competition is a push for us to continue our business and grow into a European start-up that can compete on the market,” Tortora said. His teammate Andrea Cannas said that the competition offered mentoring support during the development and a concrete funding opportunity, which is very important to further develop the product and service. “This provides us the opportunity to scale-up and achieve higher accuracy and a safer performance of our solution,” he said.
Bringing space solutions to customers
“Winning this competition is our biggest achievement so far,” said Matija Jasarov from VisionAnchor (Slovenia). VisionAnchor won the first prize in Track 1 (from idea to prototype) of the MyGalileoSolution competition and is the world's first video anchor monitoring system for boats.
“We saw a multi-million-euro niche for our solution, which allows you to know what is happening underwater at all times and makes it possible to protect underwater vegetation, so it is good both for boat owners and for the environment,” he said. Jasarov said that the GSA support provided through the MyGalileoSolution competition would help get the solution to its first customers because we now have a prototype.
Winner of first prize in Track 2 of MyGalileoSolution (from prototype to product) was 10Lines (Estonia), an autonomous parking lot marking solution. Highlighting the environmental benefits of the solution, team member Janno Paas said that the 10Lines solution is stripe parking lots 7 times faster with robots. This is allowing to save CO2. “GNSS positioning is a very important element of our solution,” he said.
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Paas noted in particular the value of the mentoring support received during the competition. “We received a lot of help from the MyGalileoSolution team and have enhanced our standards and the reliability of our solution, as a result. “The success validates what we do. We hope to be out there and visible soon,” said his teammate Tarmo Prints.
What’s next?
Speaking at the conference, Kautz presented the Cassini initiative actions to support young entrepreneurs. He mentioned the Cassini business accelerator, which would help start-ups to develop a business plan and get start-up funding. “We want to give start-ups access to the sharpest business accelerators in the EU,” he added.
The GSA Executive Director stressed that the winners had demonstrated why these competitions are important. “They give the push to take ideas to the next level. We will continue to accompany all the companies that have applied to the competition, they will continue to be visible on our website, we will also open up new opportunities in the future,” he said. Da Costa added that, with the inclusion of the commercial utilization of Copernicus under the umbrella of the European Union Space Programme Agency (EUSPA), future opportunities would also target synergies between the various elements of the space programme.
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