Startups at ESA’s Industry Space Days

The business of space is about collaboration and bringing together potential customers, investors and business partners to help the European space industry flourish.

Organised by ESA’s SME Office, this biennial event is now on its eleventh edition. Previously, it gathered 1700 participants from 800 companies and institutions from Europe’s space industry.

It provides a forum for thousands of pre-planned business meetings, presentations from ESA directors and industry leaders, and a platform to share ideas and create collaboration for new commercial uses of space.

ESA BIC Village

This year, ESA celebrates the 20-year anniversary of its Business Incubation Centre network which has grown to 30 Business Incubation Centres (ESA BICs) across 21 European Participating States giving business support to about 200 new space-based start-up companies each year.

With 170 stands in the Industry Space Days (ISD) exhibition hall, six booths are reserved for selected upcoming startups in an area called the ‘ESA BIC Village’.

Of the 69 startups which applied to their BIC for the chance to occupy a booth, 24 were selected for the village. Each startup is allotted half a day to present their products, services or innovations.

During the event, corporate partners of ESA’s Partnership Initiative for Commercialisation (EPIC) will have the opportunity to schedule meetings with these startups.

Startups

Startups in the village are involved in upstream, downstream or technology transfer activities.

Nebumind which is registered with ESA BIC Bavaria in Germany uses its digital twin software to help factories collect, analyse and visualise their manufacturing data to increase manufacturing transparency and raise the quality of their products.

“We have an in-depth understanding of production and manufacturing methods in the aerospace industry which has helped us finetune our software to suit this sector. Having a booth at this event allows us to present our product to a lot more potential customers,” commented Caroline Albert, CEO and Co-founder at Nebumind.

Omanos Analytics, based in Glasgow, Scotland and registered with ESA BIC UK, provides space-based information that supports sustainable development.

“We combine downstream Earth observation data with ground data sources from local communities to identify and monitor environmental and social impact across domains such as industry, climate resilience and conflict,” said Celia Davies, Co-Founder and Director at Omanos Analytics.  

“We will showcase our two core technologies, QuickBeam and Askr, and hope to gain an updated perspective on customer needs and profiles, along with finding potential partnership and sales opportunities. We’re also looking forward to learning more from the wider sector,” she added.

Italian startup Nautilus was selected for the ESA BIC incubation programme supporting companies in Milan in February. This enabled it to accelerate the development of NEMO, the Nautilus proprietary software for flight dynamics operations in deep space.

“Joining an event like this brings us to the centre of space business in Europe. At the ISD we hope to establish new connections, showcase our offering, and gain insights into the latest industry trends.

“We’ll promote our flight dynamics services which suit a wide range of missions from deep space to low Earth orbit, and our NEMO software which simplifies and automates tasks, in particular the orbit determination process and manoeuvre planning activities,” said Alessandro Morselli, CTO at Nautilus.

A list of all the companies with booths at the ISD is available on the ISD website.

Register to attend ISD 2024

For further information on the ISD 2024 event and to register, visit the Industry Space Days website.