Project description
Innovative support for European robotics companies
Robotics has made its way into various industries, including manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare and civil infrastructure. The EU-funded RobotUnion project aims to establish a unique and innovative acceleration programme to bring together research centres, business schools, large corporations and investors to support robotics companies operating in non-traditional markets such as healthcare, agrifood, civil engineering and manufacturing. The project's priority is to provide assistance to the 20 most promising European robotics companies that have introduced disruptive innovations to the robotics market. The goal is to reduce the costs associated with developing specific technologies for market entry. Additionally, the RobotUnion Community of 1 200 users will help promote the advantages in non-traditional markets.
Objective
RobotUnion will discover, support and fund 20 European Superstar Scaleups confirmed by top VC investors and global corporates of 4 new market domains for robotics: manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, and civil infrastructure.
40 companies developing research will be selected out of a pan-European deal flow of 300 Scaleups through 2 Open Calls. The top 20 will join an acceleration program that will help them progress from TRL4 to TRL7 onwards. This 2 up to 16-months program will provide them with technical and non-technical support services:
• Ph-D in residence type of service (the so-called Technical Mentors and Researchers-in-Residence will provide access to knowledge in abilities such as configurability, adaptability, motion, manipulation, decisional autonomy, dependability, interaction, perception, and cognitive ability)
• Entrepreneur-in-residence type of support (provided by a pool of world-class training and high-level business mentoring complemented by fundraising mentors)
• A voucher scheme to provide access to facilities and technical services across Europe
• Up to €200K of free-equity funding for the best-in-class companies.
8 best-in-class companies will start a fundraising campaign led by the VCs and platforms in the consortium leveraging the €8M of public funding with additional €8M of private investment.
To this end RobotUnion counts on 5 premier-class RTOs specialized in Robotics at European Level to provide technical support; 4 corporates enabling access to new markets: MADE in Manufacturing, ARLA food in Agri-food, FENIN in Healthcare and FERROVIAL in Infrastructure; CHRYSALIX and ODENSE S&V, as VCs of references in robotics, to lead the fundraising campaigns.
Business support partners are FMWC (dissemination), FBA (open call management), ISDI (business acceleration) and BLM (fundraising and access to corporates).
RobotUnion will help demonstrate how Europe can lead disruption around Robotics and turn the EU into the EU of entrepreneurial states
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
02150 Espoo
Finland