Nuspec Oil among startups to receive funding from Fundación Repsol

Fundación Repsol announced the five startups it has selected for the eleventh call of its business accelerator Entrepreneurs Fund, including UK’s Nuspec Oil, which  is focused on providing an alternative that addresses the issue of sustainability and security of supply to mineral-based oils. 

The five startups were chosen after an exhaustive evaluation and selection process from a total of 420 proposals received from 69 countries.

These projects will receive financial support of up to EUR100,000 (USD100,344) for one year, as well as the advice of expert technologists from Spanish multinational energy and petrochemical company Repsol and a team of professional mentors with extensive experience and knowledge of both the energy sector and business management. In addition, they will have the opportunity to validate their initiatives in a real environment, through pilot tests at Repsol’s own facilities and industrial plants, or carry out concept tests at the Repsol Technology Lab, the technology and innovation center.

The General Director of Fundación Repsol, António Calçada, and the Secretary of State for Digitization and Artificial Intelligence, Carme Artigas, participated in the event to present the companies incubated by the Entrepreneurs Fund.

In his speech, Calçada highlighted the need and the priority that must be given to science, innovation, digitisation and technology to achieve the proposed goals. I have argued that “the energy transition implies industrial and technological transition, that any transition needs time and in this sense the 2030 Agenda, the new fit for 55 challenge and the great challenge of decarbonisation by 2050 need pragmatism in the strategy, in the times and in the costs,” he said.

Artigas pointed out that “we are building a green and digital Spain that is part of the spirit of reconstruction, for which we need all the young talent of our country and the strength of the innovative entrepreneurship that is represented here today.”

11th edition attracts 400+ startups

The eleventh edition of the Entrepreneurs Fund has generated great interest both nationally and internationally and more than 400 applications have been received from 69 countries, which have stood out for their quality, especially those focused on reducing emissions, through carbon capture, use and storage ( CCUS) technologies, the production and use of hydrogen and biofuels, the application of digitization and artificial intelligence to improve the efficiency of industry and natural solutions to reduce pollution. carbon footprint.

The five companies that are going to be accelerated by the Entrepreneurs Fund as of September are:

• ADVANCED IONICS (Wisconsin, U.S.A.): Focused on the manufacture of scalable hydrogen electrolysers for operation at temperatures above ambient temperature, in order to produce low-cost hydrogen using the heat of industrial processes and thus reduce greenhouse gas emissions. carbon for heavy industry. Its electrolysers can reduce electricity needs by 50%, offering new doors to decarbonization as well as reducing the high costs associated with green hydrogen.
• GEFOREST (Castilla La Mancha, Spain): Produces digital twins and parameterizes forests using LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology. LiDAR is an active remote sensor that emits laser signals to calculate distances based on the recoil signal of the laser pulses emitted by the sensor. Geforest is the first company that has validated LiDAR technology in forests in Spain, with data management, information traceability and parameterization through models. Through mobile terrestrial LiDAR, a parameterization of each tree and a very detailed 3D reconstruction of complex forests can be achieved.The data obtained will be compared with aerial LiDAR data and satellite data, which will make it possible to obtain a complete Digital Twin of the forest, with low cost and high quality.
• JUNGLE AI (Lisbon, Portugal):It offers software solutions based on Artificial Intelligence to identify and solve the poor performance of electromechanical assets in wind and solar farms and production lines. They are experts in Machine Learning (ML) and in the electromechanical field. Its unsupervised ML models learn the normal behavior of the asset’s sensors based on raw historical data and do not require labeled data to train, unlike competitors. Jungle offers two SaaS (Software as a Service) products: Canopy, for asset monitoring and optimization, and Toucan, for energy forecasting of renewable assets. Canopy uses machine learning on sensor data to learn the actual behavior of electromechanical assets.
• NUSPEC OIL (York, United Kingdom): Development of renewable oils of biological origin from a registered and highly thermostable rapeseed oil based on polymerization processes. Nuspec Oil is focused on providing an alternative that addresses the issue of sustainability and security of supply to mineral based oils which, along with environmental and regulatory requirements, are forcing away toxic mineral oils.
• SOLATOM (Valencia, Spain): Sustainable alternative to steam boilers in industrial processes, without producing emissions and at a fixed cost. They develop solar boilers using Fresnel concentration collectors to produce steam in industrial processes. The boilers are placed in parallel with the conventional boilers in the factories and each kWh of solar steam they produce means one less kWh of gas. Their modular approach allows them to be competitive in factories, while their competitors focus on large solar plant projects, making them less competitive when it comes to integrating with industrial processes.

Driving the future of energy

Fundación Repsol has been supporting entrepreneurship for 11 years with a focus on new technologies in the energy field and has become a recognized and effective initiative for promoting the development of the most innovative solutions, thus helping to accelerate the energy transition.

Since its launch in 2011, the Entrepreneurs Fund has contributed to the development of 70 innovative startups in fields related to low carbon emission technologies, circular economy, sustainable mobility or digitization for the optimization and control of processes in the energy industry.

Throughout these years, the companies accelerated by Fundación Repsol have developed more than 850 prototypes, have registered nearly 230 patents and have obtained more than EUR175 million (USD175.6 million) in public and private funding.

In this latest call, 420 proposals have been received, mainly from Spain, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Nigeria and Portugal.