A student team at Luleå University of Technology recently won a top 5 placement in Venture Cup’s IDEA competition regional finals. The students behind RIT-sponsored startup eSat aim to make satellites more accessible, an idea that was first born in the Space Innovation Summer programme.

Venture Cup is Sweden’s biggest competition for business ideas and startups. Their IDEA competition takes place in the fall and awards the best business ideas in early stages. This year the competition saw over 300 contributions from more than 450 ambitious entrepreneurs in the northern region.

Among the top 5 winners were eSat – a business idea born with entrepreneurs Elisabeth Funck and Mattias Raudonis who aim to make space and satellites more accessible. They seek to accomplish this by clustering a hundred or more micro satellites and then launching them all in one go.

– The idea is to make prototyping satellites much smaller, allowing them to be launched more often and for less money, which makes space more accessible to universities and their students, smaller companies, and the public. We hope that this can change the view of space as an inaccessible and expensive area reserved for big companies, explains Mattias.

On winning the award he says:

– We are very happy to have received this first award for our idea. It shows a broader desire for a more accessible space.

The next step for eSat is to successfully launch a prototype and to take the idea to a broader audience.

It started in Space Innovation Summer

The idea first saw light in Space Innovation Summer, an idea development program sponsored by RIT2021 and organized by project partners LTU Business. It was developed with support from LTU Business’ idea coach Christopher Frisk.

– It’s been a true pleasure to work with eSat. They push the boundaries of satellite accessibility, says Christopher.

– It’s been crucial for eSat to define and articulate a strong value proposition as their plan for commercialization requires pre-signings. When introducing new and complex technology to a broad market you need to be successful in making the offer quick and easy to grasp, he adds.

We give our biggest congratulations to eSat on winning the well-deserved award!

 

See Mattias Raudonis pitch for eSat on Venture Cup Sweden’s YouTube channel