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After events in The Hague and Berlin, the Impact Competition – powered by ImpactCity and Unknown Group – travels south to Lisbon. Over the last decade, the city’s impact startup scene has blossomed owing to governmental support and attractive conditions for foreign investment. We challenged Portuguese impact startups to step up to the plate and grab the spotlight to scale their solution and expand their impact – and they answered in droves. Here are the 20 startups selected for dealmaking meetings with our selection of investors, corporates and governments:
What They Do: Agri Marketplace is a B2B cloud-based digital marketplace company that specializes in utilizing e-commerce, app development, and traceability with blockchain to create more efficiency and transparency in food distribution and along different channels of the AgriFood sector.
Their Impact: Their technology facilitates the matching of supply and demand over alternative and specific agricultural markets. This makes their digital platform an easier, faster and more transparent process of buying and selling agri-products.
What They Do: Founded in 2016, Agristarbio wants to develop the best solutions for the production of sustainable organomineral fertilizer from organic waste creating the most economic value to its customers and being profitable at the same time.
Their Impact: Agristarbio developed the innovative, ground-breaking environmental-friendly technology that transforms organic waste into a game changing efficient organomineral fertiliser without any CO2 or CH4 emissions in the process.
What They Do: Amnis Pura is one of the first companies dedicated to the development and commercialization of hydrogen technologies in Europe, including PEM Fuel Cells and Pressure Swing Adsorption units for hydrogen purification.
Their Impact: They are working in hydrogen technologies, helping to create a carbon free energy system.
What They Do: Aquaponics Iberia are developing a project called Fish n’ Greens, which aims to produce and deliver the ultra-organic, local fish and vegetables that the European Consumer demands, embracing the “Farm to Fork” strategy and contributing to make Europe’s food system the gold standard for sustainability.
Their Impact: Their Fish n’Greens project is done in the most sustainable and productive way through our urban aquaponics technology, generating fresh, high quality ASC certified fish protein and greens.
What They Do: Bandora is a virtual facility manager fully dedicated to operate and maintain buildings. Their technologies enable buildings to operate at best efficiency, keep spaces healthy, look for optimal comfort zone and detect/notifies anomalies in buildings.
Their Impact: Bandora fine-tune the building setup to the real needs of the building and its occupants, saving up to 40% O&M costs, maintaining the optimal comfort point and improves in 150% the performance of its occupants and reduces mistakes by 44%.
What They Do: BBKW is a drying solutions company and started it’s activity about 4 years ago in the area of aromatic herbs, with the hybrid BBLOX dryer. With this solution farmers started to have a drying with an efficient and low cost system, obtaining high quality results, and also had a great expansion in the fruit and mushrrom and lately cannabis, however, the software BBKW, brain of the dryer, can be applied to any drying need.
Their Impact: The BBKW program provides the solution in terms of energy consumption as well as storage. The software can reduce energy costs by up to 70% and dry the product with a high level of quality.
What They Do: BeON designs and manufactures unique plug in solar kits that greatly reduces the costs of domestic solar. Our unique offering allows homeowners to simply install solar by plugging the unit into any domestic socket. They have created an app that connects with the solar kit that also gives insight to the consumer of the energy production.
Their Impact: Delivering the opportunity for people to create their own green energy giving reliable clean safe energy.
What They Do: BladeInsight delivers data-driven decision-making to the wind industry with cradle-to-grave, AI-powered digital O&M management solutions for wind turbine blades, including autonomous drone inspections and powerful asset management software.
Their Impact: By allying powerful technology with blade expertise, BladeInsight provides visibility over the state of wind turbine blades and actionable insights in order for more assertive decision-making on blade maintenance, driving down the cost of blade O&M.
What They Do: Blue Oasis Technology Lda. provide ocean recovery and revitalisation solutions by using civil engineering and offshore knowledge building large scalable engineered reef structures. These structures will prevent coastal areas from erosion, stimulate coral and marine growth helping in absorbing carbon, generating oxygen and stimulating biodiversity.
Their Impact: Over time, their reef structures deliver a variety of revenue generating profitable income streams whilst creating local sustainable economies.
What They Do: Ecofoot specialize in textile chemistry solutions. They aim to solve ecological and sustainability issues that have been around the textile dyeing industry for decades, such as reactive dyeing of cotton or polyester/ cotton blends, and indigo dyeing.
Their Impact: Their use of H2COLOR-AUX in the textile dyeing process allows reduces the water consumption up to 70% while drastically lowering the pollution from textile industry. Energy use is minimzed in the industry and therefore lowers CO2 emissions whiile at the same time contributing to a cleaner air by reducing Nitrogen Oxide gases and particles that are emitted by the burning of fuel.
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What They Do: genviot develops sustainable irrigation systems for agriculture and landscape.
Their Impact: Their systems reduce the consumption and waste of water and energy up to 50%, using sensor networks and machine learning to calculate in real time the water needs and best irrigation times for each field and adjusting the irrigation system without human interaction.
What They Do: Heaboo was founded in 2015 in the business incubator of the University of Aveiro to develop a conceptual solution for heat storage optimization based in phase changing materials, an idea that was drafted by the co-founder that holds a PhD degree in power engineering and a wide experience in R&D.
Their Impact: They offer different products based in the developed technology for water and energy efficiency improvement in buildings.
What They Do: InanoEnergy develops and provides innovative solutions for IoT and energy harvesting, using flexible and highly efficient thermoelectric and piezoelectric micro-/nano-generators tailored to the needs of private businesses, and creating innovative technology that provide big advantages to the national industry. They also provide consulting services (including research and development) for large national and international companies seeking specific and custom-made applications.
Their Impact: The deployment of their technology in well operations could drastically reduce maintenance costs required to switch the batteries and enable the well to produce more barrels by decreasing inactivity time due to maintenance shutdown.
What They Do: Standby losses of electric water heaters are equivalent to the emissions of 2 mio cars, only in the EU. Klugit smart plug made from recycled plastics converts your water heater into a smart device that prioritises renewable energy to heat up your water.
Their Impact: Klugit’s smart mode reduces up to -19% energy and water consumption, but more importantly uses water heaters to store clean energy, helping to solve one of renewables biggest problems – energy storage.
What They Do: Meight developed a platform to help in fleet management, objectives control, routes and consumptions. The idea received an R&D grant from Portugal 2020 and, after their first successful pilot projects, it is now focused on solving the issues in logistics and transportation sectors.
Their Impact: The Road Freight sector has failed to solve lasting problems such as driving efficiency and safety with Fleet Managers. The role of the truck driver in this sector has been long marginalized. Truck drivers are accountable for the greatest operating cost, Fuel (30%), and their studies have demonstrated they can reduce it by up to 20%, only if provided with continuous support. CO2 emissions that contribute greatly to greenhouse effects experience similar reductions.
What They Do: Omniflow provides sustainable smart city solutions. Their Smart IoT Lamppost, powered by wind and solar, transforms a regular street light into a sustainable smart infrastructure capable of housing multiple added value services like, 5G small-cell, Surveillance, Smart car-parking & Smartwalk, Computer vision, V2X, EV charging, IoT sensors/gateways, Audio for public communication. All their units have an IoT system that monitors and control all devices through a dedicated software.
Their Impact: Avoiding CO2 emissions and expanding digitalization.
What They Do: Pavnext has developed a solution to turn cities safer, smarter and more sustainable. It consists of a road pavement energy harvesting device that reduces the vehicles speed without any driver action and produces clean energy from vehicles wasted energy delivered to the pavement. Also, it monitors traffic and energy activity, generating data for cities which allows optimizing traffic flows and energy consumptions.
Their Impact: They reduce CO2 emissions associated to energy production, by producing energy in the urban environment, recycling the energy wasted from vehicles in their speed reduction process.
What They Do: SCUBIC is a water tech and data analytics company specialized on the development of real-time decision support platforms and smart digital twins, for the optimal operation of water supply networks in the water-energy nexus. SCUBIC combines data analytics with energy efficiency strategies and hydraulic modelling to create real value with data for clients.
Their Impact: By developing real-time solutions to manage water networks in the water-energy nexus they can reduce the cost of water production, increase water quality and reduce the carbon footprint for clients.
What They Do: Integrated Logistics framework to automate cargo transportation by connecting vehicles, cargo inside and the possible clients. The autonomous orchestration of processes reduces waste and creates optimized logistics to salvage 1 Trillion USD per year.
Their Impact: Reclaiming 30% of the food that today is wasted in the supply-chains that can be saved, thus creating enough food for up to 2 billion additional people.
What They Do: Wakaru’s main research area is the design and development of intelligent systems extracting knowledge from synchronous and asynchronous, heterogenous massive event and data flows in real time for immediate or differed decisions. They do this through a combination of technologies and techniques: IoT sensors and actuators, big data, complex event processing engines, machine and deep learning and, artificial intelligence.
Their Impact: Water conservation by the optimization of water distribution networks, as well as energy usage. More than a third of the worldwide water utilities lose more than 40% of the distributed water while consumption is going to increase only for domestic use by 130% until 2050. 20% of EU population is at risk of water scarcity.
Congratulations to the 21 chosen startups! Vote for your favourite leading Portuguese impact solution from December 2 to 9 and help them reach the Impact Finals.