After 8 editions, the School of Startups of the Science and Technology Park of University of Porto (UPTEC) has already supported more than 150 business ideas and 450 entrepreneurs.
The main goal of the program is to raise awareness among aspiring entrepreneurs to the challenges faced during the development of an idea and the creation of a business. Here, the young entrepreneurs have access to a 3-month training program, with access to mentors and a network of national and international companies and strategic partners, who help them during the validation process of the business idea.
In addition to all the guidance provided and the activities developed in the incubator during the program, UPTEC promotes a Pitch Day, where each participant can present their business idea and are evaluated to gain 6 months of incubation with access to coworking environment, up to 20 hours of free legal consulting from CCA Ontier and a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet.
17 projects were presented at the Pitch Day of the 8th Edition of the program, which was held at the Medical Research Center of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto. The judges considered WeStoreONTEX the most promising project, as they aim at developing flexible textiles and accessories that store energy to power electronic devices and sensors integrated into clothes.
Honorable mentions were also awarded in three different areas: creativity, technology and biotechnology. In the creativity category the winner was Frame, an audiovisual producer with the purpose of telling stories through fiction, institutional videos and video clips.
The technology category was won by Oko’s Artificial Intelligence application, which integrates with all news feeds summarizing and displaying each news with an assigned percentage of success.
In the biotechnology area, the jury chose the SurgeonMate set of eyeglasses, which provide individual protection for surgeons whilst being able to register multimedia content of the procedures.
Vodafone also selected two projects – Night Out and Vaiivem – which will integrate the Vodafone Power Lab where they will benefit of a wide set of resources that will foster the launch of the the final product into the market.
