INESC TEC promotes session to present projects to investors
On 19 April, INESC TEC’s Innovation and Technology Transfer Unit (UITT) promoted a session to present six business projects to Invicta Angels, whose associates are individual venture capitalists.
20th May 2013
This session was part of the Spin-Up pilot training, organised as part of the European project Spin-Up – Entrepreneurship Training and Coaching For University Spin-Offs, of which UITT is member. The training session has already been tested at a European level and applied nationally in the training activity plan of two entrepreneurship projects coordinated by UITT since 2010 (the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation of UPTEC PINC and TEC-Empreende). UITT has been supporting several business projects as part of these activities.
Most promoters participating in the session have received or are receiving support from UITT in different contexts. For instance, between 2010 and 2012 Shortcut benefitted from consulting services as part of the implementation of an RDI Management System, while Next To You received support from UITT’s LET-in pre-incubation service.
JoinIt and Recibos Online are two projects of the TEC-Empreende, which were followed up by UITT’s Business Consulting area during Stage 2 of the technological entrepreneurship programme. Dependableware is a cloud computing project by Ricardo Vilaça and Miguel Matos, researchers at INESC TEC’s High-Assurance Software Laboratory (HASLab), which is part of the CoHiTEC programme. Initially it was developed during the second edition of the SEEW, a training camp on technological entrepreneurship conducted in 2012, and coordinated by UITT (João Claro). Project Healthy Systems was also presented at the session, although it is not receiving support from the INESC TEC Unit.
Business Angels are people/entities experienced in management whose support to entrepreneurs is two-fold: providing capital and know-how, strategically helping them find the first clients or partners, thanks to their network of contacts. This type of investor can boost growth in a company as their intervention is more than providing capital, where a return is expected, as there is also room for management supervision. However, venture capital is but one of the different solutions to capture funds.