For the first time, the Copernicus Accelerator Bootcamp opened its doors to a wider audience on 4 December 2018! EU Space Week visitors joined the new Start-up Fair to engage with mentees and mentors in exiting elevator pitches, live demos and match-making sessions:  .

All mentees pitched their business ideas to the audience and expert juries consisting of mentors, investors, business angels and business support intermediaries, who nominated four winners of the pitching sessions:

Daniel O’Connell, Ruma Products Limited: WindAI, a wind analysis & predictor tool to aid offshore wind farms in reducing maintenance costs without reducing output performance

Janina Stork, Hawa Dawa: EO Air Quality – A New Environmental Commodit

Jan Kolmas: RoadEO – solutions for automated detection of infrastructure changes

Aschwin van der Woude, UrbanZee: AeroZee, a service that makes air quality information available to real estate agents.

In addition to the pitches, many teams of the 2017 Copernicus Accelerator programme displayed the progress and achievements they made since they started the Copernicus Accelerator Programme. via an exhibition. The variety – from a forest alert service over fertiliser and crop yield optimisation solutions to road monitoring – of the presented applications and products demonstrated the business potential of Copernicus for industry and business as well as the importance of the Copernicus Accelerator for the user uptake of Copernicus data among start-ups and industry in general.

A dedicated Copernicus ecosystem exhibition furthermore gave the start-ups the opportunity to exchange with other elements of the Copernicus Start-up Programme, the Copernicus Services and the Copernicus Data and Information Access Services (DIAS).