GALACTICA held this week the final of the 2nd hackathon awarding 45k€ in prizes.
9 teams were selected for the final round from 8 countries.
GALACTICA, which aims to demonstrate the viability of new industrial value chains regarding the textile and aerospace sectors based on advanced manufacturing across the EU, held this week the final event of 2nd hackathon and awarded 45k€ in prizes.
The Hackathon was addressed to the European SMEs, start-ups and students to develop innovative solutions that could be part of cross-sectoral and cross-border value chains.
HACKATHON
The GALACTICA Hackathon was open to start-ups and SMEs as well as to university students based in European Union (EU27) or United Kingdom. The registration was open till 28th September. The 2nd GALACTICA Hackathon has taken place in two rounds, firstly a virtual challenge with 14 teams registered on open innovation from October 1st to 14th, and a 2nd round for the 9 selected finalists on November 30th and December 1st, 2021. The second round has been held in Terrassa (Spain).
The finalist teams came from: Austria, Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, United Kingdom
On the 1st day, 30th November the 9 teams from 8 countries met with the GALACTICA to launch the hackathon challenge for the second round and were given 24h to deliver it. All teams had the chance of receiving mentoring by the external jury panel. Selected jury members covered the different sectors and activities of Galactica: textile, aerospace, advanced manufacturing, start-up development and investment.
On the 2nd Day, 1st December, following hard work by all teams, they pitched their developed concepts on how to combine advanced manufacturing, aerospace and/or textile to the jury panel, who scored each team based on innovation potential, market potential, feasibility, team readiness and cross-sectoral approach and relevance to GALACTICA objectives.
After a consensus meeting among all jury to select winners, GALACTICA held the award ceremony with a featured pitches from the venue host (ESEEIAT-UPC), the project coordinator of GALACTICA presenting the upcoming activities and opportunities to continue with the developments to market, and the presentation of a local awardee from Orbital Projects, E.CIMA with TEXCOOL project.
The winners under the different categories are:
SME/Start-up category winner: AmaDema (Cyprus)
- Stronger yet lighter composites than traditional ones, to maximize payload capacity for space thanks to advanced manufacturing and textile enhancements
SME/Start-up category runner-up: Lúnasa (United Kingdom)
- Re-usable in-space satellite transportation vehicle, developed using advanced manufacturing and precision engineering for in-orbit operations.
Student category winner: Milky-way biosailors (Italy+Austria)
- Advanced chip for real-time DNA monitoring of astronauts, to investigate and prevent health issues from radiation during spaceflights
In the near future, there will be more opportunities: Galactica 2nd call for proposals will be launch at middle January and the info-day and matchmaking event will be held on 10th February in Brussels.