Our aerospace and spacetech cohort is slowly exiting the X-Europe’s atmosphere and we wanted to look back and share some statistics behind the startups that will shape the future of humans in space and aerospace.
The fifth X-Europe open call for startups and scaleups closed on the 30th June 2021, with 71 applications started and 55 submitted applications. Out of that selection, we have chosen the most innovative and promising 25 startups to join our fifth cohort - Aerospace and Spacetech.
Take a look at the Aerospace and SpaceTech portfolio to check out the participating startups.
Our aerospace and spacetech innovators have embarked on an engaging programme, filled with demanding yet thrilling activities, webinars, events, mentorships sessions over the five month period, that we cannot wait for you to see what they have accomplished.
Company and Product Stage
As with all the open calls X-Europe has run, we had a difficult time selecting the most promising ones that will have the opportunity to excel in the programme. This time around, (and as it was the case a few times in the past) we’ve seen the greatest competition among the early stage startups.
In the fifth open call, we’ve seen greater competitiveness coming from more scaling startups, as the gravitational pull of the evaluation criteria leaned towards seed and scaling startups. This, in turn, has yielded that the growing and seed stage (live funding & product market fit, and pre-MVP and MVP) had 8 and 14 startups being accepted from the respective stages while the competitive scaling stage yielded only 3.
Aerospace and Spacetech cohort founding year distribution among startups leans towards startups that had a lift starting from 2018 (88%) which is not that surprising given the deeptech vertical in question.
Home sweet home: the location of our startups & scaleups
While focusing on providing services that support startup’s internationalization to specific regions (Visegrad 4, the Baltics, and Benelux), X-Europe is a pan-European growth programme that welcomes startups and scaleups from all European Union (EU) and H2020 associated countries. The programme enjoys a high degree of geographical diversity when it comes to its participants. In total, the 25 participating companies come from 14 different countries (10 being from our specific regions), ensuring X-Europe’s wide impact.
The company focus and requested services
Cohort 5 shares interest in Space and Aerospace technologies, however, we are also seeing a dominant presence of our startups with technologies in transportation, defense & military, software, drones and hardware.
To conclude, let’s take a look into the X-Europe services requested by our startups and scaleups. Yet again, the top three selected services were matchmaking with investors, matchmaking with corporations, and one-on-one mentoring. Other services that were chosen and will be delivered by the X-Europe programme were growth hacking training, access to talent, pitch competition, TNW conference attendance, acceleration and incubation (at TNW Amsterdam or TechChill Riga).
We have worked hard and leveraged our network and expertise to enable have leveraged our network and expertise to enable X-Europe aerospace and space tech startups ability to facilitate the right connections that will foster their future growth.
We are not stopping here!
X-Europe also has a FinTech oriented programme currently in session. Check what’s going on there.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------