The Repsol Foundation Entrepreneurs Fund: 10 years driving technological innovation in the energy field

The high survival rate among the accelerated technology companies can be attributed “to the careful selection of the startups that enter the program,” chosen from among the almost 5,500 proposals submitted in its ten editions, and “to the opportunities for the future that open up for them, especially with the validation in a real industrial environment,” which has resulted in more than 850 prototypes, proofs of concept, and pilots being carried out during this decade.

A decade of learning

The business accelerator has been evolving “to adapt to a changing environment, particularly in the energy sector,” in aspects such as the internationalization of the Entrepreneurs Fund. When it started, it had a more local impact, “but we are looking for the best startups for our company’s technological challenges.” As an example of this global projection, 713 projects from 20 countries such as Spain, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands were submitted to the latest edition of the fund. Future plans include “expanding the coverage of our call in Asia. This year we have initiated its dissemination in India and Japan.”

The program is now aimed at technology startups in the pre-commercial phase or which will reach that stage in one or two years. This profile of companies “has been given to us by experience because at the beginning we also supported ideas in an earlier phase.” But in the final stage of technological maturity “is when we contribute more value, with a work plan that leads to testing in a real environment and brings it closer to its market launch.”

The Repsol Foundation provides this support without demanding any intellectual property rights in return. “As a company we get a double return from the startups: we are in direct contact with cutting-edge technologies of interest to us. And, if we manage to make their technology sufficiently mature, we are open to continue collaborating after their acceleration by investing in the companies or incorporating them as service providers,” says Torres..

In this decade “there have been many success stories among the startups that have gone through the Fund, with many of which Repsol has continued to work.” The most recent example is the biotech company EvoEnzyme, recently out of the accelerator, “with whom we have scaled its process of obtaining super-producing enzymes for plastic degradation” and are participating in a research project with scientists from Repsol Technology Lab.

Repsol, in addition to supporting the innovative ecosystem of startups through the Repsol Foundation, also has a strategic investment fund, Repsol Corporate Venturing. Both are tools that complement each other: while the Entrepreneurs Fund focuses on mentoring technologies that are at an early stage, the investment fund is focused on detecting technologies that are at a stage of development closer to their commercial deployment and with a high potential for incorporation into the company’s businesses. Repsol Corporate Venturing’s activity intensified as of 2016. Since then it has 85 million euros to make investments in 5-year cycles. Its activity has materialized through the acceleration of business models in more than 30 startups in which it has invested.

Collecting energy since 2014

Selected in the 4th edition, that of 2015, AEInnova is one of the veterans of the Fund. Three doctors and an engineer in Microelectronics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona created this startup to develop their idea of generating electricity that could be returned to the network by harnessing waste heat from industrial processes. Inspired by the thermoelectric technology used to power space vehicles, “we thought that this technology could help the industry to be more efficient since almost a fifth of Europe’s energy is lost in industrial heat,” recalls Raúl Aragonés, President and main founder of AEInnova.

The Repsol Foundation also liked this proposal and it was the backing they needed: “if not, it would not have gone beyond an idea. Initiatives such as the Entrepreneurs Fund are fundamental to take the leap,” Aragonés continues. Today, AEInnova now has 20 employees, has been invested by the European Commission through