Isaac Durá, current Copernicus Accelerator mentee and finalist of the 2017 Copernicus Masters Sustainable Living Challenge by the Satellite Applications Catapult is the team lead of HeraSpace, a recently founded  company focussed on develop sustainable high tech solutions for industries like fishing, aquaculture,  agriculture and forestry. HearSpace’s app helps fishermen to locate the closest legal fishing ground, optimising operating budgets while reducing environmental impacts. The application, makes use of the same blockchain technology as used for Bitcoin to ensure warranty transparency and unhackability, building a win-win relationship between fishermen, companies, administration and consumers.

The solution thus supports a healthier food production, a better fishing income, while supporting a higher sustainability and a steady rate of employment in the fishing sector. How does HeraSpace do that? Their application dynamically predicts and updates fish distribution patterns.  By combining Copernicus satellite data with actual fishing data, the selection of optimal fishing grounds can be drastically improved, as well as the efficient routing of vessels to those locations.

 

A Strong Team Committed to Protect the Marine Environment

HeraSpace is composed by an experienced complementary team of experts aiming at creating scalable and sustainable tech solutions.

• Specialization: Each professional on the HeraSpace team brings unique abilities to the table. The team’s areas of expertise include: Marine sales, Marine science, Environmental regulations, Business, Entrepreneurship, Machine learning, Data Science and Software development.
• Diversity: HeraSpace benefits from diverse and complementary team member´s experiences, together with different geographic and socio-cultural backgrounds.
• Collaboration: As they say-two heads are better than one. In the HeraSpace case, more than a dozenheads are better than one! By using the collaborative approach, we can easily create synergies and further improve our services and products.

 

Awards, Business Angels, Sustainable Community Platform and More about to Come

HeraSpace has already accomplished several relevant goals since the project’s creation in 2016:

The project team won three Hackathon challenges already:  the ESA Arctic Special Prize during the 2016 Junction, the ESA challenge at the 2016 Junction Hackathon (see picture) and the ESA Space Hack at Ultrahack 2017 Sprint II in Helsinki.

 

HeraSpace is building a community around sustainable tech solutions. HeraSpace is going to launch a first round of crowdfunding soon to enable a further support of their first stage product development. The team also plans to launch a SpaceStarters crowdinvesting campaign later this year.

Find out more about the crowdfunding campaign and its benefits for supporters here.

 

What’s next?

In addition to the ongoing search for angel investors,  the team already applied successfully for the ESA Business Incubation Centre Madrid Region and will start its incubation in the coming weeks.

Check out the HeraSpace LinkedIn page and follow their Facebook account to stay tuned!

“HeraSpace is one of the most attractive entrepreneurship projects where I have been involved so far. The dedicated and promising project leader Isaac Durá and his international team deploy all their skills and strength profiles immensely increasing the potential of their project’s success.

Particularly, I see three main advantages resulting from Heraspace’s business: Their solution can create more sustainability for oceans reducing the environmental impact by fishing. Furthermore, the app helps improving the transparency of the fishing value chain by using blockchain technology. These advantages and the team behind the idea makes the project so unique and promise that this business opportunity will result in a profitable start-up!

I had the chance to meet Isaac at the Copernicus Accelerator Bootcamp in line with the European Space Week in Tallinn where we spent a lot of time together. Since then, we continue the mentoring focused on the next short term objectives: first strategic decisions (team, investments, partnerships), business foundation, integration into an incubator, crowdfunding and MVP developing.”

José Antonio Blanco
Innovation & Technology Projects Coordinator at Fundación madri+d
Associate Professor at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM)