Two start-ups incubated at l’X take part in the European Venture Program

Two promising start-ups incubated at École Polytechnique, Divergence and BlueNose, participated in the European Venture Program 2023, organized as part of the EuroTech Universities Alliance. 

Incubated at the Drahi-X Novation Center’s start-up incubator X-Up, BlueNose operates in the GreenTech sector and proposes the installation of a structure at the front of container ships to improve their aerodynamics. The start-up’s solution reduces fuel consumption by 3 to 5% and has a real environmental impact in the maritime sector. In another realm, using AI, Divergence offers an algorithm to model stock price trajectories and derive financial indicators from them.

The European Venture Program (EVP) is an entrepreneurship boot camp organized annually as part of the EuroTech Universities Alliance. Aimed at strengthening European entrepreneurship and fostering collaboration and synergies in this field between the partner universities, the EVP brought this year around twenty start-ups from the alliance’s member universities together – École Polytechnique, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), and the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion).

Amplifying each other’s strengths

"What a tremendous adventure! The quality of the speakers and supervisors of the EVP, the network it made available, the diversity of the participants in the program, and the discussions we had with them acted as an amplifier for each other’s strengths", the co-founders of BlueNose Joë Sangar and Léon Grillet stated enthusiastically.

"We are honored that we had the opportunity to represent École Polytechnique in this program intended to contribute to making European excellence and innovation thrive. It also enabled us to explore Munich and Copenhagen – two cities as vibrant as the partner institutions we met there. The human and professional encounters we made, have enlarged our skill set, the scope of our project and also our confidence in the future", they added.

A particular asset of the EVP is that it grants each participating start-up exclusive access to the academic and entrepreneurial ecosystems of the six EuroTech partner universities.

A rich agenda

Running from August 2 to 9, 2023, the EVP 2023 edition took participants to Munich first, and more precisely, the University of Munich’s (TUM) campus, where they were able to discover TUM's dedicated center for entrepreneurship, the TUM Venture Lab, and the Munich Urban Colab. The second stop of the journey was in Copenhagen, where participants had the opportunity to experience an immersion in the Skylab – Technical University of Denmark’s (DTU) start-up incubator.

The program also included several presentations and workshops on different themes and issues specific to entrepreneurship and innovation. In addition to benefitting from expert advice, participants could exchange with other European entrepreneurs on their respective experiences, including challenges or difficulties they have had to deal with, each at their own stage of development.

This year's agenda focused, in particular, on the UX Design process, sales strategies, and best practices in interacting with investors. Additionally, various pitch formats tailored to partners, including financial partners, customers, and employees, were discussed. Training sessions, during which the participants had to limit their presentation to only a few minutes, challenged the start-up founders to describe their entrepreneurial project following pre-defined rules. Following their presentation, they could receive collective and constructive feedback from an audience composed of experts, start-up managers, and project owners.