EDP invests over €3.5 million in disruptive startups | edp.com

EDP Ventures has just closed six deals with disruptive startups which offer innovative solutions for the company's business areas. Overall, the company has invested over €3.5 million in augmented reality, predictive maintenance, artificial intelligence and wind farm design startups. Half of this amount was invested in Portuguese startups.

Enging, a company from Coimbra which remotely monitors distribution grid transformers through a innovative analytical technology, has received €1 million from EDP Ventures. The startup is already working on EDP's distribution grids, thereby helping the company improve the management of its assets and the quality of its customer service.

Glartek - a finalist company at the 2016 EDP Open Innovation awards with an augmented reality platform for remote industrial maintenance - has obtained a second round of funding from EDP Ventures worth €700,000. This investment will allow Glartek to launch its internationalization process and expand its team, which is expected to reach 22 people over the next 18 months.

These two investments were made through EDP CleanTech FCR, an investment fund created in partnership with Instituição Financeira de Desenvolvimento S.A. (IFD). This is an investment vehicle targeted at Portuguese startups, but also at international entrepreneurs who want to move to Portugal and create subsidiary companies and jobs in the country. 

Such is the case of PVComplete, a Silicon Valley startup that has created a wind farm design and optimization application to reduce costs and timeframes in the construction of these renewable energy parks. After receiving €1 million from EDP Ventures, the company has opened a subsidiary in Porto and will hire up to 10 employees in Portugal over the next 12 months.

Pursuing its strategy of investing in promising startups from around the world, EDP Ventures has also decided to invest in two Israeli companies: Presenso, which has created an AI solution that automatically learns the behavior of industrial machines, thereby anticipating possible failures; and Sepio, which has developed an innovative cybersecurity solution that enables customers to identify hardware - such as printers and mouse devices - that contain viruses or other threats to corporate security.

Finally, EDP Ventures has also made its first investment in Brazil, worth about €300,000. Delfos, a Brazilian startup that creates AI solutions for the maintenance of energy production assets, is the first company to obtain funding from an investment vehicle created last summer to help entrepreneurs in a market where the EDP Group has been growing exponentially. 

These six investment deals build on EDP's innovation strategy. Overall, in 2018 EDP Ventures has invested about €6 million - twice as much as in the previous year - in 16 startups from eight countries. More than half of this amount was invested in Portuguese startups, making EDP Ventures one of the most important local investment vehicles in this area.

"2018 was a successful year for EDP's relationship with the startup ecosystem and for the open innovation we champion and practice. We have doubled our investment in companies that are changing the landscape of innovation in our industry, established partnerships with teams from all over the world, and expanded our own team to Brazil, where we are now studying new opportunities to support entrepreneurship," says EDP Ventures Director Luís Manuel.

The investments focused on clean energies, energy storage solutions, artificial intelligence, digital innovation and customer-related solutions - all key areas for the EDP Group. Since 2008, EDP Ventures' investment vehicles have invested over €30 million in 24 startups, which now employ more than 750 workers and boast a global turnover of over €100 million per year.

For more information, visit https://edpventures.vc/