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The Commission on Clean Tech & Industrial 2023 - The Winners

The Commission on Clean Tech met on June 6, 2023 to decide the winning startup proposal for the sector.

The commission chose among 14 finalists pre-selected by UniCredit Start Lab team. The Commission was composed of senior executives from leading Italian companies such as:

CLEAN TECH:

• Antonio Biondi, Head of Enel Innovation Hub Italia, ENEL
• Marco Cittadini, Chief Officier, Downstream Services, Renantis
• Federico Ferrini, CEO & Managing Director, Techfem
• Mario Pesaresi, Chairman e CEO Echidna, Chiron Energy
• Giovanna Pozzi, Head of Renewables Development, Business Unit Hydrogen, SNAM

INDUSTRIAL:

• Andrea Cignoli, CEO, Techint Engineering & Construction
• Francesca De Sanctis, Chairman & CEO, De Sanctis Group
• Franco Iorio, CEO, C.P.C. Group
• Franco Stefani, Chairman, System Ceramics

The winning startup of the first prize for the Clean Tech & Industrial sector is Katakem - based in Catanzaro - which created OnePot: the first fully-automated chemical reactor to speed up development and scale-up by ten times. Chemists delegate to OnePot all manual tasks, resulting in 100% reproducible outcomes. The recipes are digitized and encrypted, ensuring that the same results are achieved every time the author shares them with other chemists who use OnePot.

The winning startup will receive a 10.000 € grant.

The Commission awarded the second prize to NewTwen - from Padua. The startup aims at accelerating the large-scale deployment of digital twin technology in the industrial energy transition and offers a software solution that enables its customers - from automotive, industrial automation and energy sectors - to solve the challenge of thermal management by monitoring the physical system in real time. Its technology provides real-time augmented information on otherwise unmeasurable system characteristics, creating an embedded digital twin to accurately model the physics. In addition, using certain artificial intelligence mechanisms, the digital twin is made adaptive, thus allowing it to evolve over time and become an individual replica of the physical component with which it exchanges information. 

The third prize went to Circular Materials - from Milan -  which develops innovative technologies and processes to extract and recover valuable metals from industrial effluents and wastewater. Their mission is to prevent the loss and dispersion of critical raw materials by transforming linear value chains into circular ones, offering scalable, cost-effective solutions for resource valorization and upcycling.

Finally 2 special mentions were assigned to:

• Synergy Flow, which has developed a sustainable, low-cost, and highly efficient battery system for the energy storage on a multi-day basis, allowing the penetration of renewables in the energy ecosystem up to 90 %. The technological solution is a redox flow battery based on abundant and low-cost materials, fully compliant with the Circular Economy principles.
• Composite Research, which aims at renewing industrial production processes through research and development of innovative composite materials. With focus on well-being of people and employees as well as on environmental sustainability, the startup works on the cretaion of a real 4.0 Composites Industry. Mad-Flex, the main solution developed, is a flexible resistant, air proof and leak proof tape that repairs industrial pipes.

To read more about all 14 of the 2023 UniCredit Start Lab finalists in the Clean Tech & Industrial category, please click here.