Arbórea Intellbird: In view of ‘Aracnocóptero’

02 Dec 2014

Perseo, the venture capital fund with which Iberdrola supports the new companies, has a ‘budget’ of 70 million euros, of which after studying more than 800 proposals has already invested 40 million in eight companies: three in the United States, one in Norway, another in Canada and three in Spain.

For the director of Innovation of Iberdrola, Agustín Delgado, the investment made is very important but what is promising is to look towards the 30 million Perseo venture capital program that remains to be invested.

This is a great incentive for interested promoters who, in order to enter into a first evaluation of the project, only have to enter the website of the fund and send an email. This is what, for example, the Arborea team, a ‘spin off’ from the University of Salamanca, did with its proposal to provide drones to detect breakdowns in wind turbines or light towers. That is to say, what until now was
necessary to install a crane, now can be done from land piloting by remote control an ‘Aracnocóptero’ that takes high quality images of what happens, for example, in the blades.

«This is a good example of an entrepreneur who is not looking for a unique idea, but rather focuses on an existing technology – that of drones – and proposes a new application; making work at heights cheaper. Then he thought of a client; us. And finally, he wanted his idea to be useful to us, that the drones would be capable of detecting faults in our installations through cameras and a
‘software’ that diagnoses what appears in the images -stresses the director of Innovation at Iberdrola-».

«Let’s not just think that a business is born from a totally new product. Entrepreneurs have many opportunities with technologies that are already there. This idea is very important for people who start because starting research from scratch is within the reach of very few and takes a long time to bear fruit. You always have to do research and development».

Source: elcorreo.com