Cleitus Anthony, Mark Power and Marco Dalla Santa from the Photonic Systems Group, win NDRC Pre-Commercial Programme, a collaboration between third level institutions, Enterprise Ireland, Science Foundation Ireland, Irish Photonic Integration Centre (IPIC) and CONNECT.
Cleitus Antony's team is developing a system to help find faults in fibre-optic cables.
The event featured 14 teams competing in the NDRC Pre-Commercialisation Programme over the five month process. The aim of the programme is to help researchers actively prepare for Enterprise Ireland commercialisation funding, feasibility funding and pre-seed investment.
Speaking at the event, Patrick Morrissey, IPIC Centre Manager, said “The Pre-Commercialisation Programme guides academia based research teams through the initial steps of exploring the commercialisation of their disruptive technologies through a start-up company.
“It has proven to be an invaluable tool for researchers, addressing the significant challenges on the journey from the lab to market, and I fully expect to see a number of high performance start-ups emerge from the programme as the teams progress with Enterprise Ireland and NDRC’s support and turn our excellence in research into economic impact.”