Dublin-based Ubotica participated in our latest accelerator, Mission 8. Their senior leadership team were represented on the programme by their Chair and CCO, Sean Mitchell.

The founding team behind Ubotica remains largely similar to their previous startup, Movidius which they exited from in 2016 when it was sold to Intel for a reported $400 million.

Ubotica was founded in 2016 aiming to solve the space data problem by using their AI chips on Satellites. Their product the CogniSat™ platform removes the problems of low bandwidth on downlink, where processing can take over a month due to the bottleneck of space data. Instead by processing the data on the satellite, data can be processed much faster enabling the users across major sectors to respond in time to real-time events. The market is estimated to be worth $20 billion within the next 7 years.

A month after the programme was completed we wrote to Ubotica’s CCO, Sean Mitchell to hear his thoughts reflecting on the programme and ahead to the remaining year ahead.

Which session impacted you the most on the programme? 

There were many impactful sessions throughout the course of the programme. The ones that I felt had most impact on Ubotica were the VC Mindset session, which then led into how the overall pitch should break down, and then the Storytelling session with Rafferty Jackson. The content of a pitch is very important but equally as important if not more so is how the story is told in order to connect with the audience.

How did your approach to investor readiness develop throughout the programme?  

Our approach to investor readiness developed in two main ways throughout the course of the programme. The first was the level of completeness of the content of our investor pitch. The discipline of going through the pitch many times highlighted areas where there was missing content that an investor would expect to see and then led our team to go and do further work in those required areas in order to complete all essential elements of the pitch. The second and equally important area was in how we tell the story. It's important to quickly connect with the audience of the pitch so that they're interested and they "get it". There are likely many ways that the story can be told and finding the most compelling way that connects with people is really important.

Why should other space tech startups apply for Seraphim Space Camp?  

The Seraphim Space Camp will certainly get participants investor ready. It will help to bring together the complete story and an investor pitch that is investable. Through the programme, participants will also get introduced to a range of investors who are interested in the Space market and also many corporate partners who can be customer targets. The Seraphim team have unmatched expertise in the sector and connection to the ecosystem which can continue to be leveraged by companies even as alumni of the programme in the future.

What’s next for Ubotica?

Ubotica is raising funding to move onto our next phase of exciting growth, aiming to bring our technology to bear to achieve the goal of providing persistent real-time insights to realise the true potential of Earth Observation.

It was a pleasure working with Sean and the rest of the Ubotica team during the accelerator programme. We can’t wait to see what they achieve in 2022.

For more information about Ubotica and their transformational technology for satellites, please visit their website here

If you are a pre-series A technology startup with a space application, we would love to hear from you, more about our accelerator can be found here