Onocoy wins €100’000 from EU Agency Space Program

The EU Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA), under the European Commission's CASSINI – Space Entrepreneurship Initiative, recently organized the #myEUspace competition that called upon creative innovators and entrepreneurs to develop groundbreaking commercial solutions that leverage data from Galileo, Copernicus, or both.

During the CASSINI Entrepreneurship Days, the participants had the opportunity to showcase live demonstrations of their products and engage in networking sessions with investors, accelerators, corporations and the European space startup community. Five outstanding startups won the challenge, and each received a cash prize of 100,000 euros, providing them with the necessary resources to scale up their businesses and launch their products globally.

Among the winners is Zug-based startup Onocoy, which, thanks to Switzerland’s ESA membership, had the opportunity to participate in this EU-centric competition. Onocoy is enabling mass adoption of high-precision positioning using blockchain technology. The startup has built a community-powered dense network of GNSS reference stations that provides high-quality RTK corrections for ultra-accurate positioning by leveraging Web3 technology. Onocoy ensures high data quality through rigorous data validation and by incentivizing operators of reference stations with rewards. The solution offers ultra-accurate positioning, opening new possibilities in navigation and beyond in sectors such as agriculture, mining, drones, robots, autonomous vehicles, geodesy, earthquake and tsunami warnings, etc.

Since becoming operational in the Autumn of 2022, the startup has been rolling out the MVP and continued onboarding customers in the satellite navigation industry. As part of its future plan, Onocoy aims to bring up more stations in its network. “Currently, we have 1200 but the goal is to reach 100'000 within 2-3 years,” says Daniel Amman, founder of Onocoy and a serial entrepreneur with more than 25 years in the GPS field.

While fully bootstrapped, Onocoy has grown to a team of 18 employees (10 FTE). The startup is now raising funds for its seed round.

(Press release / RAN)