Algor Education has created a service that uses artificial intelligence to build concept maps and help structure knowledge. According to the incubator, the project has 30,000 subscribers in three countries and a team of twelve. The company is led by CEO Mauro Musarra. The award is given by I3P, an incubator founded at the Polytechnic University of Turin. Its president, Giuseppe Scellato, also coordinates the ESA BIC Turin program, part of the European Space Agency's business incubation network.
Kurs Orbital received the award that was presented for the first time this year. It is intended for a graduate of the incubator's space program, and Kurs Orbital became the first such winner. For the company, this is the culmination of two eventful years. Volodymyr Usov, co-founder and CEO of Kurs Orbital, admitted in an interview with the bureau:
"These two years have been, to put it mildly, turbulent."
To understand where this scale came from, one must go back to the history of the Kurs system. It is an automatic spacecraft rendezvous system developed in the USSR in the 1980s with the participation of Kyiv developers and the Kyiv Radio Plant. According to InVenture, it has been used for more than 300 dockings of Soyuz and Progress spacecraft with the Mir station and the International Space Station. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, supplies of Kurs to Russia ceased, and the team began looking for new products based on this heritage.
In 2020, Usov headed the State Space Agency of Ukraine. That same year, the country passed a law on private space companies. The company itself is linked in sources to Usov and his associate Vadym Vasyliev, with whom, by his own account, he started the project. The founding date varies: some publications cite 2021, when the Ukrainian project launched, while others point to 2022, when the Italian legal entity appeared in Turin. The incubator considers 2022 the founding year, and we adhere to that.
From Kyiv to Turin
The move to Italy coincided with the tragedy in Ukraine. In February 2022, the full-scale invasion began, and investors began to pull back from the project. The company's office appeared in Turin, while development remained in Kyiv. Already in April of that year, as noted in local publications, the team managed to keep the project afloat, but work was carried out under conditions that no one would call ordinary.
The first recognition was victory in Start Cup Piemonte Valle d'Aosta 2022, where on 8 November 2022 the project took first place. The prize was 10,000 euros and the Jacobacci silver award. Start Cup is a regional startup competition linked to the universities of Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta. In parallel, the company was filing patent applications. The Ukrainian patent application is dated 4 January 2022, and the international PCT application was filed on 3 January 2023.
Money and Programs
From January to March 2023, Kurs Orbital completed the pre-accelerator of the Saudi Space Agency, run by the Techstars program. In 2023, the company also participated in Seraphim Space Camp and later joined the SpaceFounders program. These programs provided not only expertise but also contacts with investors who later played a role in the financing round.
In March 2024, the company closed a seed round of 3.7 million euros, equivalent to approximately 4 million dollars. The round was led by OTB Ventures, whose partner is Wojtek Walniczek. Participants included Credo, Galaxia, backed by CDP Venture Capital and Obloo, the PiemonteNext fund managed by CDP Venture Capital together with Finpiemonte, as well as In-Q-Tel and Inovo. At that time, the team numbered eleven people. The main technological project remains ARCap, for which the company has announced a flight date that has shifted since the first plans.
The result was an award, but not the finale. At the end of December 2024, Invitalia, Italy's state agency, arranged a subsidized loan of 1.1 million euros for Kurs Orbital under the Smart&Start program, which supports young innovative companies.
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