“Crossing Tech Talent with Lifestyle”: MADAN Parque’s proposal

Set in a university context, MADAN Parque pays particular attention to the realities of the health sciences and engineering. To find out more about MADAN Parque’s proposal, we spoke to Alcino Pascoal, Advisor to the Administration of this science and technology park.

This content is available in Portuguese.

– How did MADAN PARQUE come about? What kind of projects do you incubate?

MADAN – MADAN is a science and technology park, which also has an incubator. It was set up in December 1995, although the actual start-up took place in March 2000. There were four founding partners: the Municipality of Almada, NOVA University Lisbon, FCT NOVA (NOVA’s engineering school) and UNINOVA.

We welcome technology-based companies (spin-offs, scale-ups and start-ups), as well as individual entrepreneurs with a technological and scalable business idea, to whom we provide dedicated mentoring until the decision is made: to create a company or abandon the idea.

– Do you have any areas of specialization?

We favor the scientific areas present at FCT NOVA and the Egas Moniz School of Health & Science (which has been with us as an associate since April 2020). In any case, at the moment, the areas most represented in our pool of companies are as follows: ICT, biotechnology, biomedical, electronics and engineering sciences.

– What does your incubation model consist of?

We have four incubation programs: physical incubation in a room (“BOX”), physical incubation in a coworking space (“NOMAD”), virtual incubation (“BUBBLE”) and physical incubation in a coworking space for StartUP Visa teams (“VISA”). Each program complies with specific regulations (privileging entrepreneurial projects from the NOVA and Egas Moniz ecosystems), differentiated prices and specific services, tailored to the needs of each client.

We devote a lot of resources to animating the community, thus promoting cooperation between the different companies and exposing them to the institutional members of our ecosystem (who can provide concrete product and service needs).

– Can you tell us the story of a startup that made a difference in the incubator? And where has incubating with you made a difference?

We would like to highlight C-MO – Medical Solutions, which came to us in April 2021 with a small team. Its founders are all Biomedical Engineering alumni from FCT NOVA. Their business idea (developing a medical device for cough monitoring), with an AI layer in the cloud and the use of other technologies, seemed attractive and even scalable.

We didn’t expect that just over two years after joining MADAN they would raise 4.1 million euros (in August 2023, in a round from Portugal Ventures and two German VC funds) and become one of our most interesting “use cases”.

The team has grown, and they have hired human resources from other scientific areas that are necessary for the company’s growth. In February 2023, they raised 700,000 euros from the Belgian fund Borealis and, at this stage, they are already preparing the “go to market”, which will focus on the US and Canadian markets.

– Failure is also part of the journey. What did you learn most from something that didn’t go well?

On a few occasions, we believed too much in the pitch of certain entrepreneurs and allocated important resources (time, office space, lead generation, etc.). Nothing happened after a few months. As a result, we have tightened up the “Rules for the Admission of Companies”, in particular the criteria for evaluating entrepreneurial projects when they apply and once they have settled in at MADAN.

– What is your incubator’s differentiating factor? In other words, what is it about you that makes the startups you incubate successful?

A strong community spirit which, in turn, is boosted by our geographical location (proximity to the FCT NOVA and Egas Moniz campuses, as well as the coastline). This combination of “science & technology” and “living style” feeds the dreams of our entrepreneurs.

The other differentiating factor (which stems from our proximity to university campuses) is our ability to promote the crossing of knowledge from different scientific areas and, as the talent is there, we have a few more critical ingredients for the success of the MADAN Parque project.

Our value proposition is therefore crossing tech talent with lifestyle.

– What kind of projects or startups are you looking for?

We are betting more and more on the “healtech, ‘healthcare’ and ‘deep tech’ verticals, which are the fruit of the cross-fertilization processes we have already talked about in our value proposition.

MADAN has room to grow and we will soon be launching a public auction procedure for a plot of land measuring approximately 6,400 m2. This procedure will allow the installation of anchor company(ies) and/or technological infrastructure(ies) that can benefit from the explicit proximity to two campuses and a lot of talent. Attracting this private investment will be fundamental to our attractiveness as a science and technology park, in line with the assumptions of the major Almada Innovation District project.

In the same way, we are improving services and creating conditions so that, together with NOVA University, FCT NOVA and Egas Moniz, we can attract very early stage and early stage technology-based entrepreneurial projects that can provide concrete answers to the challenges facing society and the pulsating planet we live on.

– Community is one of the factors that distinguishes an incubator from an office center. How do you take care of yours and what plans do you have to make it more cohesive and fertile?

We’ve already touched on this in a previous section, but we haven’t mentioned that we hold regular community meetings outside our building. And what better place than the beaches of Costa de Caparica?

In this context, we organize our “beach meetup” events four or five times a year! These are unique moments of sharing with 2-3 pitches from companies, finger food, soft drinks, cross-talk and lots of networking looking out over the ocean, and we invite other entities from the ecosystem to get to know our community better and even challenge it, discuss opportunities for cooperation, investment, etc.

– What are the main challenges for incubation in your specific context?

The biggest challenge at the moment is the size of the team (only 3 FTE) and the multiplicity of activities that we design, implement and are called upon to develop. We are investing more and more in strategic partnerships and also in scouting for financial instruments that are relevant to our ecosystem, with the aim of finding the best answers to the above challenge.

ABOUT #INCUBXDISCOVERIES
#IncubXdiscoveries is Startup Portugal’s monthly feature that will help you discover Portuguese incubators. What projects they incubate, how they manage their community and what success stories they’ve had and future projects are some of the topics covered in these interviews.

If you’d like to find out more about MADAN Parque, either because you’d like to see your project incubated in this region or because you’d like to establish a partnership, contact the Startup Portugal team at incubadoras@startupportugal.com.