“Prototron has always had many green ideas – making energy and industry cleaner, biotechnology, and the reprocessing of materials – specialised topics linked by a mission to contribute to sustainable development. In the hands of flexible start-ups, technology allows them to quickly find and test solutions to critical problems – be it the optimisation of electricity costs and use, dependence on fossil fuels, overproduction of foodstuffs, and so on. Inspired by that, we are opening Prototron’s spring round only for green ideas in order to accelerate the arrival of the best ideas to the market,” Prototron’s CEO Jana Budkovskaya explained the reasoning behind the green round. She pointed out green technologies that have previously received development support from Prototron, such as Themo, Sympower, Fusebox, Gelatex, Bikeep, CoModule, etc.

With co-financing from the Environmental Investment Centre and the support of area experts, Prototron will help turn smart solutions quickly from ideas into products and bring the products to the market. At Prototron, teams are instructed by mentors who know the market and have an extensive network of contacts. Of all the candidates, up to 50 ideas will be selected for the development programme, in order to ensure sufficiently intensive and personal development activities for all the remarkable ideas.

The development programme is open to teams whose technological idea is related to a solution in the area of energy, agriculture and forestry, or transport.

“Green technologies help reduce the adverse impact of human activities on the environment and this means that we are using renewable energy sources and materials to the maximum possible extent. The most important thing here is the entire life cycle of a product and its impact on the environment – the longer it lasts and the more sustainably it works, the better. It is namely these solutions that we wish to find in the green round, to develop them with a more precise focus and send to the market to make our living environment better tomorrow,” Prototron’s Green Round Coordinator and circular economy enthusiast Mayri Tiido explained.

Prototron is a fund founded by Swedbank, TalTech and the Tehnopol Science and Business Park to finance prototypes of technological ideas so that world-changing ideas and products reach the market faster. By today, Prototron has financed 92 smart ideas with a total of more than 1.7 million euros and the teams have engaged more than 59 million euros as secondary investments.

The green round will be co-financed by the Estonian Republic from the Environmental Investment Centre programme.