This article is part of the special Tech4Climate, Startups for the environment by Italian Tech, on newsstands today 6 October with The print (Piedmont, Val d’Aosta and Liguria editions), Sentinel of the Canavese, The Province of Pavia, Journal of Mantua, Courier of the Alps, The Tribuna of Treviso, Il Mattino di Padova, The New Venice, Il Piccolo e The Messenger Veneto, and tomorrow 7 October with The XIX Century.
Management and monitoring of water resources, technologies to support the reduction of the environmental impact of heat engines and artificial intelligence at the service of the circular economy and the reuse of waste.
These are some of the technologies that the 34 startups of Le Village by CA Triveneto develop in Padua for a potentially global market.
One of them, perhaps the most interesting from an environmental and sustainability perspective, is Finapp, a spinoff of the Physics department of the University of Padua. The startup was born from a double scientific innovation. The partners of Finapp, researchers in the field of national security in the field of radioactivity, have worked on the evolution of a measuring instrument, a neutron detector called CRNS (cosmic ray neutrons sensing) probe, transforming it from polluting and potentially very dangerous to harmless and cheap. To achieve this they have replaced the waste gases of nuclear fission still in use in traditional probes with inert metallic substances.
But above all, the Finapp partners have certified that it is possible to detect the interaction of cosmic neutrons with the water molecules present in the subsoil with this new instrument. A scientific instrument for reading radioactivity thus becomes a probe for civilian use able to identify very precisely leaks in city water networks, evaluate snow and ice reserves in mountain areas, wet biomass in agriculture and so on.
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Result of a team work between three researchers and an entrepreneur (Luca StevanatoCEO of Finapp and father of the technology behind the probes, Sandra Morettohead of staff and researcher at the University of Padua since 2013, Marcello Lunardonproduct manager and associate professor in Experimental Physics at the same university e Angelo Amicarelli, entrepreneur and marketing director of Finapp), the startup currently works in various countries around the world in the sectors of researching the leaks of city water networks, precision agriculture and in the field of water resources monitoring. A project that immediately attracted the attention of potential customers and investors and which guaranteed the startup, operational since the beginning of 2020, to close 2022 with a turnover of around 400 million euros after having collected, last June , a 1.2 million investment round by Progress Tech Transfer (which had already invested another 200 thousand euros in Finapp), Crédit Agricole and Tech4Planet.
But among the desks of the 1,800 square meters just opened in Le Village, it is also present Ganiga Innovation.
The company, founded in Pisa in 2021 by the twenty-four year old Nicolas Zeoli and his partner Gabriele Cavallaro (25 years old) but “accelerated” in Padua, has created and patented a self-powered bin equipped with Artificial Intelligence (Hoooly!), which automatically differentiates waste, through optical reading and neural networks. It’s Hoooly! himself to notify the manager when it is full, optimizing collection times and saving money and CO ?. Together with the basket, Ganiga has also perfected the Hoooly application! App that helps consumers locate the closest trash can and gives them in exchange for each refusal a cashback to use for discounts on the Tari, parking tickets and much more. Not only that, but it tells them about the waste recycling process so as to make the user fond of the tool. Hoooly! it is also available in a home version, not much larger than a washing machine, which automatically manages separate waste collection, reduces waste and errors, compacts waste and can be connected to other household appliances to better manage waste of food.
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It is also located in the spaces of Le Village Acca Industries. Startup from Verona, founded in 2019, produces devices with electrolytic cells capable of guaranteeing concrete savings on the use of fossil fuels such as petrol, diesel, LPG and methane and at the same time to reduce pollutants.
Acca Industries engineers and mathematicians, led by CEO Andreas Hummer, have designed and put on the market a compact, plug & play device that can be retrofitted to internal combustion engines in the marine, earthmoving, cogenerators, civil and industrial heating sectors. . A very useful tool, in the midst of a complex energy transition like the one we are experiencing.
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