We have some exciting news to share! Exodus Space Systems has been selected for the Australian national finals event in the Pitch at Palace competition! More on that in a bit, but here’s a brief update first…
Ever since coming back from London Tech Week, Exodus has been exploring a variety of strategies for raising the funds we’ll need to continue our work. The first of these was that as a result of seeing the success of the UK’s Enterprise Investment Scheme at promoting investment in seed-stage companies, we set a goal to attain Early Stage Innovation Company (ESIC) status with the Australian Tax Office, which would give our prospective Australian investors a similar tax incentive.
This led us to apply for the Entrepreneurial Mindset Bootcamp and Concept to Creation modules at the Centre for Entrepreneurial Research and Innovation (CERI), which have been accredited by the ATO as worth 50 points towards our coming application for ESIC status. We completed the two-day Bootcamp at the beginning of August (group photo below), and I would strongly recommend this to any early stage company or would-be founder who wants to know more about how to get started – this material is immensely valuable and I can’t wait to see how the program progresses and expands. We’ve also been accepted into the Concept to Creation accelerator module, which will start early 2020. More on this to come.
On to Pitch at Palace!
The next part of our strategy after coming back from London was to seek sponsorship from corporations with a technology interest, and this led us to apply for Pitch at Palace: a pitching competition set up by the Duke of York, where the Perth round was held Friday 23rd of August at Murdoch University. The competition consists of state, national and global-level events, with each company being asked to give a short pitch on stage (usually 3 minutes) with a single slide for a visual aid. Importantly, it’s not a “competition” in the conventional sense, because the practice sessions were all about helping each company improve their pitch, and the quality/number of influential people in the audience meant that most companies had the potential to get their ask fulfilled by members of the audience, whether or not they were selected for the next round.
Having said that, being selected for the Australian national final by a panel of esteemed judges is a huge honour and validation of the work we’ve put in so far! We have an updated slide deck available for review by technology corporations that would consider sponsoring us, with a proposed arrangement that includes a number of benefits for sponsors, a key one being the chance for our sponsors to display their logo/branding on our prototype spacecraft when we launch it to space for our validation mission – currently planned for 2022.
We can’t wait for the next round, to be held on October 4th at Government house in Perth. In the mean time we’d ask you to consider if you know influencers within technology corporations – be they mining, telecommunications, banking or otherwise – and consider whether they would be interested in helping an Australian space company get the means to help solve one of the biggest problems in the space industry of tomorrow – a market segment we estimate will be worth $1B annually by the 2030s.
It’s time to clean up our (space) garbage!