The pre-acceleration program Empreender@Braga, promoted by Municipality of Braga and InvestBraga, distinguished three business ideas in the areas of biotechnology, digital economy and health technologies. The first edition of Empreender@Braga ended with the evaluation of the work developed by entrepreneurial teams during the four weeks of the program.

From the batch of eight projects selected for the Empreender@Braga program, the ideas presented by IPLEXMED, Pluggable.AI and FucusCurl stood out as the ones with the greatest potential, winning a monetary prize for setting up companies. The IPLEXMED project, which achieved first place, also secured access to six months of incubation at Startup Braga.

With over 30 hours of training and the involvement of about 35 trainers and mentors linked to the innovation hub community, Luís Rodrigues, director of Startup Braga, highlights the focus "on the close work developed during the weeks of work, which allowed the intensification of the teams' work around the development of the business model, the validation of its positioning and market strategy, and the construction of the pitch deck during the training period, which resulted in a sustained evolution of ideas.

The responsible for Startup Braga also emphasizes that this pre-acceleration program "is essential to support entrepreneurs in Braga, being, in some cases, the first contact they have with the market, with their potential customers, partners and investors.

Considering the extremely positive balance of this pre-acceleration program, which was designed to support entrepreneurs who want to start their businesses from Braga, Luís Rodrigues highlighted the highly innovative character of most projects, as well as the diversity of their areas of activity, thus fulfilling one of the purposes of the innovation hub by supporting scalable projects in the areas of digital economy, nanotechnology and health technologies.

Also João Rodrigues, the city councilman responsible for innovation, reinforces the importance of the work developed under this program "that brings together entrepreneurs from such diverse areas and that, a few years ago, were not directly associated with highly technological and scalable initiatives.

It should be remembered that, through previous editions of Startup Braga's pre-acceleration programs, about 80 business ideas have already been tested, with part of them later becoming startups, today references in the Portuguese innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem.