The CASSINI Entrepreneurship Days return to Prague on 30 September through 1 October 2026. Is this a practical route for earth observation start-ups to reach customers, capital and market-ready services?
Europe has spent years making Copernicus data broadly available. The harder commercial problem is helping companies turn that data into products customers will buy and then finding enough patient capital to scale them. CASSINI Entrepreneurship Days, taking place at La Fabrika in Prague on 30 September and 1 October is one of the more concrete answers to that problem.
The event brings start-ups together with more than 50 investors, strategic partners and EU decision-makers. Founders can pitch on the main stage, exhibit and schedule one-to-one meetings. For the Earth observation community, the agenda is unusually close to real markets: agriculture, forestry, energy, insurance and finance, urban development, resilience, public procurement and security all appear among the advertised areas of expertise.
As we all know, the commercial value of EO is rarely in an image alone. It is in a service that improves a farm decision, prices a risk, identifies a damaged asset, verifies a supply chain or gives an operator a credible alert quickly enough to act.
An awards event, but not only an awards event
It is worth separating the Prague event from the wider CASSINI programme. CASSINI is the European Commission’s space entrepreneurship initiative for 2021-27. It combines prizes and competitions, hackathons and mentoring, a business accelerator, matchmaking and a €1bn seed and growth investment facility. It supports both upstream space companies and downstream businesses using EU space data and services.
The Entrepreneurship Days are its annual shop window. The Prague gathering was up and running by 2023, when it showcased more than 50 EU start-ups and finalists in the then-named myEUspace competition. By 2024 EUSPA described it as an annual event. The 2025 edition leaned into space and defence innovation, while the 2026 edition returns to the broader commercial conversation with the latest CASSINI Challenges winners being recognised on stage.
The awards themselves have evolved. Earlier winners sit under the 2021 and 2022 CASSINI Challenges and myEUspace labels. In 2024, the Challenges awarded five product-stage winners €100,000 each from a €1m prize pot. The 2026 competition has moved further towards commercial readiness: 12 companies from eight countries will receive €100,000 each, selected on technology excellence, innovation and commercial potential.
Past results show what a commercial EO story looks like
There are already examples worth watching including several that are much more instructive than a generic start-up pitch.
In 2024, Dutch company Satelligence won for a commodity traceability platform built on Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data. Its focus is a live commercial and regulatory need: helping forestry stakeholders and supply-chain companies respond to the EU Deforestation Regulation.
French company Kanop, another 2024 winner, uses satellite imagery and AI to provide auditable climate and biodiversity data for voluntary carbon markets and corporate sustainability reporting.
The 2026 cohort makes the trend clearer. Finland’s CollectiveCrunch combines radar and optical Copernicus imagery with AI to map forest storm damage, including damage beneath snow cover. Germany’s FloodWaive produces building-level flood maps using Copernicus data and physics-informed AI. MARGINS in Spain uses Copernicus climate datasets to identify suitable fruit-growing regions, while the UK’s Pyri combines low-cost heat-activated ground sensors with Copernicus data for early wildfire detection.
Those are not simply demonstrations of satellite-data access. They are examples of EO being fused with domain expertise, ground data, AI and a customer workflow. That is the commercial standard BARSC members should take seriously: define the costly issue first, then show how and why EO improves it.
The wider scheme has also produced evidence that its early-stage support can travel. EUSPA highlights ClearSky Vision, which uses deep learning to create cloud-free Sentinel-2 imagery, and Hiris Guider, whose Copernicus-enabled evacuation-planning platform was later tested for wildfire scenarios in Rhodes. Caius, a winner at the 2022 CASSINI Hackathon in Athens, incorporated as a company later that year and launched its rural digitisation app, Druiter, in 2025.
These are encouraging signals that a competition prize can support scale. The more useful lesson is that CASSINI is most valuable when it moves a team into customer discovery, investor conversations, credible partnerships and an operating product.
Who is backing CASSINI next?
The European Commission owns the initiative with the Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space setting the policy direction. EUSPA is a visible delivery partner for the Challenges and Entrepreneurship Days. The European Investment Fund runs the CASSINI investment facility with the Commission, while the European Investment Bank, ESA and EUSPA are identified as cooperating partners.
And, there is near-term commitment. The Horizon Europe 2026-27 work programme says CASSINI will continue supporting commercial growth and makes provision for a new CASSINI Business Accelerator contract in 2026, with an indicative €9.8m from the 2026 budget. It also explicitly links the programme to the EU Space Programme, InvestEU and private investors.
What is not yet settled is the shape or budget of CASSINI after the current 2021-27 EU financial framework. Companies should therefore treat the programme as a real opportunity now rather than assume that today’s support mechanisms will automatically continue unchanged after 2027.
For UK EO businesses, eligibility and participation rules need checking case by case, particularly where calls are tied to EU funding instruments. But the commercial signals are relevant regardless: buyers want applications that turn publicly funded space infrastructure into defensible services and investors want evidence that those applications can travel beyond a pilot.
A practical date for the diary
The CASSINI Entrepreneurship Days are free to attend although registration is required. Companies attending should arrive with a specific proposition: the customer problem, the evidence behind it, the data and delivery chain, the capital required and the partnership they actually need. In a market full of impressive imagery that level of commercial clarity will be the differentiator.
Event details: CASSINI Entrepreneurship Days, La Fabrika, Prague, 30 September to 1 October 2026. Registration and programme information.