Oscar Festa awarded RAEng Enterprise Fellowship

Oscar Festa, who was recently completed his PhD with the IROE group, has been awarded a position on the prestigious Enterprise Fellowships by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng), to accelerate the development of his spin-out business, xmoor.

Co-founded with Oscar’s PhD supervisor and IROE chair Prof. Susan Gourvenec, xmoor is developing novel software to reduce the cost of floating offshore renewable energy. The software, powered by state-of-the art machine learning algorithms developed over the course of Oscar’s PhD, can model offshore designs over 50,000x faster than traditional modelling software, and identify a variety of optimised designs for any project requirements (see explanatory video).

The Enterprise Fellowship is awarded to the most promising entrepreneurial engineers in the UK and from overseas. Many hopefuls apply each year for the invaluable opportunity to be supported by the Academy's Enterprise Hub, which draws on the depth of expertise found among the Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Applications are considered by a panel of entrepreneurs, investors and Fellows of the Academy before shortlisted candidates pitch for a Fellowship.

The Enterprise Fellowship award follows on from Oscar's previous success in gaining a position on the Future Worlds 2024 cohort, run by the University of Southampton on-campus startup accelerator (https://futureworlds.com/). The Future Worlds cohort was instrumental in giving Oscar and Susan the training and mentoring required to submit a successful Enterprise Fellowship application. Alice lles, Head of Tech Acceleration for Future Worlds, added "This is great news for Oscar, xmoor and the University of Southampton. We've built up a strong record of supporting successful applications in what is a very specialised fellowship. It's always fantastic to see researchers grow into successful startup founders."