Marc Aragón, Marc Pous, Iván González and Marco Azpurúa make it possible, among other things, for the mobile phone to be used on an airplane or for people with pacemakers to not have problems when they are in an area of ??electromagnetic fields. This is what is known as electromagnetic compatibility (CEM OR EMC according to the acronym in English). It is the same concept that gives its name to EMC Barcelona, ??the startup that these four engineers founded in May 2020. “We were researchers from the Electromagnetic Compatibility Group of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) and within the group we already worked as if it were a small business,” explains Azpurúa.
Now, as a real company, the four partners ensure that “any electronic device can function correctly,” in the words of the co-founder. EMC Barcelona’s clients range “from startups with innovative electromagnetic technologies to more conventional companies such as manufacturers of automobiles, lighting and switches, medical equipment, heavy machinery or photovoltaic systems,” says Azpúrua. At the end of the year, they will have dealt with between 100 and 150 clients. They are mainly Catalan companies, but the startup also has work in the rest of the State and carries out R&D projects at the European level.
The entrepreneurs continue to collaborate with the UPC and have their headquarters at the university’s North Campus, but Azpurúa recognizes that the space is becoming too small for them. “We need to invest in facilities with our own laboratories,” he says. Another of the future challenges of the emerging company is to consolidate the product offering, with tools for measuring electromagnetic field emissions. On the other hand, the startup has been selected to be part of the ESA BIC Barcelona, ??the business incubation center that the European Space Agency (ESA) has in Barcelona, ??to carry out an agile multi-domain evaluation project of electromagnetic interference to space application.
EMC Barcelona, ??which employs two people and three of the partners (not Marc Pous, who works at the European Space Agency), will close 2023 with a turnover of 300,000 euros plus the investment raised for the development of public R & D projects. To date, the emerging company has involved an investment of nearly one million euros, between its own resources and public subsidies for R&D projects.
