A start-up co-founder from the University of Southampton’s Future Worlds Cohort 2024 has been awarded a prestigious Enterprise Fellowship by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng).
Dr Oscar Festa, has been awarded the Enterprise Fellowship for his work on Xmoor, which utilises innovative proprietary software tools to provide concept screening for floating offshore wind moorings, a pain point in the rapidly growing sector.
Dr Oscar Festa
Oscar is a recent PhD graduate from the University of Southampton and specialises in interfacing novel machine learning methods with traditional offshore analysis. He is passionate about offshore design and fully dedicated to accelerating the deployment of offshore renewable energy.
Xmoor’s (formerly known as Instamoor) software tools reduce the amount of iterative pre-processing, post processing and save time waiting for simulations to run, yielding significant cost savings, providing more efficient designs, and enabling customers to focus on ‘real engineering’.
“Winning this fellowship and the support of the Royal Academy of Engineering will enable me to forge ahead with Xmoor.” said Dr Oscar Festa. “I’m really appreciative of all the support I’ve received to get to this point. It has provided a great foundation for future growth in a sector that is critical in the move to net zero”
Dr Alice Iles, 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.”
The Royal Academy of Engineering is one of the UK’s four national academies, focused on promoting excellence in engineering. Its work includes providing advice to the Government, furthering engineering education and innovation from research, and recognising excellence.
The Enterprise Fellowship is awarded to the most promising entrepreneurial engineers in the UK and from overseas. A large number of 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 follows on from Oscar’s recent success in gaining follow on funding from the Innovation-to-Commercialisation of University Research (ICURe) programme.
Oscar follows in the footsteps of a number of Future Worlds alumni founders who have been previous recipients of RAEng Enterprise Fellowships in recent years, including Iris Kramer, founder of ArchAI, Ryan Beal, co-founder of Sentient Sports, Federico Romei, founder of OhmSpace and Henry Harrod, co-founder of Fourier Audio.
