An hour's drive from Bratislava, engineers are working up a prototype reminiscent of James Bond's extrication of a Soviet defector from the Slovak capital to Austria in the 1987 film, The Living Daylights. Instead of a one-man capsule, the 3-metre-high, real-life version is designed to haul up to 50 passengers through a Hyperloop tube in 8 minutes to Vienna.
C2i, the 11-year-old company started by Patrick Hessel, is one of dozens of cutting-edge companies popping up in recent years in the central European nation where entrepreneurs who trained abroad are returning to their homeland. They are taking advantage of cheap land and skilled workers to develop products from the Hyperloop capsule and plasma drills to flying cars.
“There is a start-up hype in Slovakia,” Mr Hessel, the country’s entrepreneur of the year, says from his factory in the town of Dunajska Streda. “The situation is very different from 10 or even five years ago.”
While Slovakia will be in the spotlight after assuming the European Union’s rotating presidency just as the union is trying to cope with the UK’s vote to leave it, the country also seeks to use the six months at the helm of the bloc to show off its technological potential. The government’s aim is to broaden the country’s reputation beyond the world’s largest carmaker per-capita and attract high-tech investors.
Following four decades of state-planned economy that ended with the fall of communism in 1989, entrepreneurship had a slow start in Slovakia when many left the country of 5.4 million to pursue education and job opportunities in western Europe. After transforming itself into an automotive hub – with about a million cars a year rolling off production lines at factories owned by Volkswagen, Kia and Peugeot – a reverse “brain drain” is taking hold. And those returning are bringing foreign expertise with them.
“Considering that we are such a small country, we have been able to come up with quite a few innovative products,” says Rastislav Chovanec, the deputy economy minister. “The government wants the country to move in this direction.”
With that in mind, the prime minister Robert Fico’s cabinet will host an innovation conference with the European Commission in late October that will highlight nano-, bio- and other advanced technologies. During a visit to Bratislava last month, Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy chief, met representatives of a company that is designing what may be the world’s first flying car.
The yellow and grey hangar on the outskirts of the Slovak capital houses the two-decade-old conception of Stefan Klein, an engineer with a pilot’s license, and Juraj Vaculik, an advertising executive.
The third generation of the model – with retractable wings, a petrol engine and a body that can handle motorway speed – has spent seven-and-a-half hours in the air during test flights and is now displayed in the entrance lobby of the European Commission building in Brussels to underscore Slovakia’s focus on new technologies.
The company, AeroMobil, is competing with visionaries such as Google’s billionaire co-founder Larry Page to roll out a flying car. But being first isn’t the goal, says the company’s chief technical officer, Doug MacAndrew. AeroMobil’s next prototype, which now exists in life-size technical drawings on walls and a wooden mock-up of the cockpit, will be the basis for the commercial model that may go on sale in 2018, according to Mr MacAndrew.
“We don’t see this as a race,” he says. “We see it as a technological journey. Being first would be nice but not necessary.”
While it is easier now to lure talent to eastern European start-ups, access to financing remains a more complicated issue. Unlike in western Europe and the United States, where developed stock markets allow for initial public offerings to raise money, Slovak entrepreneurs are more dependent on private investors and EU grants. AeroMobil received a €6 million (Dh24.4m) subsidy from the government to cover research costs.
“The entire region is underserved in terms of venture capital,” says Christian Mandl, a Belgium-born managing director of the Bratislava-based Neulogy Ventures, which manages a €26m fund that now invests in 30 companies. “For an investor, this means an opportunity.”
A euro also goes further in Slovakia for developers than in western Europe, Mr Mandl said, and owners of start-ups are more aware of how to stretch their budgets.
Closer to the capital’s downtown, a team of GA Drilling engineers huddles around white boards and models to sketch out a contactless system for deep wells with which they want to reshape the world’s gas, oil and geothermal industries.
Once in production, the so-called Plasmabit, which uses high-powered electrical arcing to disintegrate rock, concrete and metal without physical contact with the materials, will be able to pummel its way 10 kilometres below ground at a fraction of the cost of traditional drilling, according to Igor Kocis, the chief executive. While the company plans to sell the technology to the oil and gas heavyweights Royal Dutch Shell and BP, one of its goals is enabling access to deep geothermal energy around the world.
“Our vision is outside Slovakia,” says Mr Kocis. “We are challenging global markets to make something completely disruptive.”
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