Spinouts progressing technologies for road traffic and electric vehicle applications are among the first to have been selected for a Philippines government funding scheme.

Five Philippines-based spinouts have been backed by a new funding initiative of the national government created to support academic research from an existing state grant program, OpenGovAsia has reported.
Dubbed Funding Assistance for Spin-Off and Translation of Research for Advancing Commercialization (Fastrac), the program will aim to bridge the commercialisation gap for teams awarded grants by the Department of Science and Technology’s Philippine Council for Industry, Energy and Emerging Technology Research and Development.
Fastrac will back projects for a one-year term in the hope of translating council-funded research into market-ready products, via means including spinout agreements.
The program has been designed with what the government described as a “researcher and technology”-led focus, and will start by testing potential use-cases as well as their market appetite and product viability.
Once validated, Fastrac support will continue to be provided as the selected research teams commence formal business operations, and researchers will also be put in touch with business support groups.
The five projects selected for the inaugural Fastrac funding tranche were identified as:

  • Contactless Apprehension of Traffic Violators, a De La Salle University Manilla spinout progressing vision-based artificial intelligence analytics software for road traffic and transport compliance purposes.
  • Charging in Minutes, which will leverage University of the Philippines Diliman research related to a fast power charger for lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles.
  • Universal Structural Health Evaluation and Recording System, a spinout formed from Mapúa University’s intellectual property focused on commercialising technologies to monitor buildings.
  • Fish-I, a University of the Philippines Diliman-founded developer of marine environment surveying technologies that would deploy data analytics to simplify the evaluation of images collected from an underwater camera.
  • Smart Surface, another University of the Philippines Diliman spinout, is focused on delivering a multi-electronic sensor technology that would convert almost any flat surface into an interactive interface.