Following its selection for Tech Foundry Portugal – Deep Tech Edition, ENG8 joins the country’s first deep tech accelerator for four months from September, closing with a Demo Day in Porto in December, the quarter in which the company expects its first commercial energy sales.
ENG8 has been selected for Tech Foundry Portugal – Deep Tech Edition, the first accelerator of its kind in Portugal, run by Startup Portugal with Hello Tomorrow and the Câmara Municipal do Porto as institutional partner. The declaration of intent was signed on 6 August 2026 by Energynetiq Lda, ENG8’s Portuguese operating company, and the programme runs from September to December.
The programme
Tech Foundry Portugal takes up to 40 teams across two tracks, working in Porto and online over four months. Entry is restricted to companies at technology readiness level 4 to 5, meaning a technology validated in a laboratory or demonstrated in a relevant environment, with selection weighted towards technological innovation and market potential.
Teams receive workshops on the problems of taking a technology to market, one-to-one mentoring across three areas, assessment meetings at onboarding, midpoint and close, a dedicated programme manager, a corporate visit to a national industry player, peer learning with other Portuguese founders, and a place at a Demo Day in December in front of investors and industry. Hello Tomorrow, which has worked with deep tech companies across 35 countries for 14 years, opens its network of more than 1,300 investors to the cohort, and follow-up sessions continue after the programme closes.
What ENG8 takes from it
The three areas of mentoring, technology to market, business model and investment readiness, map closely onto where the company’s work now sits.
EnergiCell assembly: two people build a 50-100 kW module in a day at ENG8’s laboratory in Ílhavo, on a largely off-the-shelf supply chain with roughly 90-day lead times. The work that now sets the company’s pace is installing, commissioning and servicing generators on customers’ sites. The programme brings four months of structured work with people who have taken other deep tech companies through the same transition.
The investor network is relevant for the same reason. ENG8 intends to raise a scale-up round once commercial invoicing begins, and the programme brings access to Hello Tomorrow’s investors and a Demo Day in the same quarter. The corporate visit and the peer group are Portuguese, which is where the laboratory, the trials and the first customers are.
Where the company stands
ENG8 enters the programme at an interesting point for a deep tech company, with a customer already signed. Its first industrial trial goes onto Primus Ceramics’ production line in Aveiro this quarter under a letter of intent signed on 29 June, in time replacing gas burners that deliver hot air at between 600 and 1,250°C with an EnergiCell generator, which produces heat and electricity from the hydrogen and oxygen in water. First commercial energy sales are expected in the fourth quarter, during the trial rather than after it.
In July the company won PRIO JumpStart 2026, taking a funded 100 kW pilot at the Portuguese energy group’s biodiesel refinery, and received a letter of support from APICER, Portugal’s ceramics association. The EnergiCell has been independently validated on nine occasions to date, by the Instituto Electrotécnico Português, Prof. Jean-Paul Biberian, the University of Cambridge’s Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, CICECO in Aveiro and an independent testing laboratory in the United States.
‘We are past the point where the question is whether the technology works. The questions now are how quickly we can install and service generators on a customer’s site, and how we fund doing that at scale. Those are the questions this programme is built for.’ – Valeria Tyutina, CEO and co-founder
What happens next
The programme begins in September, the same month ENG8 presents the PRIO pilot scope to the energy group’s executive committee. The Primus trial runs on the ceramics line from this quarter, with first commercial energy sales expected in the fourth. Demo Day is in Porto in December.
ENG8’s immediate focus is the line in Aveiro.