Would you like to know more about the GEVI team and its history?
Find out here!
vol. 2
30 August 2022
HOW THE GEVI TEAM WAS BORN
By Eleonora Cacchio
The protagonists of this story are Emanuele Luzzati, Edoardo Simonelli and Soufiane Essakhi; all of them are graduated in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Pisa and close to completing their master’s degrees.
Having met in university halls, these three young engineers have shared several adventures together by participating in National and International Competitions:
- Samsung Innovation Camp 2018;
- University Makers Championship 2019, winning the Kaspersky prize;
- The 2019 and 2020 editions of Nasa SpaceApp Challenge;
- Airbus Sloshing Rocket Workshop 2021, where they won the second prize for designing and launching a carbon fibre sloshing water rocket.
Then, in July 2022, their passion for renewable energy drove them to found the startup GEVI, with a clear goal in mind: to contribute to the acceleration towards a decarbonized future.
The desire to build something new, that could help getting rid of fossil fuels, started much earlier, in September 2020. Back then, Edoardo and Soufiane were writing their bachelor’s thesis on sustainable aviation based on hydrogen and next generations fuels. Meanwhile, between 2017 and 2019, Emanuele has developed a low-cost datalogging system and an ultrasonic anemometer, to speed up anemometric campaigns of small wind turbines. His desire to characterise and capture the energy inside the wind, led him to start delving into new wind energy production systems.
The passion for sustainability and renewable energy, drove the team to design and build a prototype of a new kind of wind turbine. In late 2021, the first 30W prototype of the vertical axis wind turbine with active blade pitch control was built and tested.
It was with this project that the they won the first prize at the Human Knowledge Lab, organised by Eni joule in February 2022.
This opened the door to the possibility of taking part in a series of acceleration programmes to turn a theoretical project into a business idea, such as Eni Energizer and PoliHub accelerators.
Now, GEVI is a start-up which has received its first investment through ZERO, the Cleantech Accelerator by CDP, Eni, LVenture Group and ELIS, with the support of Acea, Maire Tecnimont, Microsoft and Vodafone.