Opening of the 3D Factory Incubator: the digital hub of the Duty-free Zone consortium makes its debut with over 70k sqm and an investment of €100m

• The 3D Factory Incubator will accommodate about 30 companies from the sector
• The project’s second phase will consist of spaces devoted to robotics and biotech projects

Barcelona will get a new technological centre with over 70k sqm that aspires to become a reference hub for innovation in the south of Europe and that will entail an investment of almost €100m. In this sense, the Duty-free Zone Consortium (CZFB, for its acronym in Spanish) has started to materialise the project with the inauguration of a 3D printing incubator. This facility, with a surface area of some 600sqm, will accommodate about 30 companies from the sector.

The 3D Factory Incubator, a good example of public-private collaboration, is an initiative driven by the CZFB and the technological centre Leitat. It also has the economic support of the FEDER and Fundació Incybe funds. The new incubator will accommodate start-ups and micro-enterprises, mainly from the medical technology, industrial and logistic sectors. The companies moving into the incubator won’t be paying for the space, only for the printing services or the investment and internationalization consultations.

Last summer, the 3D Factory Incubator launched an international incubation offer, answered by more than 40 business projects. From these, 34 were accepted: 7 from foreign companies and 27 from Spanish companies. 11 of these selected projects are related to consumer goods, 6 to equipment goods, 5 to the health sector, 4 to mobility, 3 to consultancy, 2 to ICT, 2 to chemistry and 1 to logistics.

The incubator’s second phase is another project that will also be developed in this digital hub at CZFB and is called DFactory. It consists of various spaces where projects from the robotics or the biotechnology sectors will be developed. The construction of this second phase starts this year with a first 17,500sqm space that will be finished by 2020. Subsequently, the facility will be extended up to a total of 72,500sqm.

[03/18/2019]