Nurturing the deep tech startups of the future at DTU Skylab
By Uffe Frandsen, Community Manager at DTU Skylab
According to Mikkel Sørensen, Head of DTU Skylab, universities play a crucial role in developing new technology startups. Especially, when it comes to startups working with deep tech – it is a field of complex technologies where you need patience to reach market maturity and capital from early on. Innovation hubs such as DTU Skylab can help accelerate that journey.

Mikkel Sørensen, Head of DTU Skylab
The success and growth of DTU Skylab
“At DTU Skylab we are expanding rapidly at the moment, and digital technologies play a very important role in this. We see ourselves as an international leading hub for innovation and entrepreneurship. DTU Skylab is both a sandbox for early-stage startups and an excellent learning environment. One of the reasons for the success of DTU Skylab is the entrepreneurial culture and mindset that characterizes the place. Another is the opportunity of cross-disciplinarity which both the students, researchers, and corporates who choose to participate in our community benefit from. These will continue to be key strengths as we open the new updated DTU Skylab with 5000 m2 of space in 2020″, says Mikkel Sørensen.
DTU Skylab Digital will expand the focus on deep tech at DTU Skylab
Mikkel Sørensen reveals the plan for the new in-house digital hub at DTU Skylab: “In a few months, we will launch our new digital hub, DTU Skylab Digital. For this space, we will use our existing strengths and increase the focus on the digital dimension of our facility. The new digital hub will offer tools and sandboxes for working digitally with iterative development and rapid prototyping. This will be possible through software and hardware platforms to support work with IoT, AI, blockchain, cloud storage, and cloud computation. To support startups and students working in these areas, we will provide access to high power computing and datasets to be used for experimenting with big data. As part of the DTU Skylab ecosystem, the digital hub will facilitate events, meetups, and challenges to bring together the best of students, researchers, and corporates, both from inside DTU and the outside world.”
Corporates connect through the DTU Skylab Business Club
“Corporates who would like to participate in all the exciting activities going on at DTU Skylab should consider signing up for our DTU Skylab Business Club. The DTU Skylab Business Club offers corporates an easy way into our community. Ways to participate include partnerships, setting challenges, participating in events and collaborating with the world-class students and young researchers from all over DTU frequenting our facility on a daily basis,” Mikkel Sørensen adds.
Start-up Fair
According to Mikkel Sørensen, DTU High Tech Summit 2019 is the best place to discover the best new tech startups:
“I would like to encourage curious corporates and others to come to the Startup Fair at DTU High Tech Summit 2019 and check out cutting edge tech startups from all areas of the DTU startup scene. This is the place to see, meet and match with some of the best startups from DTU, including those who are part of the DTU Skylab community. The Startup Fair is really the perfect place to learn all about how and where to connect to the DTU ecosystem for innovation and entrepreneurship.”
Read more about DTU Startup Fair.

“It’s no use closing your eyes to the changes. We need to constantly keep up and try to influence the process.”
Professor Jan Madsen, DTU Compute