The startup Maspatechnologies has just become the first company created by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) to be acquired. The American company Danlaw, based in Michigan, was the buyer, for an undisclosed amount. After the operation, Maspatechnologies will maintain its headquarters in the Catalan capital, on the Campus Nord of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). To face the new stage and grow the company, the hiring of new highly qualified profiles is foreseen, especially computer scientists and engineers. The current workforce stands at eight employees.
With the purchase, the BSC thus ratifies the technology transfer model that began in 2016 with the creation of its first spin-off, Nostrum BioDiscovery, to which ten more have been added in these six years. "The sale of Maspatechnologies confirms the BSC's commitment to the development of excellent and relevant research, with a high impact on society," explains the director of the scientific infrastructure, Mateo Valero, "we hope that many BSC spin-offs will have similar success and can generate high-quality jobs and attract international investments to Barcelona".
The 11 companies promoted by the BSC touch very diverse technologies, from earth sciences to life sciences, and have created more than 120 jobs and raised 8.5 million euros. The creation of these spin-offs allows the center to return the public investment it receives for research, in addition to validating supercomputing as one of the most cutting-edge enabling technologies for science to develop its full potential. In addition to Nostrum BioDiscovery and Maspatechnologies, the other spin-offs of the supercomputer are Mitiga Solutions, ELEM Biotech, Nearby Computing, Qbeast, Nextmol, Qilimanjaro, Frontwave Imaging, and EAS.
In the case of Maspatechnologies, the technology developed by the BSC, called micro-benchmarks, is the result of research that began more than a decade ago. Over the years, it has been settling, until it became a product ready for the industry. A team of BSC researchers from the Computer Architecture - Operating Systems (CAOS) group and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) launched this company in 2020, with BSC researchers Francisco Cazorla and Jaume Abella as co-founders.
The spin-off offers tools for the analysis of temporal behavior and the security of software used in aviation and automotive. This reduces the effort required to certify its proper functioning, as well as guaranteeing safer transport systems.
For example, before an airplane begins commercial use, in its testing and validation phase, a series of tests must be passed to verify that the aircraft functions well and executes different actions in milliseconds, such as flight control, autopilot, landing gear deployment, or the detection of another nearby aircraft. Maspatechnologies verifies that it performs functions like these in the appropriate time and does not delay, pushing the aircraft's capacity to its limit and confirming that it does not become saturated. "We have developed software that does not go into an airplane or a car; what it does is verify the integrated software they carry," summarizes Francisco Cazorla. This technology can also be applied in autonomous driving, which presents the same need for software capable of responding quickly.
Some of Maspatechnologies' clients have been Airbus and Rapita Systems. Thanks to working with the latter, a British company founded by Guillem Bernat, an entrepreneur born in Sant Carles de la Ràpita, the acquisition by Danlaw has come to fruition. Danlaw specializes in electronics for automobiles and connected cars and has a global workforce of 800 employees. Rapita Systems, more focused on process verification for aviation, was acquired by Danlaw in 2016. "We have had projects with Rapita Systems, and this has helped," says Cazorla. Maspatechnologies will be integrated into Rapita Systems, and Cazorla will become a senior technical fellow.