Where deep technology finds capital, infrastructure and time.
FORJA is a venture-backed accelerator for hard-tech startups. A public–private platform that replaces the single largest cost on a founder's cap table — building their own lab — with shared world-class engineering infrastructure, specialised operating mentorship and pre-seed capital.
Europe leads in deep-tech research. It lags in deep-tech ventures.
Hard-tech founders lose between eighteen and thirty-six months, and several million euros, assembling the laboratory capacity they need before their first prototype. That capital is absorbed by equipment, not by the science. FORJA exists to remove that burden and compress the industrial development cycle from five years to two.
Public infrastructure becomes venture infrastructure
A publicly-funded engineering facility — co-designed with technology centres and anchor universities — becomes the physical backbone of the programme. Startups access it in exchange for equity, not rent.
Specialised private capital alongside, not after
A hard-tech VC co-invests from day one with the public entity on a 50/50 basis. Financial discipline, commercial judgement and follow-on conviction live inside the programme, not outside of it.
Operator-grade mentorship, not advisory-board tokenism
Senior founders who have already built, scaled and exited industrial companies lead the cohorts. Mentors are compensated on equity aligned outcomes, not on visibility.
A single, clean deal with the founder.
Every company that enters FORJA receives infrastructure, capital and mentorship under one simple, investor-grade deal structure — designed to survive Seed and Series A due diligence without renegotiation.
Software accelerators do not work for companies that ship atoms.
The hard-tech founder's first eighteen months are consumed by three structural problems that software accelerators were never designed to solve.
CapEx absorption. Between €1–5M of the first fundraised round is spent standing up lab capacity — oscilloscopes, SEM time, 3D-printing rigs, environmental chambers — that the company will outgrow, depreciate, and under-utilise.
Talent gravity. Senior engineers join ventures that already have a laboratory. The absence of a physical workbench is the single most frequent reason early hard-tech hires fall through.
Investor legibility. A hard-tech company without an operating prototype is not yet a Seed-ready story. Most die between grant funding and Seed not because the science is weak, but because the commercial timeline cannot absorb the infrastructure gap.
Public capital, stranded. Europe already commits significant public funding to deep-tech research — much of which is returned or under-spent because grant vehicles are not structured to deliver industrial-grade outcomes. FORJA gives that capital a conversion layer.
FORJA closes all four gaps inside a single venture-grade platform.
A shared lab estate worth more than most Series-A rounds.
Six interconnected laboratories, a supporting technical workforce, and a shared stores function. Designed in partnership with established technology centres to avoid duplication and to plug directly into existing Catalan and European research infrastructure.
L1.Electronics & PCB Prototyping
Mixed-signal design benches, reflow and pick-and-place lines, high-frequency analysis, EMC pre-compliance, embedded test racks.
L2.Mechanical & Additive Manufacturing
CNC machining, industrial-grade FDM/SLA/SLS printing, metal sintering partnerships, CMM metrology and structural test rigs.
L3.Materials & Characterisation
Shared SEM/FTIR/XRD access through partner centres, thin-film deposition, tribology, accelerated ageing, failure analysis.
L4.Energy, Power & Thermal
Power electronics lab, battery cycling and safety testing, thermal chambers, high-current DC/AC benches, grid-emulation hardware.
L5.Robotics, Autonomy & Testing
Indoor test arena, sensor calibration, ROS-native integration benches, environmental rigs, low-speed mobility validation track.
L6.Cleanroom-adjacent & Wet-Lab Interface
Class-10K adjacent space for micro-assembly, photonics and biotech-adjacent prototyping, integrated with wet-lab partners for cross-discipline projects.
Public capital, private discipline.
A vehicle sized to deliver industrial returns without distorting the public mission. Governance is shared; investment decisions sit with the specialised VC; infrastructure decisions sit with the public entity and its technical partners.
Beyond equity returns: what the territory recovers.
A hard-tech accelerator operated from a single jurisdiction compounds public value in four directions. None of it is captured on a cap table. All of it is measurable, durable, and accrues to the sponsor.
I1.Scientific base expansion
Every cohort imports 30–50 doctoral-grade and senior-engineer profiles into the territory. Once physically anchored to the platform, a disproportionate share stays — founding second-time startups, joining industrial partners, or embedding in the research ecosystem.
I2.Economic dynamization
Each venture deploys 60–75% of its first round inside a 50-km radius: payroll, services, specialised manufacturing, legal and fiscal infrastructure. Two cohorts per year translate into sustained, high-multiplier demand on the local high-value service economy.
I3.Technological sovereignty
A working deep-tech platform generates domestic capability in the sectors Europe currently imports: advanced electronics, energy storage, robotics, materials, photonics. Ownership of that capability cannot be outsourced back later; it must be built in place.
I4.Ecosystem density
A credible hard-tech hub changes the geography of European venture: international co-investors open local presence, follow-on rounds flow inwards, and academic spinouts that would have defaulted to Paris or Munich stay close to the platform that trained them. Density compounds faster than any individual exit.
Impact indicators are tracked publicly and reported to the sponsoring entity on an annual cadence: doctoral and engineering headcount, portfolio spend per territory, follow-on capital, survivor rate, tax base contribution and sector diversification indices.
From mandate to first cohort in twelve months.
Four phases, two years. The first eighteen months are structurally about governance, infrastructure and team. Everything else compounds from there.
Political Mandate & MoU
May – Jun 2026Formal endorsement by the Govern d'Andorra. Memorandum of Understanding signed between Andorra Business, Andorra Recerca + Innovació, the Universitat d'Andorra and the hard-tech VC. Public announcement at Andorra Business Market 2026.
Vehicle & Governance
Jun – Jul 2026Constitution of the Andorran investment vehicle (Societat de Capital Risc). Operating committee formed with Andorra Business, AR+I, UdA and the VC. Legal, fiscal and compliance frameworks aligned with the Andorran regulatory regime for foreign investment.
Infrastructure & Hiring
Jul – Aug 2026Activation of the Sant Julià de Lòria campus footprint (UdA + CATSA facility). Procurement of Phase-1 laboratory equipment. Recruitment of the Managing Director, two senior engineers and two lab technicians. Open call launched across the European hard-tech community.
Cohort Zero · Pilot
Sep 2026Selection and onboarding of the pilot cohort — 4 to 6 hard-tech startups. Formal launch of FORJA · Andorra. First residents take up position on the Sant Julià de Lòria campus. Public-facing milestone with institutional and industry press.
Delivery & Demo Day
Oct 2026 – Jun 2027Cohort Zero runs through nine months of engineering and commercial milestones. Mid-programme review in Q1 2027. Demo Day in Andorra la Vella with anchor Seed and Series A investors from Iberia, France and Central Europe. Selection of Cohort 1 begins in parallel.
Scale & Territorial Anchoring
2027 – 2036Two cohorts per year of 8–12 companies. Progressive build-out of Labs L1–L6 on the Sant Julià campus. Alignment with Govern d'Andorra's trajectory of lifting public innovation investment from 1.75% to 7–8% of budget by 2036. Realised gains are reinvested into the Andorran innovation ecosystem.
Operators, not intermediaries.
FORJA is led by founders and institutional engineers with first-hand operating experience. The founding circle combines entrepreneurial leadership with direct authority over Catalonia's most capable technology infrastructure.
José Antonio González Paz
Entrepreneur and operator with a track record across deep-tech venture building, corporate strategy and international commercial development. Origin and driving force behind FORJA and convenor of the Andorra chapter.
Andorra Business
The Principality's economic promotion and development agency. Anchors FORJA · Andorra inside the national innovation strategy and the trajectory of public innovation investment toward 7–8% of budget by 2036.
Andorra Recerca + Innovació
Andorra's innovation agency and the operational link to the Andorra Living Lab. Provides the open-innovation and challenge-based frameworks that integrate FORJA cohorts into the national research programme.
Universitat d'Andorra
Host of FORJA · Andorra on the Sant Julià de Lòria campus, in direct proximity to the Institut Universitari de Recerca en Salut (IURS) and the CATSA research-and-innovation building. Anchors the talent pipeline.
Roger Casals
Multi-time founder with international exits across cybersecurity and enterprise technology. Brings founder-grade mentorship and the commercial reality of building venture-scale companies.
Jordi Rodríguez · Leitat
Senior figure at Leitat. Provides FORJA · Andorra with reciprocal access to Southern Europe's deepest applied-research lab estate — the infrastructure extension that Andorra cannot duplicate domestically.
Senior Startup Mentors, staff engineers and laboratory technicians are recruited under the Phase 2 plan. An operating committee combining Andorra Business, Andorra Recerca + Innovació, the Universitat d'Andorra and the hard-tech VC formalises the final composition of the team. Named anchor entities reflect the founding dialogue and are subject to formal convention.
A private conversation with the founding team.
FORJA is being structured through direct engagement with senior public stakeholders and a short list of specialised European venture firms. This page exists to support that conversation. Requests for the full strategic brief, financial model and governance draft are handled by invitation only.