Ernst Holm, Magne Vethal Kanneworff, Lucas RønneJeppesen, Nicoline Louise Thomsen, Magnus Frederiksen, and Youssef Walid Abdel Rahman were one of the teams who won the 2023 UArctic Entrepreneurship Fund for their work creating an Arctic maritime drone platform to solve arctic environmental problems such as waste management.
AAVEQ Robotics was awarded with $5000 for their UArctic Entrepreneurship Fund seed grant. The team’s plan is to develop unmanned surface vehicles designed to tackle waste accumulation in remote Arctic communities, revolutionizing waste management.
Responding to landfill growth, labor shortages, and long-distance transport challenges, the team proposes weekly waste collection using remotely operated boats designed specifically for Arctic conditions. Rather than selling vessels, however, AAVEQ will operate as a logistics service provider in collaboration with ESANI A/S and Greenlandic municipalities.
“It is our hope that continued investment in Arctic entrepreneurship and industry will empower northern communities with the social tools needed to tackle and thrive in an ever-changing climate,” commented Michael Carey, Managing Partner, COO of Canard Group, LLC, and supporter of the fund.
In 2024, the AAVEQ Robotics team were finalists for the High North Young Entrepreneur Award, 2024. This award is an international competition of Arctic-related business ideas for young entrepreneurs and start-ups. The goal of the contest is to promote the potential and opportunities of the High North for young people and to encourage them to develop a more sustainable North through business ideas.
The AAVEQ Robotics team were awarded a second $5000 fund from the 2025 UArctic Entrepreneurship Award. The project continues to build on three years of development and aims to deploy a scaled MVP in Greenland in 2026, offering a cost-competitive, scalable model that improves environmental conditions, public health, and Arctic infrastructure resilience.
Interested in AAVEQ Robotics? Check out their website to see how they’re doing now.
You can read more about the first cohort of the UArctic Entrepreneurship Fund on UArctic’s News.
