Tomorrow Street: The joint venture of EU|BIC Technoport with Vodafone that became a worldwide channel to corporate procurement.

In 2017, Technoport, Luxembourg’s certified EU|BIC, co-founded Tomorrow Street with Vodafone Procurement. Tomorrow Street was founded with a twofold purpose: to find technology scale-ups that can solve Vodafone’s innovation challenges, and to help those companies establish a presence in Europe and access Vodafone’s global procurement ecosystem. Nine years on, Tomorrow Street has assessed more than 550 companies. Its programmes have generated more than €50M for scaleup partners, addressed 400 open innovation use cases, and reduced procurement cycles by almost 40%.

A successful design

Tomorrow Street is a story of structural design. Sara Robles Moreno, CEO of Tomorrow Street, explains: “Many corporate innovation projects fail because they need time to grow, time to produce results, and that time can be too costly. From the start, Tomorrow Street was designed to generate its own revenue. That commercial discipline shaped every decision the team made”. The public-private structure, Vodafone and Luxembourg (via Technoport), added a second layer of stability as both entities reinforced each other’s belief in the project. The programme has not stayed fixed. Neil Cocker, Director and Senior Partner at Tomorrow Street, describes the rhythm: “It feels like we refresh our model every two years, just to reflect not only what’s happening geopolitically, but what’s happening within Vodafone, what’s happening within the Luxembourg ecosystem.” COVID eliminated the physical co-working model that had been central to the original design. The team rebuilt around what matters: curate access. Each revision made the model sharper. “We often say we’re building the plane while it’s in the air.”

How it works

Tomorrow Street runs on four phases: internal scoping with Vodafone business units to map where innovation is needed; global scouting, with over 300 companies evaluated in 2024 alone; mutual coaching, where selected companies and the Tomorrow Street team learn from each other before Vodafone introductions begin; and two flagship events each year: a curated gathering in Luxembourg for the procurement teams who hold Vodafone’s global contracts, and a larger showcase in London. This preparation distinguishes Tomorrow Street from a standard accelerator. Companies arrive with a product and leave knowing how to sell it to one of the world’s largest corporate buyers. Tomorrow Street does not take equity in the companies it works with. Instead, it charges scale-ups a fee to participate in its six-month programme and takes a success fee when commercial outcomes follow. This model works.

Results

The results speak to that access. Quantexa joined Tomorrow Street in 2019 when it was valued at around $100 million. Its contextual decision intelligence platform, which connects disparate datasets to detect financial crime and build 360-degree customer views, was deployed commercially inside Vodafone and, from there, spread to clients across banking, insurance, government and telecoms. Quantexa is now valued at over $1 billion. Emplay entered Tomorrow Street as an AI company focused on sales performance and left as Vodafone’s chosen partner for autonomous procurement.

Of all the companies that have passed through Tomorrow Street, Emplay’s journey shows most precisely what the multiplier means in practice. Emplay joined Tomorrow Street initially, unfamiliar with the European market. Among others, Tomorrow Street, critically, identified that the company’s AI capabilities reached beyond sales into procurement, leading to a five-fold expansion of Emplay’s potential applications inside Vodafone.

Emplay was selected to build Vodafone’s autonomous procurement platform. It is now deployed across multiple Vodafone markets. Emplay is setting up a Luxembourg-based R&D team, making the country its European anchor. Sanchita Sur, Emplay’s CEO, is direct: “I think Tomorrow Street has given us a 100x multiplier.”

What comes next

In 2025, for the first time, a Luxembourg company joined the ScaleupX cohort. Videobot, an interactive video platform in its third year of operations, joined after Vodafone expressed interest in its technology. The programme that was built to attract companies to Luxembourg is now producing companies that come from there. Diego De Biasio, CEO of EU|BIC Technoport, is honest about the difficulty of replication: it required consistent long-term investment from both sides, the right people staying in place for the full duration, and real commitment to something unproven. The model may be hard to replicate, but the lesson is not. For an EU|BIC willing to think beyond the standard acceleration programme, Tomorrow Street shows what becomes possible when you build something designed to last.