The Search for Hidden Particles experiment (SHiP) is a new general purpose fixed target facility, whose Technical Proposal has been recently reviewed by the CERN SPS Committee and by the CERN Research Board. The two boards recommended that the experiment proceeds further to a Comprehensive Design phase in the context of the new CERN Working group "Physics Beyond Colliders", aiming at presenting a CERN strategy for the European Strategy meeting of 2019. In its initial phase, the 400GeV proton beam extracted from the SPS will be dumped on a heavy target with the aim of integrating $2\cdot10^{20}$ pot in 5 years. A dedicated detector, based on a long vacuum tank followed by a spectrometer and particle identification detectors, will allow probing a variety of models with light long-lived exotic particles and masses below O(10) GeV /c$^2$. The main focus will be the physics of the so-called hidden portals, i.e. search for dark photons, light scalars, pseudo-scalars, and heavy neutrinos. The sensitivity to heavy neutrinos will allow for the first time to probe, the mass range between the kaon and the charm meson mass, a coupling range for which baryogenesis and active neutrino masses could also be explained. Another dedicated emulsion-based detector will allow detection of light dark matter from dark photon decay in an unexplored parameter range.