The SHiP Collaboration has proposed a general-purpose experimental facility operating in beam dump mode at the CERN SPS accelerator with the aim of searching for light, long-lived exotic particles of Hidden Sector models. The SHiP experiment incorporates a muon shield based on magnetic sweeping and two complementary apparatuses. The detector immediately downstream of the muon shield is optimized both for recoil signatures of light dark matter scattering and for tau neutrino physics. The second detector system aims at measuring the decays of hidden sector particles into the visible sector in a nearly background free environment. The detector consists of a 50 m long decay volume followed by a spectrometer and particle identification. Using the high-intensity beam of 400 GeV protons, the experiment is capable of integrating $2\times10^{20}$ protons in five years, which allows probing dark photons, dark scalars and pseudo-scalars, and heavy neutrinos with GeV-scale masses at unprecedented sensitivities. The sensitivity to heavy neutrinos will allow for the first time to probe, in the mass range between the kaon and the charm meson mass, a coupling range for which baryogenesis and active neutrino masses can be explained. Following the review of the Technical Proposal, the CERN SPS Committee recommended in 2016 that the experiment and the beam dump facility studies proceed to a Comprehensive Design Study phase. These studies have resulted in a mature proposal submitted to the European Strategy for Particle Physics Update.