“Barcelona has triumphed” about Madrid as the seed capital of Spain because of the deal flow and the talent,” explains Miquel Martí, CEO of Tech Barcelona. “International talent is attracted by the lifestyle, the strength of the ecosystem and the presence of international companies.”
According to Barcelona & Catalonia Startup Hub – the region’s startup directory – there are more than 1,900 startups in Catalonia, mainly concentrated in Barcelona; since 2016, the number has grown by more than 75 percent. The city has long had a strong tradition of health technology start-ups fueled by collaboration between universities and regional governments, but successful founders have funded, supported and started other companies, diversifying into construction, mobility and sustainability. . There is also a slow flow of fintechs out of London, lured by post-Brexit border-free banking, good weather, lower cost of living – and the beach.
011h’s Lucas Carne and Jose Manuel Villanueva.Photo: Gregori Civera
011u
Lucas Carné and José Manuel Villanueva sold the e-commerce site Privalia in Barcelona in 2016. In 2020, they both pledged €2 million (about $1.97 million) to establish this eco-friendly “passive house” startup, raising an additional €8 million in seed funding and, in July, €25 million in Series A financing with Redalpine, Aldea Ventures and A/O Proptech. 011h builds prefabricated houses in its factory with wood from managed forests to remain carbon neutral. “We are bringing factory systems from the automotive industry to construction to reduce costs and design buildings with low energy consumption,” explains Carné. “Buildings are responsible for 40 percent of global CO2 emissions.” A project with developer Renta Corporación reduced the building’s embodied carbon by more than 90 percent compared to conventional methods, while reducing construction timelines by 35 percent. The 011h Fioresta development in Alicante began in July 2022 with the construction and the company is developing a digital platform to carry out the design and build process, with global expansion to follow next year. 011h.com
acceXible
“We call it math-based language medicine,” said Carla Zaldua, co-founder and CEO of acceXible. The company’s automated speech analysis captures a patient’s voice – anywhere from the doctor’s office to over a landline – and uses AI to analyze their speech patterns and detect the early signs of dementia, Parkinson’s and even coronary disease using tone, pauses, repetition and sentiment analysis via so-called vocal biomarkers. Founded in 2017, AcceXible has raised €1.4 million, supported in the early stages by grants, plus $959,000 in seed funding in 2021. acceXible detects dementia with greater than 91 percent accuracy, has a new round of funding by the end of 2022, and is expanding internationally. The company is piloting the service with the UK’s National Health Service in rural Cornwall, where it is difficult for older people to reach doctors, and is prototyping a 60-second voice test to detect the signs of depression and anxiety in Colombia, Spain, UK and US. accexible.com
Carmen Rios and Frederic Llordachs of Doctomatic.Photo: Gregori Civera
doctomatic
Frederic Llordachs calls himself the ‘grandfather of digital health in Spain’. He created the Doctoralia search app for doctors in 2007, then Doctomatic last June with Carmen Rios, raising €415,000 in seed funding from Encomenda Smart Capital & Ship2B Ventures. It is a remote patient monitoring app that allows doctors to check in on patients with a chronic illness using any medical device, from heart rate monitors to scales. On-screen prompts help subjects take their readings, while physicians receive alerts if the results are absent or abnormal. The data is fed into Doctomatic’s predictive AI, which helps doctors determine if a patient’s condition is deteriorating. Some 5 billion patients worldwide suffer from chronic diseases, and Llordachs notes that Covid has made it more difficult for those patients to attend surgeries. European countries also suffer from a shortage of health workers. “We are in healthcare, so we don’t want to disturb. We want to improve,” he explains. doctomatic.com
VOTTUN
VOTTUN is “the WordPress for Web3, selling spades for the blockchain gold rush,” said Marta Valles, who co-founded the platform in 2018 with CEO Luis Carbajo, the former Spanish director of Amazon. To help companies track and certify data using blockchain technology, VOTTUN offers “templates”: turnkey blockchain products that allow companies like Nestlé, Estrella Damm and the World Bank to track data, identity, and more. certify, manage crypto payments and launch NFTs. VOTTUN received government support for its R&D phase in 2020 and 2021, then raised €1.1 million in two seed rounds from the likes of Draper Venture Network, Lanzame Capital and US fund Proteum X, with plans for an initial coin of €20 million offering by the end of 2022. The company will break through in 2021 and will turn a profit in 2022. The next step is expansion into the US and Mexico, Valles predicts. vottun.com
Nuclia
“Nuclia makes the unsearchable searchable,” said CEO Eudald Camprubí. With CTO Ramon Navarro Bosch, he has built an AI-powered search engine that can index data from any document type and transcribe videos in any language. Companies own and store more unstructured data than they know what to do with it: “unstructured data in many different data sources,” as Camprubí puts it. Nuclia’s semantic search indexes everything online in a specially created database so that when a user does a search, Nuclia offers relevant paragraphs and specific moments from audio and video recordings, all based on keywords and semantic meaning. Founded in 2019, Nuclia saw a €5 million seed round in April, led by Crane.vc and Elaia, which the company will use to target developers. nuclia.com
lupa
Combining the second oldest human activity (running) with one of the newest (deep tech), Lupa combines audio coaching, wearables, GPS maps and landmarks to take runners on new routes, explain local landmarks, and provide running tips and feedback about their physiology. The app also has a social element: Lupa hosts weekly running clubs, and it’s Sweat and laugh podcast is meant to build a sense of community. The mobile apps company was founded in 2020 by Stefano Lorini, a Salomon-sponsored mountain runner and former program leader at Google for Startups, and his co-founder, CTO and running partner Sergi Porta. lupa.run
HUBUC
Hubuc’s platform allows any company to embed financial services into its product: services such as issuing payment cards, checking exchange rates and organizing customer payments. CEO Hasan Nawaz and COO Ignacio Javierre worked on pivot after pivot before launching HUBUC in May 2020. Their single API can embed financial services – bank accounts, payments, exchange rates – into business offerings. HUBUC sits between financial partners and the company’s product, managing contracts and legal requirements. The February seed round raised $10 million from WndrCo, DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Runa Capital. “Usage has grown exponentially, with the number of card transactions increasing by 1,600 since the beginning of the year,” explains Javierre. hubuc.com
Last.app
When the world started ordering food through the app, who supported the food providers? Last.app is a B2B on-demand courier service for the restaurant industry, founded in 2019 by two brothers, both former Glovo employees, to serve hospitality businesses, restaurants and haunted kitchens. Local entrepreneur and CEO Eric Nikolic saw that “technology has made things harder for restaurants, not less,” he explains. So far, the company has deals with local chains including PadThaiWok, Tony Roma’s, Carl’s Jr. and Miss Sushi. January’s €2.5 million funding round, led by All Iron Ventures, a Spanish financier, with support from Bynd, aims to drive international expansion in 2022 for the app, which is currently only in Spanish. last.app
Vitality
“Insurance is not a sector that has shown a lot of innovation to date,” says Ana Zamora, a long-time insurance expert and now founder of Vitaance. “It should contribute to lives, not just cover disasters.” Trying to overcome the consumer perception that insurance is boring, Vitaance combines financial, social, mental and physical improvements for a company’s employees by providing rewards for individuals and teams who achieve healthy physical, emotional and financial goals. The Catalan company closed 2021 with a €3 million pre-seed funding round from the likes of SoftBank, Kindred Ventures and Astorya to fund a research and innovation lab and expand employee benefits. vitaance.com
payroll
Payflow shares Catalonia’s respect for civil society. The startup is selling a salary advance service to employers, where companies charge a commission if staff withdraw part of their pay early, instead of charging staff like competing services do. “We offer workers a real employee benefit and will never charge employees,” said Benoît Menardo, who co-founded the company in 2020 with Avinash Sukhwani. Among users, it has an average download speed of 40 percent, which peaks at 90 percent for some of its customers. Since its launch in 2020, it has raised €12 million, with a round of €8 million in January including Spain’s VC Seaya Ventures, Cathay Innovation, Y Combinator and Steve Huffman’s Rebel Fund to move into a neobank. payflow.io
