Posted on

The Future of Banking

Fintech trends and startups that will change the way we approach banking

The banking sector as we know it is ready for disruption. Who needs huge transaction fees, mountains of printed forms and long waiting times in our digital age? Technology and startups are already changing and hopefully optimizing the way we approach banking and traditional banking services.

According to a BI Intelligence survey from 2017, “71% of millennials say it’s very important to have a banking app and 60% say it’s very important to have an app to make payments.” While many traditional banks are not there yet to serve this need properly, fintech startups from across the world are ready to fill the gap.

This week we looked at some of the biggest trends in the financial sector, to give you an overview and to introduce you to Europe-based startups that are innovating on top of these trends and that are already profiting from the underlying changes.

Lending marketplaces for SMEs

Instead of borrowing money from traditional banks, more and more SMEs are using online lending providers and lending marketplaces. Compared to traditional banks, these solutions are often a bit less bureaucratic and less time-consuming. Three startups that are innovating in that space are: Spotcap, which operates as a direct lender to SMEs (already secured over €100 million in funding), Bitbond, which is a Blockchain-based SME lending platform from Berlin, and Barcelona-based LoanBook, a marketplace which focuses on the provision of working capital loans and other types of financing to Spanish SMEs.

Consumer Credits and Credit Scoring

Also for consumers, online lending marketplaces become more popular. Do you have a stable income, own some real estate, do you have debts? These are probably the most important and most common factors for banks and other financial service providers when it comes to estimate the credit-worthiness of a client. But actually, there are many more factors or approaches. Kreditech, for example, also measures some data points from social media platforms in order to evaluate if you’re credit worth or not. The German fintech startup not only does credit scoring, but also offers consumer loans. Another fast-growing company in that space is Barcelona-based ID Finance. The most prominent ID Finance assets is probably the smart data online lending service MoneyMan. An online lending service with more than 3 million registered clients. The idea behind MoneyMan is to help people to solve their short-term cash flow needs by providing a fully automated loan service operating round-the-clock.

Blockchain Technology

In the future, blockchain technology might have a big impact on the global banking system. The implementation of the distributed-ledger technology has the potential to play a major role when it comes to payments, settlements or compliance. The blockchain’s key properties of decentralization, immutability, efficiency, cost-effectiveness and security might lead to the technology’s adoption across the entire spectrum of financial services. Although it’s an exciting concept, there are not so many working use cases for it yet. One example of a European startup using blockchain technology is the Estonia-based Funderbeam. The crowdinvesting platform uses blockchain to secure issuing tokens, trading tokens, keeping track of investors (cap table management) and clearing the trades. This way, the blockchain carries many roles that in traditional stock markets are provided by many intermediaries. It is the trust that intermediaries should represent and the trust is now built in technology — blockchain.

Cryptocurrencies

Cryptocurrencies will change everything and will democratize and decentralize the whole monetary system as we know it. That’s at least what my taxi driver told me last week. Let’s hope he’s right, when we think of all the money that is currently getting invested in that field. In the physical gold rush times of the past, companies selling shovels and gold digging supply made a lot of money. Today, this is also the case with cryptocurrency marketplaces. No matter if prices go up or down, they win. The leading and most basic cryptocurrencies marketplace is probably Coindesk, which was founded in 2013 by the London-based serial entrepreneur Shakil Khan. Coindesk lets you buy and sell Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and Litecoins.

Saving up money

Saving up money can be hard, especially if you don’t have a big salary. But there are more and more startups that set out to help consumers save up money. They haven’t replaced savings accounts or piggy banks yet, but they are on a good way. You want to grow your savings as well? One of the newest and most promising startups in that space is probably Madrid-based Arbor. It’s an automatic savings app with the mission of helping users save seamlessly without impacting their lifestyles. Users control how and when they want to save. Arbor for example offers to round up all card and bank transactions to the next euro. All these little amounts are then going into the user’s savings account. With Arbor you can also just set up recurring savings transfers. For example by choosing to save up €5 every Tuesday. The Arbor solution integrates with the user’s existing banks which means they don’t even have to change banks.

Equity Crowdfunding for Startups and SMEs

Another alternative financing form which gets more and more popular is equity-based crowdfunding. Instead of raising money from traditional venture capital firms or getting a loan from your bank, you can offer some shares of your company through platforms like Seedrs, Crowdcube or StartupXplore. Of course it still needs some time and efforts to create a successful funding campaign, but some standard due diligence processes and most of the bureaucratic steps are handled by the crowdfunding platform. Most importantly to note is, that it’s not necessarily easier to raise funding via a crowdfunding platform, but in many cases it will happen faster compared to traditional fundraising.

International money transfer

Are you also annoyed of huge transaction fees and long waiting times when it comes to international money transfer? With Transferwise and other solutions, this is now a thing of the past. London-based Transferwise was founded by Estonian entrepreneurs in 2011 and today is headquartered in London. The fast-growing fintech company makes sending money overseas up to 8 times cheaper than traditional bank, and their borderless account allows you to manage money in 28 different currencies. The Transferwise team aims to provide the fairest, easiest way to manage your money internationally.

Mobile banking

With mobile banking, you can do most of the things you can do with your regular bank account, but all on your smartphone. For example with apps like N26, Revolut or Atom. With those modern banking providers, opening a new bank account takes less than 10 minutes and can be done directly from your smartphone. Users receive a credit card to pay cashless or withdraw cash all around the world. They can block or unblock their card with a simple click and send money instantly to friends and contacts. And it’s no secret that the mobile banking space is really booming right now. Earlier this month the UK-based mobile bank Atom raised £149 million in funding led by Spanish bank BBVA. This week, the Berlin-based mobile bank N26 raised $160 million to accelerate growth in the US and the UK.

Conclusion — the future of banking

It’s of course hard to predict the future of banking, mostly due to the yet untapped potential of the blockchain technology. But with traditional banks and startups exploring innovative use cases of decentralized financial solutions, there will be certainly big changes coming, which will completely transform the way how consumers and businesses access/use banking services. And most likely it will not be the Deutsche Banks or BNPs of the world which will be leading that field in the future, but probably a fintech startup that is just getting started.

Posted on

Podcast #29 — Talking Insurtech with Eugeni Morales

In itnig’s Podcast #29 Bernat Farrero, CEO at itnig speaks with Eugeni Morales about his experience in the Insurtech and Proptech business. Eugeni is one of our partners at Factorial and someone we have the pleasure of working with day by day.

At itnig every Friday we sit down to talk with interesting people whom we meet throughout the week and we make a podcast (in Spanish) out of our conversations. You can listen to it on iTunes, subscribe to our channel on Youtube or enjoy it through iVoox.

For this Podcast #29 Bernat Farrero, CEO at itnig and Eugeni Morales come together to talk about the beginning of his career in Insurtech, what he has learned, how digitalization has shaped the sector and how he got involved with Factorial.

Eugeni, how did you get started in the world of insurance?

I had the chance that my family already had small businesses. I started to study engineering and straight out of college worked for a multinational company. After a few months I realized that this was not what I was looking for and started to work in a family business dedicated to insurance for medical sector. Eventually we sold the company to insurance executives and after this first experience in entrepreneurship I continued to create another business in the insurance sector.

In 2003 / 2004 I was leading a medical services business oriented to companies and other businesses connected to this. We had about 200 employees and revenues of 6 million Euros facilitating medical services to construction firms for example.

What are the margins in such a business?

When you work for insurance companies the margins are very small, whereas in the public sector you can reach a higher margin. All in all however it was very complicated work because you had a high costs for overheads for the doctors. In the end we sold the company.

Why did you decide to sell if the business was working for you?

It was a lot of work with high labor risk for a low margin. At that age, I preferred to have a less labor intensive business. We sold the company and I decided to go into the real estate sector. After living through the real estate crisis, I took a break in 2010 to travel the world and recharge.

Upon coming back to Barcelona I started again. This time I had the idea to start online. Not that I knew anything about Internet but I thought there were many opportunities. That’s when the idea of Insurtech started taking form.

The first online company I created was an insurance information portal — where you as a user could have access to all insurances you have, see the costs and compare them and contract new / switch insurances right through the platform. An insurance comparison if you will.

This business is where I lost the most money in my life. It did not work — I did not execute it well and the market was not ready.

The insurance sector is a very regulated business. You cannot apply lean or startup methodologies of trial and error if you are in such a regulated space. Regulations condition your philosophy of trial & error.

What went wrong? What was your go-to market plan?

I dedicated a lot of time to create the product and little time to think about what the user would want. Our time to market was delayed a lot because we needed to reach agreements with insurance companies. When we finally launched, the margin time we had to interact with the market, to have traction was really short.

We were an aggregator of insurance policies as app. For a lot of users it was the first time they knew how much they were spending on insurance, which insurance they had contracted and a chance to compare them.

What was your business model?

We worked as brokers, with a commission based on all insurances. However, the insurance companies at that time were not so interested in digital world. Now of course this has changed and they are investing a lot online.

From what I learned here new businesses emerged and I maintained a good relationships with an international broker looking at what online business can grow, what opportunities there are for brokers.

So what kind of projects do you do in Insurtech?

Different products like insurance cancellation for travel companies like Waynabox, Real Estate sector or even all kind of Classified sites like for example Wallapop.

We are not looking for distribution but rather new business models for insurances in the digital space. Where there is insecurity between buyer and seller, we can create an insurance product dedicated to bridge this gap.

An exempla is the fintech startup Marketpay. You buy a product from someone far away and you don’t want to go to physically pick it up and check it is in good conditions. We can do logistics and an insurance for warranty of product for you.

We work with escrow payments on the platform. The buyer pays for the product, the company keeps the money until product is received and validated by the buyer. Only once the product is checked, is the money released to the seller. If it turns out that the product does not work in the limit of 30 or 60 days, the product is returned — repaired or the money is reimbursed partially. We are part of this operational flow of Marketpay — creating a new insurance product that did not exist before.

Without escrow, without validation by the buyer this would be impossible.

In this way, I look for startups where we can test new products like this — before bringing it to a much bigger customer.

A bigger customer like Airbnb?

Yes, for example.

We created an insurance that covers the damage a visitor might leave in your house. The traveller instead of leaving a deposit, could pay a premium that covers the damage. That could be an option, substitution the deposit for a premium (which will never be recovered). There is a friction between traveler and renter. Renters needed to have money in cash- that makes it more complicated and we think that in this case for example an insurance would be better.

Airbnb can make a margin off the premium, on a deposit Airbnb does not make anything.

What changes do you see in the business? Is there anything that surprised you lately?

The model that I most liked could be the one used by Marketpay, using escrow but some would consider this more Fintech than Insurtech. Another interesting project I recently saw in the US is a company offering to cover certain risks but instead of asking for a premium they ask for more data of their users. If you give us access to this data and the buyer, we’ll cover the risk. Substituting the insurance for data could be a possible future.

What about Factorial? You got to know Factorial in the very beginning and you decided to invest. Where did you see the opportunity?

The strong suites I saw were and are that technology has a high importance. There is a clear market necessity, brokers were already doing it (benefits), so there was an existing demand. The capacity to monetize was diversified not just insurance but through other products as well. The commission is small but the volume is high and the segment is growing. As there is more pressure on our social welfare system, young people are looking more and more for private insurance — if they can get benefits by going through their employer why would they not do it?

Another important part in my decision was itnig. Knowing that itnig is behind Factorial meant that I did not have to worry that the entrepreneur would get scared, it’s not the fist time they are doing it, they know how to build a business.

In general, what motivates you when investing?

I only invest if I know about the sector, if I can bring contacts and add value, if I see a strong team and an infrastructure like an incubator that gives more security, behind the startup.

If I don’t know anything about the space the startup is working in I don’t go in.

What are you planning to do int he next years?

I have some ideas to start a business in Real Estate. And for the other projects, where I have invested I look to contribute the most to make it a success like Factorial or Marketpay.

Listen to our podcast to learn more about Eugeni’s story. Learn more in this Podcast in Spanish on our Youtube channel, listen to it on iTunes or enjoy it through iVoox and subscribe to our newsletter to stay always up to date.

Posted on

Doing Business in China — Podcast #27 with Alexis Roig

In itnig’s Podcast #27 Bernat Farrero, CEO at itnig, Jordi Romero, CEO at Factorial and César Migueláñez, Product Director at Factorial speak with Alexis Roig entrepreneur in China about how he got started and the challenges and opportunities he faces on a day to day basis.

Summing up 9 years of living in China in terms of bureaucracy, local partners, recruitment of talented team members, cultural differences and the effects of pollution.

Before moving to Shanghai I was living in France. Little decisions bring you to new places. To me, European culture felt pretty similar once you learn the language. So, after a time in France I was looking for something new, a cultural challenge. And in that sense China, Shanghai really seemed like a personal and professional challenge with huge opportunities for business and technology.

I moved to Shanghai initially working for a French company — and I arrived there without knowing anything. If you have something entrepreneurial in you, China is contagious. It has another rhythm, everybody has another company, side projects. In the first year I started with my own personal project while working at the company.

What kind of projects did you start?

We started out with Food & Beverage products that were innovative at that time. Later I dedicated myself to education, developing collaboration between Europe and China and now lately consulting projects in technological diplomacy. International relation paired with science, innovation and technology.

In general, Chinese don’t cook at home, most people eat out. So we launched a restaurant with mediterranean/ catalan cuisine. Far away from technology, this was a very interesting project.

How do you create business in China?

If you are thinking more about the bureaucratic aspect it’s not easy: As foreigner there is a format to follow, a lot of regulation and norms for taxes and recruitment. These rules for foreigners differ from rules applied to Chinese businesses.

And it’s not just bureaucracy — you need a new approach to everything.

Chinese internet is another world.

You’ll have to think of other ways of doing business — Amazon Web Services, Google Apps, GitHub …. you won’t be able to do business as usual and have to find new ways. When you want to start in China, you’ll need maximum humility and you should look at it as if it were your very first project.

What is the work culture like?

For me as entrepreneur this is probably the hardest challenge. Talent lack, no team work, not much creativity — based in education system. You listen to the teacher but you never question his wisdom. No creativity, no critical thinking, no group work. This education system helps to keep up the system but it also means that China is lacking talent working in new areas of science and technology.

People are only children — this also has an implication on their behavior. In a family there might be six people who are looking after one child, all frustration, aspiration and expectations are focussed on one child. This child receives a look of pressure on what to do in life, whom to marry, where to work, if to buy a house or not…This also affects the way you look at work.

You ask somebody for an opinion — but it’s hard to get an answer.

This is generalizing of course, stereotypes. Now the trend is to bring back Chinese population who left to study abroad, start business or work in laboratory. They know how to move in the Chinese society and have seen the ‘world outside’.

How do you sell in China?

In terms of Internet, the Chinese internet user is very accustomed to buy online. 8 years ago when I arrived to Shanghai, I was surprised! In the subway in the morning everybody around me was buying online through their mobile. At the same time in Europe, we had Amazon but it wasn’t the same thing. I still use my desktop to shop, compare prices and find information about the product looking to buy. And when arriving at the office, the reception was swamped with parcels.

Most Chinese people’s first contact with internet is through the phone. Like in other areas of development, the first product introduced to the market was a phone not a desktop pc.

30 years ago China was a miserable place but now people are dressed with international brand, big cars, use the latest smartphone. The boom of consumer society, deleting the story of the country, religion is the money, the big aspiration is making money, paying a good education for children and finding a high paying job. What’s left of communism is probably only the leading party’s name.

If you are interested in hearing more about starting a business in China, watch the whole podcast on Youtube or listen to it on iTunes.

Listen to our podcast to learn more about Alexis’ adventures in developing businesses in China. Learn more in this Podcast in Spanish on our Youtube channel, listen to it on iTunes or enjoy it through iVoox and subscribe to our newsletter to stay always up to date.

Posted on

Discovery & Delivery in Product Management at Typeform

In itnig’s Podcast #26 Bernat Farrero, CEO at itnig and César Migueláñez, Product Director at Factorial, talk with Pol Narbona, Product Owner at Typeform about Product Management.

Pol shares his story with us: How he arrived at Typeform, how he started out as a Product Owner and gives us a little overview on how he works with two road maps — Discovery & Delivery — in Product Management. For the whole talk you can view this video on the Dual Track Agile methodology:

At itnig every Friday we sit down to talk with interesting people whom we meet throughout the week and we make a podcast (in Spanish) out of our conversations. You can listen to it on iTunes, subscribe to our channel on Youtube or enjoy it through iVoox.

https://upscri.be/5c88ff/

First of all, we ask him to situate us and give us a bit of context before we enter in detail into his career path.

What is Typeform?

Typeform is a software for online data collection: forms, surveys, register forms — converting a bureaucratic thing into a conversation. But this is probably just the boring explanation of the produc t— we are really strong in design and user interaction.

How did you arrive at Typeform?

I am from Barcelona and started to study here but then I had the chance to go to the US with a sport’s internship. In the 3rd year at uni I was doing some market research and needed to create a survey, I used Typeform and when I shared the survey the respondents were really surprised. I was studying Business & Tech and when I was finishing uni I started to look for jobs all over Europe. Actually I think Typeform was the only company in Barcelona I applied for. As they did not have any open positions in the Product team I started as Data Analyst, as part of the Customer Success team. Here I came to understand user behavior and I started seeing how the product team works. After a while and a restructuring of the teams, I applied internally for product owner position and here I am now.

I finished my university studies and started working at Typeform a year and a half ago. At that time I was employee #90 if you will and now, 1.5 years later we are about 180 people in the team. I think this gives a good impression of our rapid growth.


How do you work at Typeform in Product Management?

At Typeform we separate ourselves into different product teams, distributed along the User Journey:

  • Discover (top of the funnel, acquisition, public sites)
  • Subscribe (user subscription, demo environment to try product)
  • Conclude (results based work, e.g.integration with partners)

In the Conclude team for example we work in different colonies with Designers, UX, Developers, QA and Product Owners. The colonies give us the info that people working in this colony are focussed on this part of the user journey.

These colonies are not hermetic, we switch between teams, actually it is pretty common for developers to be working on different parts of the funnel from time to time. This allows us to divide the product up in different parts and assign an objetive and metric to each of them.

However, we are changing this again as we discovered that there are lot of dependencies. For example: We wanted to create a user journey for a specific persona but if other teams are working on other priorities there are dependencies that arise. Now we are going for a more horizontal approach to have more context at the moment of working together.

And you said you use Dual Track Agile as work methodology?

Yes, we do Discovery & Delivery in parallel. While the team works on delivery of a tested feature, I can dedicate myself to identify new opportunities that come later.

In general, throughout all teams we work in 2 weeks sprints and with Scrum. We have seen that these are compatible with the Discovery & Delivery Agile roadmap.

If you are interested in finding out more about his work methodology at Typeform, we encourage you to listen to and watch his talk at itnig as well.

Listen to our podcast to learn more about Product Management at Typeform and Pol’s experiences with Discovery & Delivery. Learn more in this Podcast in Spanish on our Youtube channel, listen to it on iTunes or enjoy it through iVoox and subscribe to our newsletter to stay always up to date.


Posted on

10 female entrepreneurs you should keep an eye on in 2018

Who they are and how they are overcoming their business challenges

Watch out for FutureFunded, a crowdfunding platform focused on training the next generation of women in technology, Bwom, an intimate health coach on your mobile and brand protection partner Red Points — and especially their leaders Cecilia Tham, Helena Torras and Laura Urquizu.

As women are still heavily underrepresented in the startup world, we think it’s time to shed some light on all those amazing female entrepreneurs in Barcelona who are already crushing it. In the beginning of this year we therefore took a close look at the Barcelona startup scene to identify female entrepreneurs who are working on promising tech ventures. Below we’re introducing you to 10 women in tech who we think you should keep an eye on in 2018. Why? Because they are awesome, and working on exciting projects that have a great year/future ahead!

We also asked them to share with us what their biggest business challenge was in 2017 and how they eventually mastered it. Here is our list of promising female entrepreneurs from Barcelona, and some of their insights:

Cecilia Tham is known as an innovation activist in empowering individuals and organizations by building communities to innovate for impact with design and tech. She is the co-founder of multiple companies such as MOB, Makers of Barcelona, a collaborative co-working community, FabCafe, a new concept that brings digital fabrication tools to the everyday environment of a coffee shop. Her latest venture FutureFunded is a crowdfunding platform focused on training the next generation of women in technology. Cecilia is also the founder of MEAT — an agency that enables companies for corporate transformation to innovate with technology.

Regarding her biggest challenge in 2017 and how she mastered it, Cecilia stated: “2017 was a really tough year for us because of many unexpected obstacles and events, from the unbearable noise of the heavy renovation work of our neighbor to the lack of leadership from my own decision to take 3 months off work to attend Singularity University. There wasn’t one major event that was problematic, it was an accumulation of multiple events, one after another throughout the year that had made it difficult. I myself was overwhelmed, but my team of 14 pulled together, each took on different responsibilities and tasks and really tackled every single difficulty that we had to endure, many of which I wasn’t even aware of. There were times when the situation was tense and even conflictive, but the team manage to resolve the issue on their own, something I gleam with pride now looking back. It was a hard year, but it was also the year where we learnt the most and the lesson I came out of 2017 is that perhaps good businesses make money, but great businesses make leaders.”

Helena Torras is the co-founder and CEO of Bwom, which aims to change self-care for women. Prior to that, together with the entrepreneurial team, she lead Abiquo, which she joined in 2007 as shareholder. Abiquo raised more than $28 million in VC funding and established operations in US, UK and Spain. Helena has also invested in more than 8 tech startups through Paocapital, and she is board member and mentor of several startups.

Regarding her biggest challenge in 2017 and how she mastered it, Helena stated: “My biggest business challenge in 2017 was not only one, but 3. First of all, we pivoted from a pelvic floor trainer app to a digital coach. Second, we were just a B2C company and we started to do our first steps on the B2B2C. Third, we adjusted and consolidated our team for the next phase we were facing. We went through it having a full commitment of the team, and with the incredible support of our investors, who not only helped us financially in 2016, but advised us and oriented us regarding the business decisions we had to take. We validated everything and although having big challenges, we divided them in small ones, to keep moving and improving.”

Laura Urquizu is the CEO of Red Points — a technology company that provides a solution for brands and content owners to counterfeiting online and digital piracy. Red Points is the preferred brand protection partner in the sporting, entertainment, fashion, editorial, design and luxury industries, providing unique products across the entire digital spectrum. One of her prior career steps was Capital Semilla, were she was subsequently responsible for the venture capital investments area and a portfolio of 90 investments.

Regarding her biggest challenge in 2017 and how she mastered it, Laura stated: “2017 was a year of aggressive targets, and we at Red Points are super happy to have surpassed expectations! It wasn’t easy, as one would imagine: we managed to grow 350% while staying customer-success oriented (the reason why our a churn rate is still close to zero). And we did all this while hiring and onboarding new professionals that doubled our team to 75 employees. The explanation as to why we were able to master our challenges is simple, teamwork: it wouldn’t have been possible without the true commitment of all our departments. This dedication is the main reason why Red Points has managed to arrive to 2018 as the #1 technology solution in online brand protection.”

Mar Alarcon Batlle is the founder and CEO at SocialCar and Co-Founder at Social Energy. Founded in 2011, Social Car is an Internet based P2P platform where car owners can safely rent their car to their neighbours. It’s the first P2P carsharing player in Spain. Mar is also a board member of Barcelona Tech City, Adigital and a mentor at Conector Accelerator.

Regarding her biggest challenge in 2017 and how she mastered it, Mar stated: “From its origin SocialCar has been a model looking for real disruption on mobility habits. The challenge itself was to make it feasible. After some years of evangelization, the challenge turns into consolidating the business. 2017 has been an amazing year in terms of results. However, the highlight of last year was the shaking impact on the industry. The mobility and automobile industry is finally is shifting to a world of real connected mobility services. Cars are finally seen as a mere mobility tool and not a status asset. Achieving that is a question of patience and perseverance. A long way to run without losing focus. Personally, the biggest challenge is to keep always filled with energy to keep running to improve things.”

Laura Fernandez is the Co-Founder and CEO of FutureFunded. Officially launched earlier this year, the Barcelona-based startup aims to bring more women to tech, by helping them crowdfund their education in renown coding schools. FutureFunded recently completed its first crowdfunding campaign and has already two new campaigns up and running. Aside from running FutureFunded, Laura has more than 5 years of experience as COO of Makers of Barcelona. She’s also a mentor for young entrepreneurs and a tech curator.

Regarding her biggest challenge in 2017 and how she mastered it, Laura stated: “My biggest business challenge has been an inner challenge I would say. To understand and accept that I won’t have the power to have everything under control, that nothing will be perfectly set up and done because a startup is an experimental project 24/7 and this shouldn’t stop you from moving forward. You need goals and objectives, more for your mental health than for the growth of the project itself, because those metrics will probably change every week because of the organicity and the own life of the project, at this very early stage. A startup is not a sprint but a marathon, so you need to keep yourself hydrated and this water is your team, your mentors, your users and the drive that it took you to start this adventure. So you have to take very good care and awareness of this water and your own hydration, to keep running as far as you want to get and this is also up to you.”

Gemma Sorigue is the co-founder and CEO of Deliberry — the online grocery store that delivers your food to your doorstep within one hour. Last year, Deliberry has received about €3 million in funding. Gemma has over 13 years of experience in e-commerce companies. She’s taken part in the startup and growth stages of top online companies like Atrapalo, Emagister and LetsBonus participating in different management positions as General Manager in LetsBonus.

Regarding her biggest challenge in 2017 and how she mastered it, Gemma stated: “Our main challenge in 2017 was to grow in sales while achieving operational profitability. We closed 2017 with +60% in GMV. We have managed to reduce the cost per order by 24%, thanks to technological improvements that allow us to have a more efficient operative. And we have doubled the revenue per order thanks to the new Revenue Stream CPG that we offer to manufacturers. Thanks to this, since Q2 we are in a positive unit economic and growing in sales.”

Carlota Pi Amoros is the co-founder and Executive President of Holaluz — a new generation energy company solely for 100% renewable green energy. The Barcelona-based company was founded in 2010 and was able to raise more than €12 million in funding. At Holaluz, Carlota is focusing on Strategy, Marketing and Fundraising. Aside from that, she’s a professor at the Universidad de Barcelona and the mother of three girls.

Diana Moret is the CEO and founder at PANDORAHUB, a Barcelona-based company which is accelerating growth stage startups in villages and rural areas. She started as social entrepreneur at the age of 25 founding the NGO which organized the DJs Against Hunger Festival (a charity electronic music festival) and the PACAS courses (Cultural Activities Program for Social Action). As a social innovation consultant she also designed and created the amusement charity campaign for families One Red Nose Day.

Beatriz Amilibia is the COO of SocialPay, which operates the two payment solutions Marketpay.io and Lemonpay. Marketpay enables escrow payments in the sharing economy, and provides a safe, immutable, double ledger API for marketplaces and e-commerce. Lemonpay enables individuals to trade (buy/sell) safely with each other. Before focusing on SocialPay in 2016, Beatriz founded another company called tuMédico.es.

Cristina Galán is the Co Founder and Managing Director of LOYALTIO is a tech company that leads the digital transformation of businesses and public institutions, offering end-to-end products and solutions, provides development, and offers consultancy services. Founded in 2014, LOYALTIO aims to become the loyal tech partner you need to make your digital projects come true. Prior to LOYALTIO, Cristina co-founded other companies like Bitcarrier and Profitail.