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Why Investors Are Looking To Barcelona For The Next Big Thing

Lately I’ve been hearing people talk more and more about international investors, and how they’re increasingly looking to Barcelona for interesting projects.

These rumors confirms a feeling I’ve been having for quite some time. It’s always scary to predict the future, but sometimes you just see a pattern so clear that you need to share it with people.

We’re all tired of comparing different tech hubs around the world, so I will focus on the elements inside the city, and not compare too much to other places.

There are four (probably more..) reasons why I think investors increasingly are looking to Barcelona for investment:

  1. Funding rounds are growing fast
  2. High degree of innovation
  3. City brand
  4. Successful entrepreneurs are giving back

(1) Money, money, money

One of the big challenges of fast-growing startup hubs in Europe are the lack of Venture Capital, and a couple of years ago, this was also a huge problem in Barcelona.

Investors was still licking their wounds from the 2008 financial meltdown, and few were willing to risk their money on new technology.

Last year Barcelona broke all records in terms of funding with €535 million invested in Catalunya. That’s an increase of 87% compared with the year before, according to numbers from Mobile World Capital Barcelona.

It was a also a record year when it comes to international VC’s investing in Spanish companies. Barcelona startup Typeform did a round of $15 million without a single Spanish investor.

Even though many of the big rounds of investment has been coming from abroad, there’s also a growing number of active investors in Spain.

Last year Barcelona ranked as number 8. in concentration of local business angels in Europe, according to the report; The State of European Tech 2015.

We’ve seen many, both big and huge investments in companies like Letgo ($100 million), Jobandtalent ($42 million), Typeform ($15 million). I think that 60% of the startups in Barcelona is operating abroad is one of the reasons why more and more international VC’s are coming to the region.

The FOMO is growing for every big startup getting funded in Barcelona.

(2) Top tier on innovation

According to a new report from European consultancy Science|Business, Barcelona ranks as one of Europe’s most innovative city’s and also one of the places in Europe where people are some of the earliest adopters of new technologies.

According to the study, Barcelona ranks as the fourth best city in Europe for scientific production. Only one year ago the city was ranked as the smartest city in the world in 2015 by Juniper Research.

Even though these types of reports doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s a better environment for tech startups, Barcelona are home to several world famous universities and business schools, and also have Europe’s 5th biggest army of mobile developers.

For startups a big pool of developer talent and tech savvy early adopters are two vital keys in growing fast, and the city is providing both.

In other words, a VC investing in Barcelona knows that the startup aren’t dependent on outside talent, but can hire premium developers from the region, at a much lower cost than other European city’s.

(3) The city brand

The last decade Barcelona has built one of Europe’s strongest city brands, both among tourists and business people.

The last two years the city brand has been ranked as number 4. and 6. in the world, according to The Guardian and The Place Brand Observer,

Tourists come for the lifestyle, the food, beaches and other leisure activities. And professionals enjoys big conferences such as the Mobile World Congress, Barcelona Games World and 4YFN.

4 Years From Know is the annual startup conference that’s runs alongside the Mobile World Congress.

When you combine these two aspects and sprinkle it with the worlds best football club, the famous Modernista architectureand one of Europe’s biggest ports, you end up with an extremely strong brand both among professionals and tourists.

It’s no wonder why big tech companies like Amazon, HP and Telefónica I+D, (the research and development arm of the Telefónica Group), have big headquarters here with thousands of employees.

It’s actually one of the city’s in Europe with most technology oriented Meetups, as much as 13,500 people attended last years events, according to a report.

Investing in a city you don’t know anything about is scary, but the brand of Barcelona makes the city a safer choice for a VC who’s planning to risk millions of his fund on a local startup.

(4) Giving back

One of the most important thing a successful entrepreneur can do after selling his company or running it with profit, is to give back to the community he created the company in.

Without comparing, many of us know the Paypal or the Skype “Mafia”, and what kind of projects they have gone on to support or create.

That experienced entrepreneurs give back through funding new projects, like Bernat Farrero here, is essential for a startup ecosystem to grow.

Luckily we also have people like this in Barcelona (again, without comparing..): Miguel Vicente, Bernat Farrero, Carlos Blanco, and other alike who all have launched or still are running successful companies, but also have chosen to give back to the community through investing and supporting new projects.

However, giving back is an area where Barcelona have potential to grow, and hopefully we’ll see more examples of this the next years as more entrepreneurs succeed in their projects.

If VC’s see success stories, and then again see the same entrepreneurs involved in new interesting projects, they’ll be intrigued to invest.

If you can think of any other reasons, or disagree with some of mine, please let me know below!

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Parkimeter Wins CECOT Award

The Catalan organization CECOT representing over 6000 entrepreneurs, awarded itnig startup Parkimeter with the award for best new company.

Once every year CECOT hosts what they call “the night of the entrepreneur” in Barcelona. Here they award different kind of local entrepreneurs, and this year it was co-founders of Parkimeter, Jordi Badal and Ferran Gatius turn to get honored.

The startup that allow you to reserve, pay and find parking spots for your car, was created in 2013, and has been experiencing massive growth in both users and parking facilities the last years.

Soon 500 places to park

As of today, the company offers their users over 380 different locations to park their cars.

Parkimeter’s plan is to reach 500 parking facilities by 2017 in over 80 cities in Spain.

Parkimeter has parking facilities all over Spain.

And it seems like the service was needed, as the startup has parked over 50.000 cars the last three years. To make the parking experience even better, Parkimeter will in a matter of weeks release the new app so you easily can book your parking through your phone.

Even though the area around Barcelona is the one with most parking facilities at the moment, Parkimeter plans for expansion. They raised a seed round this June and plans to start their expansion to the rest of Europe by next year.

“How parking has been changed through technology, is similar to how the travel sector was disrupted 15 years ago,” say co-founder of Parkimeter Jordi Badal.

Smart sustainable cities

Parkimeter recently spoke at the SmartCity conference InFocus 2016, held in the Chinese city of Yinchuan this September.

This year’s CECOT event was also focused on building smart and sustainable cities, that are able to offer services that bring improvements to the lives of its citizens.

The Parkimeter team in their headquarters in Barcelona.

At the CECOT conference smart cities like New York and Dubai presented their plans for the future along with Barcelona represented by Parkimeter which introduced their initiatives to facilitate parking according to people’s needs, optimizing traffic, reducing the visual impact and aligning itself with the policies of mobility each city has.

But Parkimeter does only care about the environment, they also care about your wallet, as Parkimeter’s facilities is up to 50 percent cheaper than normal street parking.

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This post was written by Sindre Hopland, media manager at itnig.

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Prepare For The Future Of Marketing — Build Your Content Factory

There are few startups or young companies that doesn’t have a blog these days. We all know the benefits of producing content in one shape or another, but exactly how to do it the right way?

There are several ways to establish yourself as a quality content provider, and some things you need to avoid when interacting with people through content.

Build Credibility and expertise

Content marketing is more about showing of your knowledge, to help people, than to sell something.

A common mistake companies often do, is to produce their content like a very good-looking ad for their product. Wrong.

A blog article will usually never lead to a sale or a direct purchase, it’s about building credibility as an expert in your field. So when your potential customers is ready to make a purchase he or she knows what brand to trust with his wallet.

How content marketing doesn’t work.

This means that you can’t fake being an expert if you really want to get something out of your content. This blog you’re reading right now is not existing for you to buy or invest anything in itnig.

We want to be a real resource for the startup community, so that our startups benefits from the reputation itnig has as a good provider of useful knowledge.

If you’re company full of experts or people with a lot of experience you should take advantage of their knowledge, and present it through your content.

If you’re a startup, with a young team without experience, you can bring in external people from your network, experts or others for an interview, but present it through your brand, so both you and your external expert benefit from it.

Stay Relevant

Staying in touch with trends is getting harder, as trends are changing every day.

One of the ways of staying in touch with what’s relevant for your audience is creating a balance of current and evergreen content.

To only cover current trends is great when it’s hyped, but it’s a big risk to take if it fades away in a month or two. In other words, many hours of hard work can be wasted. To stay relevant you also need to present evergreen content; videos & posts that explain timeless topics which have been discussed, and will be discussed for the next ten years:

All of these articles are evergreen, and will bring people to the itnig blog for the next years. With a balance between this kind of content, and current events in the industry you’re in, you’ll be sure to create a brand that shines of relevance.

Avoid content shock

We are reaching a point in content marketing where publishing 500 word articles for SEO isn’t really working anymore.


As everyone is creating content we need to know our customers or users much better. Do the research, and instead of creating tons of short posts, create longer content with higher value. Also because Google now favors that kind of content. The average word count of a Google first page result is 1,890 words. Also Medium favor longer content, as a 7 minute read will rank better in their algorithms.

If you’re building or running a company I guess you spend a good amount of time getting to know your customers. Use this information to shape your content.

It’s however worth mentioning that if you’re doing video content, the rule of length does not apply as much as with written or audio content. If it’s not a super interesting keynote, try to keep it shorter, around 1–2 minutes, especially in social media.

Across platforms

There’s tons of places on the internet where you can promote your content.

Medium, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, the list goes on..

The key is again to know your customer and your content. All platforms has their target audience and one or more types of content that performs well. Medium is obviously good for text, especially longer form. Facebook and Youtube is great for video. Twitter is great for spreading the word fast.

The different social media channels all serve their particular purpose, and you can’t stick to only one. When itnig writes a medium article we always try to include:

  • Videos
  • Photos
  • Social media content

It should be a goal to do this in all posts, but it’s hard and resource demanding. It’s however these posts that people read and share the most.

Now, go build your own content factory!

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This post was written by @sindre hopland, media manager at itnig, and based on Scott Mackin’s talk at itnig this fall.

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Undressing a CTO and how to become one

Do you want to become a Chief Technology Officer, or are you just curious about the role?

If you want your keyboard to remain your closest friend, you can stop reading right here, being a CTO is much more than just being a talented developer. But if you want to get some insights from three experienced Barcelona-based CTOs, please continue reading.

Investing time in your team is the most important task, even more important than focusing on your product.

Right place at the right time

Roger Campos from Camaloon (to the left) says that personal experience is much more important than how many years you have worked in a company.

In the startup world not all decisions within the company are carefully planned and executed according to the planned strategy.

Pau Ramon Revilla, former CTO of Redbooth, and currently founder at Factorial felt he was at the right place at the right time when stepped up as CTO for the first time.

I started at Redbooth, living on the founders sofa in San Francisco, coding for a roof over my head, so I wasn’t a very expensive developer. But as I went back to Barcelona, the former CTO and the tech lead left, and I was asked to be the new CTO.

For others it’s more of a transitioning after starting a company from scratch.

Both Albert Bellonch at Quipu and Roger Campos at Camaloon founded their startups, and gradually grew into the CTO role as their companies grew. Roger never really set out to become head of tech at Camaloon:

It was never a goal of mine to become a CTO, but you take on responsibility and do your best to grow a great team.

The biggest challenge — new developers

A huge challenge for most CTOs these days is finding talented developers in a highly competitive job market.

CTO Pau Ramon Revilla and Roger Campos says personal motivation is key when hiring new developers.

But what kind of developers are most tech leaders looking for?

They all agree that the most important aspect when hiring, is personal motivation, and if the person is willing to go deep in all kinds of challenges he or she faces.

Experience is important, but having worked for many years, is not necessarily the only metric that is valued, say Roger:

If a developer has worked in five different jobs the last years, doing the exact same task, to me he is less experienced than a younger developer, that has worked on many personal projects and faced complex challenges.

Pau gives junior developers two tips:

The startup world may be too harsh for many junior developers. To get the right kind of experience I would advice to contribute a lot in open source, and maybe take a job in a big corporation the first years.

https://upscri.be/285782-2

Invest in people

People have different skills and methods on how to lead a technical team, but the three CTOs agree that people is the most important focus for them in their work. Pau explains:

Depending on the company, most of the time the development team will be the most valuable asset, sometimes even more than the product itself.

All the CTO’s agree, and Roger says:

My biggest task and most important mission is to talk with people. Talk with my team, with the rest of the company and external people, that’s most of my job.

I keep coding to keep my sanity

Albert Bellonch (to the left) is still coding every day at Quipu, but will soon have to stop to code on a daily basis because his team is growing a lot.

It’s no secret that time spent coding decreases a lot when you move over to the role of being a leader.

Albert is currently leading a 4–5 development team at Quipu. He’s happy he’s still able to code every day:

I still code on a daily basis, and I’ve been able to create some cool new features for Quipu, but as my team grows by the months, I will soon stop coding every day.

Soft skills

A developer that has the aspiration of becoming a CTO should have a lot of experience, but there’s also other skills that are vital, says Pau:

Focus on the soft skills, you need to be able to reach a consensus with people, not only focus on your own opinions.

All the CTOs agree that you don’t need to be the best developer in the company to lead the development team, but there are some skills that are good to know these days, according to Roger.

It’s hard to point to one kind of technology, because everything depends on what kind of project you’re working on, but Javascript is probably the safest bet for a developer today.

(If you want more insights, check out the video at the top!)

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This post was written by Sindre Hopland and the video was edited by Masumi Mutsuda — the itnig media team.

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How EDpuzzle Went Straight To Silicon Valley Without A Single Line Of Code

Barcelona startup EDpuzzle went through Y-combinator’s Edtech program imagine K12.

A lot of Spanish entrepreneurs go to the US to expand their markets. It’s normal, it’s the right thing to do for most companies. But usually you take with you a portfolio of achievements and milestones from the country you started up in.

Not EDpuzzle, according to co-founder and CTO Santi Herrero.

We started from scratch at ImagineK12, now part of Y Combinator where big companies like Dropbox and Airbnb were born. We applied with an idea, but without any line of code at all. The idea we had when we moved to San Francisco was that we needed to build a tool that allowed teachers to make any video their lesson.

The Barcelona startup combines simple video-editing tools with analytics so that a teacher can take a video and make it personal for their classrooms.

The teachers can take already existing videos from Youtube, Khan Academy, Crash Course, etc. or upload your own, and then enable self-paced learning with interactive lessons, adding their voice and questions along the video.

Not global from day one

Experts often say that you need to have a global mindset from the first day, no matter where you start your venture.

And even though EDpuzzle hoped their product could reach a global audience, and today is used in 150 countries by 6 million users, the first focus was very local, says Herrero.

Our initial approach was to connect with 10 very interested and energetic teachers to learn from them as much as possible. This way we would get a lot of very vital information for the development of the product. Those teachers ultimately became some of our biggest evangelists.

After three months and demo day at Y-combinator, EDpuzzle had several interested investors in the US, so not long after returning to Barcelona, a part of the team went back to start raising a seed round which resulted in $800.000.

The CTO and co-founder thinks their very local focus helped them create a better global product, compared to if they went straight for the masses.

To really learn from your users you need to be very close to them, you can’t retract everything from analytics etc. After we got the validation we needed from several teachers, we started driving around in the US to all the education events we could find, and talk to as many teachers as possible. That’s how we grew.

Barcelona + San Fransisco

Even though parts of EDpuzzle’s team have been in San Fransisco from day one, the development of the product has been done from Barcelona.

Our competitive advantage is that we can hire great developers from our network in Barcelona, with a lower cost than in San Fransisco, and create a great product from here.

Says CTO Herrero who is hiring people in all kinds of positions after the company closed $3 million in their series A this August.

It makes a lot of sense for us to divide the business between Spain and the US, because our biggest market is in the states. I can’t say that this is the right thing to do for everyone, but the US market is easier to enter and people are open to new solutions, especially in the Edtech sector.

Keeping it simple

From the beginning EDpuzzle valued keeping their product as simple as possible.

Both EDpuzzle’s landing page and their product reflect their value of keeping what they do as simple as possible.

Both their product and their landing page reflect this value of simpleness.

They said it’s about knowing their audience, and that the last thing a busy teacher needs, is spending time on learning a new complicated tool.

In a matter of days they’ll release their android app, so students can consume their teachers’ videos no matter if they have a computer at home, or not.

We are now in 1/4 schools in the US, but our goal is to be in all of them.

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This post was written by Sindre Hopland, media manager at itnig.