Barcelona Tech City wants to accelerate its expansion with European funds

Pier 01 became too small almost at the same moment of its inauguration, in 2016. In just four months, its 10,000 square meters were occupied. "We quickly realized that we had growth capacity and the idea of starting to look for more Piers emerged," recalls the CEO of Barcelona Tech City, Miquel Martí. The association's roadmap is based on creating an urban technological campus with different buildings like Pier 01 spread throughout the city, focused on specific themes and concentrating emerging companies from sectors such as fintech, mobility, logistics, or health.

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One way to accelerate this urban technological campus is through European funds. The dream project must serve to change entrepreneurial dynamics in Barcelona and definitively turn the city into a first-class tech hub. For Martí, the expansion with new spaces and cutting-edge areas "will complete Barcelona Tech City's value proposition and will solve needs that the city does not quite have well covered."

Specifically, the proposal that Barcelona Tech City has presented to the Generalitat consists of seeking support from European funds to create more buildings like Pier 01 in sectors such as health, sports, arttech, urbantech, and marketing. The association is already promoting some, such as the fintech one at the Barcelona Stock Exchange or the logistics and mobility one in the Correos building. Their intention is to push them forward no matter what, but European aid can facilitate and accelerate it.

Thus, Barcelona Tech City, chaired by Miguel Vicente, is working to develop Pier 05 in the Barcelona Stock Exchange and the Pier in the Correos building. For Pier 05, a future fintech center, it is estimated that between June and October 2021 it will already have activity and, finally, will occupy all floors, thanks to an agreement with the Generalitat, which owned the upper floors. On the other hand, for the Correos Pier, which will be dedicated to mobility and logistics, there is still time for it to be finalized and it is expected to start hosting startups within at least two years.

But they are not the first. Barcelona Tech City's second Pier arrived three years after the inauguration of Pier 01, in 2019, with Pier 03, focused on blockchain technology. Located in the Els Porxos d'en Xifré building, it is three minutes from Pier 01 and has more than 3,500 m2 for offices. However, this first expansion of Pier 01 has not quite worked out. "We are a startup and, sometimes, you also make mistakes," Martí defends. A year later, the association has realized that the blockchain community in Barcelona "is not as solid or as strong" as to have its own space and companies in this sector will be integrated into the one being developed at the Barcelona Stock Exchange.

"It makes more sense to frame them in an industry that already applies blockchain and leave this space to guarantee the natural growth we need from Pier 01," he indicates. In this way, Pier 03 has become a transversal space like Pier 01 and has served to house companies that no longer found a place in Pier 01, such as Novartis and CaixaBank, and others that needed more space than they had in Pier 01, such as Tiendeo.

How the idea of creating Pier 01 arose

Barcelona Tech City was born in 2013 as a private association that wanted to support entrepreneurs to turn the city into one of the main technological capitals of the world. At that time, Barcelona was not constantly in the top positions of international rankings on startups, talent, innovation, investment.... Seven years later, the contribution of Barcelona Tech City, institutional support and the impact of events such as the Mobile World Congress make it clear that the panorama has changed absolutely.

"Work has been done but there is still more to do," Martí explains. "The work of the previous 25 years has been brought together to achieve exponential acceleration in a few years," he adds. Martí, who defines the association as "a club of entrepreneurs," recalls that Barcelona Tech City emerged as just another startup, in a small office and with many ideas in mind.

"The ecosystem existed but in a quite fragmented way," he states. The association wanted to become a hub for the entire sector, to be able to help the different agents and have a personalized response for each one, covering all possible needs. But it didn't just have to do this.

The example of experiences to foster the entrepreneurial ecosystem that were being carried out in Paris, London, Berlin, and Boston convinced the members of Barcelona Tech City that what was needed was to make a differential and valuable proposal, concentrating many startups in a single space. However, it couldn't be just any place; it had to convey what Barcelona means so that the companies that were to set up there only had to worry about explaining what technological innovation they wanted to develop.

"We had to find a physical space that somehow expressed what Barcelona is, that didn't need to be explained," Martí emphasizes. Nor could they be traditional offices; instead, it had to serve to promote initiatives thanks to the constant exchange of ideas among entrepreneurs, and these could be easily visualized with a visit to the building. This is how Pier 01 was created in 2016, in Palau de Mar. "If you take a piece of 22@ and put it in Berlin, depending on how, you can say it's a piece of Berlin. But if you take this piece and put it anywhere in the world, you'll say this is very Barcelona," Martí summarizes.

Currently, Barcelona Tech City represents more than 1,000 companies. In Pier 01, there are currently about 100 companies, and about 200 will have passed through its facilities since its creation. Martí points out that very few leave Pier 01 once they set up. Some do so because they have ceased to be startups and the space they had has become too small for them, like Holaluz, and others because they have sought more specialized places, like Capital Cell. Byhours, Letgo, Nuclio Venture Builder, and Antai Venture Builder are some of the companies linked to the building, where institutions such as Mobile World Capital (MWCapital) are also located, which recently concentrated all its activity in Pier 01.