The Barcelona City Council has taken another step in its commitment to consolidate Barcelona's digital capital status and its entrepreneurial ecosystem, with an investment of up to a maximum of ten million euros in private venture capital funds. The objective is to boost investment in startups and preserve their competitiveness in the face of the effects of the crisis caused by the pandemic, taking into account that the digital sector is one of those that is best enduring it and is even growing.
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"Administrations can also be entrepreneurs," defended the first deputy mayor of the Barcelona City Council, Jaume Collboni. Through the Barcelona Accelera initiative, managed by Barcelona Activa, the council wants to send a message to the city's digital sector: "It is worth it for local funds to grow and take risks, and alongside these decisions there will be a part of the public sector that will do the same."
The ten million investment has a ten-year time horizon and will be distributed among six investment funds, which must be based in Barcelona and be in the process of constitution or capital increase. In addition, they will have to commit to investing at least three times the amount allocated by the City Council, which will never be the main investor and, at most, will have a 10% stake.
The selected funds will have to invest in emerging companies in the city and its metropolitan area and belong to strategic sectors for Barcelona such as the digital economy, creative industries, the green economy, industry 4.0, health, sports, food, and the blue economy. It will also be taken into account that the funds support startups founded by women or with the presence of women in the management team.
This investment by the city council has two precedents in Barcelona. The first was the creation of the company Barcelona Emprèn in 2000, which promoted companies such as Fractus, a spin-off from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) that globally patented the technology that allows mobile phones to no longer have a visible antenna. Barcelona Emprèn was a pioneer because at that time there were no venture capital operators in Catalonia or in the rest of Spain that invested in innovative start-ups. The second was the city council's participation in 2009 in the Nauta III fund of the management company Nauta Capital. One of its success stories was Social Point, dedicated to the development of free games and applications for mobile phones.
Project financing is one of the three pillars of the city council's strategy to strengthen Barcelona as the digital capital of Southern Europe, based on public-private collaboration. The other two are talent attraction and the creation of new spaces to host business initiatives with this purpose, such as the transformation of the Correos building into an innovation hub for companies.