Barcelona is the main startup hub in Southern Europe and the fifth largest entrepreneurial ecosystem on the entire continent. It is the first European city in attracting international investment projects, and it is the third preferred place in Europe to undertake. Among its attractions, the city boasts a powerful ecosystem made up of multiple actors that energize it, and which at the same time connect it with international opportunities that contribute to the global positioning of the Catalan capital.
This ecosystem is nourished by renowned research centers, universities, and research groups that enrich it through the training of professionals and the generation of knowledge. At the same time, institutions ranging from the public to the private sector interact to generate a network that propels and articulates the entrepreneurial ecosystem: hubs, incubators, accelerators, clusters… each with its role, these centers channel the entrepreneurial initiatives of the city and beyond to accelerate and maximize their impact, through institutions ranging from the public Acció and Barcelona Activa to Impact Hub, Tech Barcelona, Biocat, and Norrsken.
But little would all these actors do without the raw material of entrepreneurship: founders are the root from which every startup ecosystem grows. “Entrepreneurs risk part of their money and their opportunity cost to promote a project with more risk than other alternatives, but with more impact or more profitability,” emphasizes Acció's Senior Startup Manager, Oriol Sans, who defines the figure of the entrepreneur as an “agent of change that can contribute to improving society.” The goal set by the Generalitat is clear: to reach 3,000 startups by 2030, based on the conviction that entrepreneurship represents a driving force for innovation and knowledge transfer, as well as a magnet for investment and talent.
Currently, the Catalan entrepreneurial ecosystem is close to 2,300 startups, and continues to grow not only in the number of emerging companies, but also in turnover and employees. In 2024, startups as a whole invoiced more than 2,330 million euros in Catalonia, 10% more than the previous year, and employed more than 22,800 people. The ecosystem is also diverse, and includes startups from the earliest stage of development to scaleups —17% of Catalan emerging companies— and even unicorns. These are startups with a valuation of more than one billion dollars, a category that includes the Catalan eDreams, Glovo, Factorial, Travelperk, Letgo and Wallbox, and to which scaleups such as Wallapop, Red Points, Typeform, Heura and SpliceBio, which has just raised 118 million euros, the largest biotechnology sector round in Spain to date.
For these scaleups, Barcelona brings together key characteristics for growth, such as the ability to generate and attract talent, its international connection and its projection which, moreover, have matured over the years. “We started almost a decade ago, and the ecosystem had nothing to do with the current one, neither in entrepreneurs nor in investors,” explains Marcel Queralt from Factorial and Itnig. Despite this progress in the city, he highlights that there are major pending issues, which often involve bureaucracy. “The Startups Law has helped, but it could help founders and employees of the ecosystem more, also scaleups, which are left out of bonuses in many cases,” Queralt argues: “More can be done and the ecosystem and success stories can be boosted much more,” which emerge from multiple sectors and could do so with greater force.
The diversity of the entrepreneurial landscape is also appreciated in the sectors in which Catalan startups stand out, led by healtech, traveltech, fintech, ecommerce and deep tech. With all this, Barcelona presents itself as the fifth startup ecosystem in Europe, only behind Paris, Berlin, Stockholm and Amsterdam. In addition, as highlighted by the executive director of Business and Entrepreneurship at Barcelona Activa, Itziar Blasco, the city is positioned as the third preferred for entrepreneurs if they were to found a startup again. “We are in a very good situation, from an open city where there is diversity and talent”, defends Blasco from the Barcelona development agency, which has programs to support entrepreneurship in the various growth phases of a startup.
But entrepreneurship is not a bed of roses, far from it. So much so that only one in ten startups reaches three years of life; the rest fail before. And the main challenge for launching a startup and making it grow in the Catalan capital has another key actor in the ecosystem as its protagonist: investors. Along with bureaucracy, access to financing is the main barrier that hinders the growth of entrepreneurial initiatives in Barcelona, and this is confirmed by the founders.
“There are always challenges and difficulties in stages such as product development or market entry, but behind all of them is always financing. It is the great pain and a very exhausting process”, according to Iván Martínez, founder of Robopedics. “Without money, you can't do anything, and the efforts of co-founders to seek resources slow down the rest of the project's development and cause the focus on the product and market entry to be lost”, adds the now CEO of the company, which has developed a robotic device that allows people to walk again after suffering a stroke.
Obtaining investment and excessive bureaucracy are the main brakes for emerging companies
Despite the difficulties of seeking financing, the startupis immersed in its third round of investment, which has already raised the resources that will allow it to bring its bionic system to market. Since its founding in 2021,Robopedics has raised close to four million euros,and before it was developed from Martínez's own funds. The co-founder started researching ten years ago following a stroke suffered by his father, which affected his mobility laterally. His father died during the pandemic, and Martínez decided to shape the device to respond to the millions of people who, like him, see their mobility reduced due to a stroke.
As in Martínez's case, entrepreneurship often requires much more than funding: for many, it requires a purpose and the goal of generating a positive impact on society, beyond invoicing and generating income. Although in many cases the initial and final goal of a startup is simply to do business, many others provide value that goes far beyond wealth generation. In fact, for many, the will to generate this impact is key not only to improve society, but to maintain focus and persist in the project when difficulties arise. “You have to be sure that you are involved in the problem you want to solve,” defends Heura co-founder Bernat Añaños. “Given the uncertainty of changes, you have to be clear about your mission and the impact you want to have; we have gone through a pandemic, through wars, through price and market changes and, when something goes wrong, you have to be in love with the problem. It's what reconnects you and gives you the energy to continue.”
“If entrepreneurship is just doing business, at some point you say enough; when it's something emotional, something that really moves you, you look at it from another prism and from another dimension. It's the difference between wanting to leave a legacy and filling your wallet.” In Añaños's case, this goal is to move towards sustainable plant-based food for the benefit of the planet, health, and animals. But this mission can range from quantum physics, as LuxQuanta does, to advances against diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's, passing through fields as varied as mental health and the care of the planet and seas promoted by Ocean Ecostructures.
“Our goal has always been to be a little more than a company, and to bring value to society,” agrees Carlos Manubens, founder of Livo, which is responsible for facilitating the organization of shifts in hospitals and the access of talent to centers: “In the end, if the professional is cared for, the patient is cared for.” This is the same reflection that led Eholo to pivot and go from building a psychologist search engine to creating a saas that facilitates the work of these professionals: “Entrepreneurship makes no sense if it is not with impact,” defends Sonia Torras alongside Eholo's co-founder, Eduard Martí.
For Nora Barata, this impact is in healthy eating, in her case, at the office. At 50 years old, the now founder and chef of Nora Real Food set out to promote a startup of healthy menus for eating at work, which now serves more than 4,000 daily menus to companies including companies like Mango, Glovo and Socialpoint: “Facilitating the possibility of eating healthily at the workplace is also contributing something positive to society,” defends the businesswoman. To reach this point, she went through many stages: “I was afraid of leaving my comfort zone and of failure, but you have to overcome that. If you fail, you try again, or at least, you've already tried. And if things go wrong and success doesn't come, the whole journey is good, everything is values that are cultivated.” These are very common fears among founders, which are accentuated in the case of those who undertake alone. To overcome them, Barata proposes a recipe: “Work intensely and project, but above all think about the present, and surround yourself with committed people.”
From uncertainty to adrenaline
And it is that uncertainty is an intrinsic constant of the entrepreneurial landscape, both in the most initial and in the most advanced phases. From Eholo, Torras illustrates this by recalling her first sales: “When they first offered to pay for Eholo's services, I realized that I had also become a salesperson and that they were validating our product. And that generates an adrenaline that ends up making you addicted,” assures the co-founder of the startup, which now has 23 people on the team. And this adrenaline leads to generating more and more ideas, “and you have to be careful, because it's easy to get distracted, and maintaining focus is key,” as Martí adds. Eholo is now in the middle of an investment round, with which it wants to raise about two million euros.
Despite the intensity and pace of work —or because of it—, both co-founders highlight the need to take care of mental health. The co-founder of Fabbric, Alba Rocafort, defends the same, having launched the startup with her childhood friend Hugo Cuesta to be able to design, produce and sell fashion collections in a few clicks and a few weeks. “Thousands of things happen to any entrepreneur, from closing rounds to finding clients; you face many challenges constantly, and mental health and working on a good relationship between co-founders must be a priority,” says the co-founder of the startup. And although the challenges do not diminish, they are faced differently as experience is gained. “Something that four years ago was a problem, now it's everyday bread and we solve it more easily, because you are used to the pace and gain problem-solving capacity,” Rocafort defends. According to her, “the most interesting thing about entrepreneurship is this: it is continuous learning.”
The startup ecosystem is bridled with universities and research centers
Fabbric now has ten employees, in a Barcelona that facilitates the attraction of talent. Precisely this access to suitable professionals is another of the needs of the
startups, and to respond to this, the city plays in two leagues: the generation of talent through universities and training centers, and the attraction of international professionals. In fact, 20% of the workers and also founders ofstartupsin Catalonia are of foreign origin.Those known as expats enrich the Catalan economic and knowledge ecosystem and contribute to positioning it internationally, while they can generate effects on rising housing prices and gentrification.To address the guarantee of access to housing, as defended by minister Miquel Sàmperin an interview with TheNBP, more public housing must be made available to citizens, which is why the Government is promoting the construction of 50,000 homes by 2030.
In addition to access to talent and access to financing, Acció's Senior Startup Manager focuses on another of the needs of entrepreneurs, especially in the scientific field: access to certain scientific infrastructures, an element in which universities and research centers once again play a fundamental role. And it is that a great diversity of startups require carrying out tests and developing solutions that they can only carry out using cutting-edge equipment, such as the particle accelerator of the Alba Synchrotron or the supercomputer of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), which are open to these initiatives to test their research and products.
The ultimate goal of empowering the ecosystem, according to Sans, is to generate quality employment
Through all these pieces,the Barcelona entrepreneurial ecosystem continues to expand and gain international relevance.And it doesn't do it alone, but surrounded and connected with other local entrepreneurship nodes that are gaining weight in cities like Sant Cugat, Girona, Terrassa, Mataró and L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, in an entrepreneurial reality also boosted through large fairs and events like theMobile World Congress and its 4YFN, in addition to large projects such as theCatalunya Media City, which will return the Three Chimneys of Sant Adrià to activity with ahubaudiovisual with global aspiration. These great initiatives coexist and feed off each other with events and meetings of smaller formats but with great impact, such as theTech Spirit, the Health Revolution Congress and the Impact Week.
And, in the end, everything pursues one goal, according to Sans: "To create quality jobs." Barcelona and its surroundings continue to advance in this direction with the aspiration of continuing to climb positions in world rankings and to ensure that the wealth and added value generated by this ecosystem reaches society as a whole. "The startup ecosystem is vital for job creation and for economic renewal and diversity, as well as for giving competitiveness to our economy and impacting the quality of life," adds Sans: "We are in a good position in a framework in which competition is global and does not stop; we must continue to advance to strengthen this ecosystem."