Bitpanda, an Austrian fintech specializing in Bitcoin trading that landed in Spain in June 2020, has chosen its Barcelona office to manage a digital hub that will specialize in product and customer experience. The center will complement the one the platform has in Krakow (Poland), to develop digital payment methods.
The project will require an investment of 10 million euros that will be mainly allocated to hiring a hundred digital professionals by the end of 2022. The company will continue to operate in Barcelona in its WeWork coworking offices in Glòries, where about thirty people currently work, because it offers great labor flexibility to its staff to work remotely for long periods of time, as well as competitive salaries and labor benefits. In fact, it has already opened a call for 50 job vacancies to be filled in the new digital hub.
Currently, the Bitpanda platform has three million users with a specific weight in the European markets where it is present with offices in Vienna, Berlin, Krakow, London, Milan, and Paris. In Madrid, where it also has a team of 10 people, tasks will be more oriented towards regulatory aspects of the market and commercialization. Globally, the company has about 600 employees of more than 50 nationalities.
Bitpanda's global product director, Lukas Enzersdorfer-Konrad, explained that the most demanded profiles by the company are software engineers, product managers, and user experience (UX) specialists, and it also seeks experts in backend, frontend, native mobile developers, and specialized headhunters. He specified that the choice of Barcelona responds to the digital ecosystem in the Catalan capital, as it is the third preferred destination in Europe to launch a startup. The company values that, between 2016 and 2020, the number of these companies has grown by 57% in the city, reaching 1,700 firms.
The digital expansion plan from Barcelona will be led by Albert Zaragoza, the company's new director of development teams (VP Engineering). Zaragoza highlighted Barcelona's positioning as an entrepreneurial ecosystem that should allow it to attract the necessary talent for the platform's growth. They want to focus on the development of "simple and accessible" financial products for all European citizens, including cryptocurrency investments, but also fractional share investments and ETF (Exchange-traded funds) investments.
The company, founded in Austria in 2014 by Eric Demuth, Paul Klanschek, and Christian Trummer, has become a new European unicorn ---a startup valued at over a billion--- after its latest funding round ---led by Valar Ventures, billionaire Peter Thiel's investment vehicle--- obtained a valuation of just over 4 billion dollars (3.54 billion euros).
The fintech recently announced the opening of its first remote blockchain research and development center, with 30 product developers, focused on uniting talent from across Europe to build cutting-edge technologies, in order to create solutions that are ready to be integrated into the platform.
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