The auditorium of the Torre Banco Sabadell in Barcelona hosted on June 14 the closing event of the first edition of "Venture on the Road", an initiative organized by the BStartup program of Banco Sabadell and SeedRocket. BotsLovers, a firm specialized in the design and development of chatbots to optimize communication with clients, prevailed over the other three finalists after the evaluation of the jury, composed of Vicente Arias (SeedRocket), Juan Margenat (Marfeel), Manuel Jaffrin (GetApp), Jaime Biel (Faraday), Lenka Kolarova (SeedRocket 4Founders Capital) and Marta Campillo (BStartup). They also participated in an expert panel that discussed innovation as a key factor in the success of a business project, moderated by Yolanda Pérez, director of the BStartup program.
"Venture on the Road" is an itinerant event or road show that has been held, between October of last year and June of this year, in seven cities in Spain –Seville, Oviedo, Madrid, Palma, San Sebastián, Valencia and Vigo- with the aim of creating a meeting space between entrepreneurs in the technological and digital field and investors for the presentation of projects and ideas. Participants had a specific time to explain their business model and the BStartup and SeedRocket teams selected, in each city, the best 4 projects. Subsequently, a jury chose the startup winner of the corresponding locality. The winning firms from Seville –Lendismart-, Madrid –BotsLovers-, San Sebastián –The Best5- and Vigo –RocketForms- were the ones that attended the grand final of the first edition that took place in the Catalan capital.
Through the cities where "Venture on the Road" has passed, 28 startups of the 200 that have applied to this first edition and that have a developed product or service, have competed, and more than 80 investors interested in new ideas to implement have attended. BotsLovers receives a prize of 3,000 euros, granted by BStartup, and will be one of the invited startups at the Entrepreneurs Campus in Madrid, as well as being able to enjoy three hours of advice from SeedRocket, the first accelerator in Spain for ICT startups.
MORE THAN 2,700 STARTUPS AS CLIENTS
BStartup is Banco Sabadell's business unit that provides specialized banking and financing services to startups. In fact, the entity chaired by Josep Oliu has deployed a global strategy in recent years to support these developing business projects. In 2013, it created BStartup, through which it launched BStartup10, an investment vehicle for firms in their initial startup phases. In 2015, it established Sabadell Venture Capital for equity and venture debt investments of up to two million euros in startups in seed and Series A stages. And in 2017, it created Innocells, the bank's digital new business hub. Today, more than 2,700 startups are clients of Banco Sabadell. In the last four years, the entity has granted more than 150 million euros in financing and investment projects for this market segment.
Featured image: Venture on the road final held in Barcelona