The Girona businessman Francesc Julià, leader of the furniture company Kave Home, has won the Catalonia Young Entrepreneur Award 2023 granted by AIJEC. The jury wanted to recognize Julià's ability to reinvent his family's company and build in record time a furniture design and manufacturing brand that is already present in 27 countries, with a 400% increase in turnover in just five years and a team that already exceeds 600 employees.
In the 30th edition of these awards, the Association of Young Entrepreneurs of Catalonia has also distinguished with the Award for Best Business Initiative to The Smart Lollipop, an intelligent lollipop that, through a saliva analysis, is capable of detecting celiac disease and hypercholesterolemia in children and adolescents. During the AIJEC night, the careers of Anna Bosch, general director of Noel Alimentaria, and Adrià Buzón, founder of Cuideo, were also recognized.
The awards were presented this Thursday night at a gala held at the IMO Grupo Miranza Convention Center in Barcelona, attended by some 300 people, including well-known faces from the entrepreneurial ecosystem and the business world. "Your stories inspire us all," highlighted the president of AIJEC, Ruben Sans, after reviewing the successful careers of the three nominees for the Best Entrepreneur Award: Jordi Romero, CEO and co-founder of Factorial; Diliara Lupenko, founding partner of Impress; and Francesc Julià, CEO of Kave Home, who finally took home the award.
"The common denominator of all entrepreneurs is effort and work; the entrepreneur is the first tireless worker of any company; there is no business success without effort," added Ruben Sans, who also highlighted the importance of the ecosystem and the community generated around young entrepreneurs. "We must leverage collaboration, grow together. It is vital to take advantage of the business ecosystem that surrounds us and provides us with tools to achieve new milestones," he pointed out, after also asking to continue with the effort to internationalize and project Catalan companies to the world. "Entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, and others who dream of being so, have the opportunity before their eyes and only need to go out and look for it. Don't let anyone take away your desire. Believe in yourselves. Opportunities are infinite when we unite. We must continue writing success stories that inspire future generations," asked the president of AIJEC.
Claiming Girona's chicken coops
The announcement of the winner of the Catalonia Young Entrepreneur Award was the most exciting and applauded moment of the night. During his acceptance speech, Francesc Julià wanted to pay tribute to his father, present in the room, and to all Catalan family businesses. "I want to claim the importance of family businesses. I am only the continuation of my father's work. I have spectacular admiration for companies that start from scratch, but also many more traditional projects can be reinvented, adding ingredients of innovation," reflected Julià, who ended his speech with his battle cry: "We must claim Girona's chicken coops."
For Julià, chicken coops are the Gerundense equivalent of the garages where some of the technology companies that have made Silicon Valley famous were born and remind him that one should never lose sight of one's origins. Julià's father started his business in 1983 selling mattresses to hotels on the Costa Brava, which he stored in an old chicken coop in Sils (Girona), as they were a farming family. Little by little, the company grew with the distribution and import of furniture in the wholesale channel, but its scope remained fundamentally focused on the province of Girona and it was a low value-added business. The seed of change and the radical transformation of Julià Grup began 10 years ago, in 2013, when it was decided to create the Kave Home brand to sell furniture online directly to the end consumer.
At that time, Francesc Julià worked at Kantox, a currency management fintech that BNP Paribas eventually bought, and where he discovered the world of hypergrowth and the energy that characterizes startups. Already eager to undertake and lead his own business project, in 2016 he decided to join the family business to take charge of Kave Home, which at that time only represented 0.5% of Julià Grup's sales, which, as a whole, did not reach 20 million.
Seven years later, the reality is completely different: Kave Home invoiced 153 million euros in 2022 and expects to reach 210 million this year, demonstrating that an emerging project born within a traditional company can end up transforming and revolutionizing everything. Within the atomized furniture sector, Kave Home has become a powerful brand that aims to offer, in the mid-market segment, the best Mediterranean style design with the best quality-price ratio. Headquartered in Sils, with factories in Yecla (Murcia) and commercial presence in 27 countries through a network of 14 own stores, 16 franchises and 95 corners, the company aims to invoice 1,000 million euros by 2030.
The second great protagonist of the night has been Diana Ballart, co-founder of the startup that created The Smart Lollipop, an intelligent lollipop that allows detecting and diagnosing diseases such as hypercholesterolemia or celiac disease in children through a saliva sample. In this way, blood tests are replaced by the ingestion of a lollipop that, in 10 minutes, offers the results digitally on an online platform. This product, which has been awarded the Award for Best Business Initiative 2023, has already begun the clinical validation phase, with the aim of being able to enter the market in 2025.
Ballart thanked the commitment made by the investors who have provided capital to the company and stressed the importance of having startups based on "disruptive innovation that seeks to generate impact". "It's not easy, but we believe it's possible and, with The Smart Lollipop, we want to prove it," she stressed.
The Smart Lollipop has prevailed over two finalists who were also highly valued by the jury, which this year had an especially difficult time choosing the winners. These are Opground, the first AI-based platform where information technology (IT) professionals are interviewed by hundreds of companies at the same time through a single conversation with its AI, and Theker, a startup of robotic development, artificial intelligence and computer vision that has developed a revolutionary welding technology for microelectronics.
AIJEC has also honored the Girona businesswoman Anna Bosch with the Recognition for Best Professional Career. Bosch leads the Noel food group, which has a turnover of nearly 600 million euros and has already welcomed the fourth generation. "This award highlights the work done by Noel throughout its 83-year history. From a small charcuterie in the center of Olot, we have become, thanks to the pillar of innovation, a benchmark company in the national and international food sector, with more than 60% of sales in the foreign market," explained Bosch, who also highlighted the social aspect of the group, which has created two foundations in favor of the fight against childhood cancer and the granting of scholarships to access university studies.
The Social Entrepreneurship Recognition has been awarded to Cuideo, the company providing care and home assistance to the elderly. The award was collected by the CEO and co-founder of Cuideo, Adrià Buzón, who reiterated that Cuideo's goal is to revolutionize the home care sector. Since its inception in 2016, Cuideo has served more than 170,000 families and now employs 30,000 professional caregivers.
Finally, AIJEC has presented the Recognition for Business Linguistic Quality to Fent País, a company selling packages of cultural, gastronomic, and tourist activities in Catalonia; and the Recognition for Future Entrepreneur to a group of high school students from IES Torre Roja de Viladecans who developed the company My Interactive Plant, an app that uses artificial intelligence to monitor and share the status of plants in real time.
Promoting entrepreneurship as a social elevator
The Secretary General of Business and Competitiveness of the Generalitat, Albert Castellanos, closed the awards ceremony by recognizing AIJEC's trajectory and its contribution to making young entrepreneurs and new companies that create wealth in Catalonia visible. He recalled the strong growth in the number of startups in the last six years and their important role in creating new jobs and transforming the country's main economic sectors. "With cases like today's, it is demonstrated that more than more or less traditional or emerging sectors, what there are are brilliant business strategies," Castellanos affirmed, after posing a challenge to the association. "I believe that AIJEC should promote that entrepreneurship is not only a source of wealth creation, but a path for social mobility. Thus, we will be able to take advantage of the magnificent talent and the great asset that people constitute, whatever their origin, achieving a more just and meritocratic society," Castellanos concluded.