Grow Venture Partners will expand its first 'deep tech' fund from five to seven million

Helping scientists bring their ideas to market. With this objective, at the beginning of the year, the venture capital firm Grow Venture Partners was established in Barcelona, promoted by investor Francisco Badia and entrepreneurs such as Nacho Sala ---one of the founders of Atrápalo---; Marc Almendros (Signadyne); and engineer María José Morales (Petroprix). The firm has just raised 5 million euros to establish its first fund, specialized in deep tech projects, and after the good reception from investors, it has decided to expand fundraising to seven million euros.

According to Grow Venture Partners, the 5 million euro target was met in just 20 days, exceeding the expectations that had been set. In this sense, due to oversubscription, the fund, registered with the CNMV as Grow Seed Fund I, will now be expanded to seven million. Around half of the money has been contributed by Fond-ICO Global, the public venture capital fund of funds. The funds raised have already allowed for the execution of the first two investments in Process Talks and Inrobics, two spin-offs from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) and Universidad Carlos III (Madrid), respectively. The goal is to acquire stakes in up to ten companies throughout 2022.

All projects in which investment is planned are focused on technology transfer, that is, on facilitating the leap of initiatives developed by scientists and researchers from the laboratory to industry. "The Spanish economy has a gap between the research carried out in universities and knowledge centers and the productive market," explains Francisco Badia, founding partner and president of the management company. As he states, Grow Venture Partners was born with the objective of "filling that gap thanks to investment in projects with a high content of technology transfer" and with the challenge of ensuring that "researchers also become entrepreneurs and can materialize their ideas and work." "We help scientists and researchers become entrepreneurs and make a better world with the technology they develop," the management company declares on its website.

Based in Rambla Catalunya, Grow VP states that the projects planned to be promoted this year and in 2023 will mobilize between 25 million and 50 million euros, with a potential generation of more than 200 jobs. The idea is to invest in the initial stages of quantum computing, artificial intelligence, robotics, energy, or the internet of things (IoT) startups, among other deep tech or deep technology fields. The key is that these companies have a clear "competitive advantage based on intellectual property developed in research centers and universities." Grow VP also explains that they want to follow the experience developed by Cornell University in New York and Technion in Israel, regarding entrepreneurial development programs.

Francisco Badia was a director at the Roca group, and his professional career has also been linked to the companies Latinia, Iverywhere, Grupo TEX, HogarDigital, and MagisTeams. In 2009, he founded the consulting firm ImpulseToGrow, specialized in advising technological startups, a firm that has been the seed for the birth of Grow Venture Partners.