A Catalan businesswoman, member of a well-known family saga, was involved in a media-hyped tax inspection more than ten years ago. Although the case came to nothing, that information about an alleged tax crime published in digital newspapers or in the form of a tweet is still online and it is easy for it to appear when someone enters her name in the Google search engine. Achieving the removal of such negative content from the web that damages the reputation of this businesswoman due to old events for which she was acquitted is a typical case that RepScan, the latest business venture of Josep Coll, a lawyer and entrepreneur from Sant Feliu de Guíxols (Girona), must face.
"The market needed a solution like the one our company offers, capable of removing negative content from the Internet in record time and making use of technology," explains Coll, CEO of RepScan and a veteran of the Catalan entrepreneurial ecosystem, as he was also the founder of Red Points, a leading company in the fight against counterfeiting and piracy on the Internet. According to Coll, RepScan was born only eight months ago, in the pandemic era, and has been profitable practically from day one. "We started with a team made up only of the founders and today we are more than twelve people," explains Coll, who has created this new company with Alejandro Castellano and Coque Moreno.
The online reputation improvement startup has just closed its first financing round, of 1.2 million euros, contributed mainly by business angels including investor and mentor Dídac Lee, Javier Llorente (Softonic), David López (Fhios), Josep Maria Frigola (exNike), Juan Carlos Tous (Filmin) and Javier Asarta. Of this amount, 240,000 euros have been contributed in the form of a soft loan by Enisa.
RepScan targets both companies and individuals and operates with a software as a service (SaaS) model that allows users to contract the RepScan Alert service, which detects and warns of the appearance of new negative content on the net. The startup assures that it is capable of deleting videos, images, false data and all kinds of information published on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, in addition to Google. "Our goal is to make RepScan the global benchmark for anyone or company that wishes to monitor their negative reputation on the net," explains the firm, which will allocate the funds raised to accelerate its growth and improve its technology.
Josep Coll, who in addition to being a lawyer is a musician, founded Red Points in 2011 after specializing in advising artists and companies in the entertainment world. However, the explosion of the Internet, the decline of the music industry and the rise of online piracy sank his business and he knew how to take advantage of this crisis to reinvent himself and create Red Points to pursue Internet pirates, that is, those who fed and lived off the content of others. This company, now led by Laura Urquizu, is a world leader in the sector and its algorithms work for more than 550 brands in the detection of counterfeits and misuse of all types of content on the net.
The founder of RepScan began working on the launch of this new company in May 2019, when he posted an ad on the Internet looking for talent to "create a technology center in Barcelona that develops solutions that automate processes to simultaneously put and remove people's content from the Internet." "I want to create a digital excavator that buries, extracts and eliminates content (photos, videos, fake news etc.) simultaneously 24/7/365", highlighted the entrepreneur in his self-proclaimed "rock and roll proposal".