Barcelona is one of the world’s most beautiful cities and represents the sixth largest metropolitan area in Europe. The city also has one of Europe’s most active startup ecosystems and is home to EU-Startups and our annual EU-Startups Summit (postponed until April 29-30, 2021).
Since Barcelona is also a big tourist destination, it has been hit very hard by the current Covid-19 crisis. On the bright side, there are many innovative startups in the city, which are still going strong despite the crisis.
Today, we’re introducing you to 10 exceptionally promising startups from Barcelona, founded between 2016 and 2020, which are continuing to grow fast despite everything that’s going on right now:
MediQuo is a Barcelona-based eHealth startup that was founded in 2017 and which focuses on managing medical appointments. So far, MediQuo has received €4 million in funding (€2 million in January of this year), and has been installed by over 650,000 users managing over a million medical appointments. The startup’s latest product MediQuo PRO gives doctors and health professionals the ability to manage online appointments, both for their own patients as well as for the users of the app. Pretty helpful, not just in times of Covid-19.
Factorial is an innovative HR automation platform which helps companies save time with administrative human resources tasks, and focus instead on other more impactful activities. Founded in 2016, Factorial’s easy-to-use platform offers everything from managing employee absences to recording staff hours. In April of this year, the Barcelona-based startup raised a €15 million in a Series A round led by CRV, a prestigious Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has Twitter, Dropbox and Zendesk in its portfolio.
Payflow, the Spanish startup offering financial well-being, was founded earlier this year and just closed its first funding round of €1.6 million in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, with investment from top-level local and international players, including Rocket Internet, Lanai Partners, Itnig, and Abac Nest. Payflow allows employees to instantly collect the portion of their salary corresponding to how much they have worked during a specific month, through a mobile app.
Holded: The Barcelona-based startup Holded has created a “Business Operating System”, designed to help business owners manage every aspect of their business from a single platform. Founded in 2016, Holded has raised a €6 million Series A round in 2019 led by Lakestar. Holded provides its clients with full operational capacity, from financial management such as accounting and invoicing to HR, CRM, and project and inventory management.
Landbot.io uses a new ‘anti-AI’ chatbot to help companies create conversational experiences on their websites and boost customer engagement. Launched in 2017, Landbot uses a rich texting interface as a website navigation tool to help visitors find out where to click, and its interactive, adaptive messaging thread uses conversational choice prompts to give them the information they need. Landbot already counts over 1,500 customers from over 55 countries, was a finalist of the pitch competition of our EU-Startups Summit 2018, and successfully raised a seed round of €1.9 million shortly afterwards.
Amenitiz set out to become the Shopify of the hospitality industry, allowing, Aappartements, bed&breakfasts, cottages and hotels to quickly and easily create and edit their own website without technical knowledge. The platform also offers a fully integrated booking engine and connectivity to Booking, Expedia and 120 other channels. Founded in 2017, continues to grow its business and team even despite the current Covid-19 situation. In a few months from now, the Barcelona-based startup is considering to close a Series A funding round.
Learnlife: Founded in 2017, the edtech startup Learnlife is on a mission to transform education with personal and purpose-inspired learning. Learnlife is building collaborative learning communities through its digital platform and physical hubs to empower individuals in a world where creativity and innovation will be needed to solve future challenges. In June 2019, Learnlife raised a €3.1 million seed funding round. During the current crisis Learnlife has been growing from 28 team members to 38 team members. In the last 4 months more than 500 school leaders from more than 60 countries have signed-up to have access to the startup’s learning innovation elements. In November of this year Learnlife plans to launch one of the world’s largest online Learning Innovation Festival with more than 10.000 participants.
Tradler: Founded in 2017, Tradler aims to improve employee satisfaction and productivity by recognising them for the work they do. Tradler’s employee engagement platform assists companies in rewarding their team members, especially in large companies where employees have highly repetitive jobs, finding ways to reward and recognize their daily contributions. The platform helps employees feel valued by setting clear goals, identifying contributions, and providing feedback and rewards, thereby increasing loyalty and value for the entire organisation. According to Tradler CEO Jasper Deprez, the company recently experienced very strong customers growth numbers, since companies are increasingly seeing the importance of taking better care of their employees.
Remy Robotics – Advances in robotics and AI are beginning to change the food industry. Soon, many of the meals we eat will be prepared – chopped, cooked, and served – with the help of robots. With its new technology, Remy Robotics aims to lower costs, improve and standardise quality, and reduce food waste for restaurants. Founded in 2018, Remy Robotics is creating food robotics solutions for use in dark kitchens, kitchen factories, restaurants and other businesses, enabling consistent quality, adaptability to any recipe, and operational effectiveness.
Hubtype helps companies create personal relationships with their customers at scale by combining great customer experience, automation and conversational apps. By combining the power and efficiency of chat bots with the authenticity of real human beings, Hubtype enables brands to engage customers through messaging including WhatsApp, Messenger, Twitter, web-chat and other channels while reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction. Founded in 2016, Hubtype integrates messaging platforms with AI, NLP and NLU providers, CRMs, analytics, and other business tools. In March of 2019, the Barcelona-based startup raised €1 million in a funding round led by K-Fund.
By the way: If you’re a corporate or investor looking for exciting startups in a specific market for a potential investment or acquisition, check out our Startup Sourcing Service!