spain
(41)
Roberto Touza David and the art of finding out early
The Startups.st co-founder has spent years helping entrepreneurs test their ideas. His own expensive lessons explain why he keeps asking what a business has actually proved.
Joaquin Duato and the art of staying curious
Thirty-three years after joining Johnson & Johnson in Spain, Joaquin Duato became its CEO. His route to the top ran through different countries, twelve jobs and a habit of accepting the next unfamiliar assignment.
Julio Juan Sánchez Sánchez and the Trouble With Selling Everything
Four brothers began with office supplies in Benidorm. Julio Juan Sánchez Sánchez helped turn that business into Energy Sistem, then spent his career explaining why a technology company needs to know exactly whom it serves.
Manuel Moreno and the business of being believed
A warning in his first week as CEO changed Manuel Moreno’s approach to leadership. From construction software to Málaga apartments, his work keeps returning to the same question: how do you earn the right to make things better?
El Club del Emprendimiento and the business of not going it alone
A free front door, a six-month mentoring offer, and a room full of possible introductions. Spain’s El Club del Emprendimiento makes a business out of helping small businesses find their next useful connection.
CEJE gives students a business to run before a job to get
Spain’s Junior Empresa network turns university knowledge into work for real clients. Its most interesting lesson is how students earn the right to be taken seriously.
ĀticcoLab gives founders a board before they have a boardroom
In Barcelona, ĀticcoLab turns a mentor network into a working advisory board. Its merger with Muutos now extends that experiment beyond startups, into the businesses that rarely get invited to the pitch party.
Quadratura Makes the Furniture Fit the Room
An awkward wall can wreck a beautiful plan. In Guadalajara, Spain, Quadratura brings interior design and furniture supply together to work through the details that a catalogue cannot settle.
Startups.st sells the work behind the startup dream
From a ham-carver marketplace in Cáceres to a European fellowship for women founders, Startups.st turns entrepreneurship policy into programs people can use. Its business is making the introductions, teaching the skills and keeping the work moving.
DIGITALENT’s bet: buy the schools, close the skills gap
A Spanish education group has brought business, law, coding and vocational schools under one roof. Its next test is teaching people to work with AI while keeping the classroom connected to the job.
Marina de Empresas puts the classroom next door to the capital
On Valencia’s waterfront, Juan Roig brought a business school, a startup accelerator and an investor together. The offer is practical: learn the business, test it with customers, and earn your way to the next stage.
W Startup Community turns a warm introduction into a business tool
A Spanish nonprofit puts women founders in reach of investors, corporate leaders and one another. Its most useful offer may be the conversation that happens after the applause.
VILOR builds the way back
From a flood-wrecked station in Paiporta to the tunnels beneath Seville, the Valencia contractor has made public infrastructure its business. Its next challenge reaches from recycled asphalt to the security of construction data.
Conector puts its mentors on the cap table
The Barcelona accelerator turns advice into an ownership stake. Its history explains the bargain: founders get a small circle of committed advisers, and those advisers get a reason to keep showing up.
La Fábrica de Sevilla starts recruiting founders before they have a company
School competitions, subsidized incubation and introductions to working founders: Seville’s public-private startup initiative is building a route from the classroom to the first customer.
Barrabés.biz took the mountain shop to the boardroom
A family retailer’s experiments with online community became a consultancy for companies, startups and cities. Its record shows what turning an innovation strategy into daily work actually involves - and why the corporate story changed in 2026.
Las Rozas Innova gives startups a city to test in
A municipal company near Madrid connects founders with real users, turns public roofs into power plants and puts new technology through everyday tests. The useful part is what happens after the pitch.
Eatable Adventures wants foodtech to pass the factory test
A clever ingredient is only the beginning. Eatable Adventures combines startup investment, industrial trials and corporate matchmaking to get food innovation out of the lab and into business.
Andalucía Open Future offers a place to grow - and takes no equity
Four hubs, more than 80 mentors and no equity fee: Andalucía Open Future gives technology founders room to build in southern Spain. The real commitment is showing up, testing the business and learning to sell.
A good résumé does not make a good mentor
Red de Mentoring de España has built a business around the gap between having experience and knowing how to share it. Its offer combines mentor training, managed programs and the machinery that keeps people talking.
The Spanish Company That Answers the Door for 85 Countries
Every apartment buzzer has a story. For millions of doors from Valencia to Sydney, the story starts at a Spanish radio-repair workshop that opened in 1949.
The Spanish startup that bet electric bikes could beat gas, then quietly started selling gas bikes too
A team of university racing engineers set out to make an electric bike that rides like a real motorbike and costs like one too. Then they hedged the bet - and started selling petrol versions of the same machine.
The €54 Portfolio Builder That Refused to Get Big
Drawfolio has spent more than a decade selling illustrators a website they can build in five minutes and then forget about. No venture capital, no coding, no growth theater - just a small Valencia team and one very specific customer.
Huspy
Huspy is a Dubai-based proptech and fintech company that runs a digital platform for buying and financing homes. It connects home buyers, real estate agents and banks in one place, offering online mortgage comparison and pre-approval, a broker portal linked to more than 25 banks, and mobile tools for agents. Founded in 2020 by Jad Antoun and Khalid Ashmawy, Huspy operates across the UAE and Spain, facilitates over $7 billion in annual real estate transactions, and has helped more than 25,000 people buy homes.
Maria Manso
Maria Manso is the co-founder and CEO of Tucuvi, a Madrid-based healthtech company that builds LOLA, a clinical-grade voice AI agent used by more than 60 healthcare organizations to conduct automated patient follow-up calls. A biomedical engineer by training, she has raised over $21 million for the company, including a $20 million Series A round in January 2026, and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe 2025 list for Science & Healthcare.
Oriol Rius
Oriol Rius is the CEO of Microwd Inversiones, a Madrid-based social-impact fintech that connects women entrepreneurs across Latin America with microloans funded by impact investors. A senior banking executive with more than two decades in Latin American capital markets at Santander, Merrill Lynch and BBVA, he now channels that corporate-finance machinery toward microcredit, helping run a fund that became the first in Spain to securitize microloans for women entrepreneurs. He also sits on the board of Vista Alta Impact Investments.
Uptodown
Uptodown is one of the world's largest independent, multi-platform app stores, founded in 2002 in Malaga, Spain. It distributes Android APKs (and historically Windows software) directly to users as an alternative to Google Play, offering older app versions, region-free access, and editorially curated listings. Bootstrapped and profitable on web advertising rather than venture capital, it serves well over a hundred million monthly users and hundreds of millions of downloads while championing software sovereignty and user choice.
Ironhack
Ironhack is a global tech school offering intensive bootcamps in web development, data analytics, UX/UI design, cybersecurity, AI engineering and more. Founded in 2013, it runs on-campus programs across cities in Europe, Latin America and the US plus a remote track, pairing immersive project-based training with embedded career services and a network of hiring partners to move career-changers into tech jobs quickly.
Domestika
Domestika is a global learning platform for creatives - illustrators, designers, photographers, animators, writers - built around professionally produced video courses and an enormous community of working professionals. Founded in Spain in 2002 as a forum, it became a unicorn in 2022 and now hosts millions of students taking courses in more than 10 languages.
Angel Vina
Dr. Angel Vina is the Founder and CEO of Denodo Technologies, the global leader in data virtualization and data management platforms. A former academic who spent 25 years as a university professor at institutions including the Technical University of Madrid and the University of A Coruña - with postdoctoral research stints at UCLA and Stanford - Vina founded Denodo in Spain in 1999 after asking a deceptively simple question: how can we set data free? Today Denodo operates in 25 offices across 20 countries, has secured $336 million in Series B funding from TPG, and has been named a Gartner Leader in Data Integration Tools for five consecutive years. Vina's academic obsession with real-time distributed data systems became a commercial category - and a company that turned 25 in 2025.