spain
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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?
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.
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.
Julio Cotorruelo
Julio G. Cotorruelo is the co-founder and CEO of Domestika, the global online learning community for creative professionals. Starting in 2002 as a modest Spanish-language forum for designers in Madrid, Domestika grew under his leadership into a unicorn valued at $1.3 billion, with over 8 million members, 2,000+ courses, and a presence in six languages. A notoriously press-shy entrepreneur, Cotorruelo built one of the world's largest creative education platforms by championing affordable, pay-per-course learning and the belief that creativity is best learned through doing - not just reading.
Luis Paarup
Luis Paarup is the Co-Founder and CTO of HappyRobot, the AI voice agent platform transforming how logistics enterprises automate operations. A robotics engineer by training with a Masters from the Technical University of Munich, Luis met his co-founder Pablo Palafox on a competitive underwater robotics team and went on to build one of the fastest-growing AI companies in the supply chain space. HappyRobot, a Y Combinator S23 company backed by a16z and Base10 Partners, has raised over $100M and deployed AI workers at 70+ enterprise customers including DHL, Ryder, and U.S. Xpress.
Pablo Palafox
Pablo Palafox is the Co-Founder and CEO of HappyRobot, a San Francisco-based AI workforce platform that deploys autonomous voice agents for logistics and freight operations. A Spanish-born roboticist who left a PhD program at the Technical University of Munich in 2022, he has built HappyRobot from a YC S23 startup into a company serving 70+ enterprise clients including DHL, Ryder, Schneider, and Werner - raising $103M across three funding rounds, most recently a $44M Series B led by Base10 Partners with participation from Andreessen Horowitz.
Roger Salameh
Roger Salameh is a General Partner at Swanlaab Venture Factory's AgriFood Fund I, bringing over 30 years of hands-on agribusiness and biotechnology leadership to the venture world. A veteran of Monsanto, Calgene, and Arcadia Biosciences - where he served as interim CEO and then COO - Salameh now deploys capital into early-stage agri-food tech startups from his perch in Napa, California, while simultaneously running DnA Advisory Services, a consultancy helping AgTech and FoodTech companies navigate the path from innovation to commercialization.
Luis Garrido
Luis Hernandez Garrido is the co-founder and CEO of Uptodown, the world's largest alternative app store, which he launched in 2002 as a university project in Malaga, Spain. Over two decades he has grown it into a platform with 130 million monthly active users and 450 million APK downloads per month - all without a single outside investor. Now based in Berkeley, California, he champions open internet principles, device neutrality, and democratized software distribution, and is an active voice in the Coalition for App Fairness pushing back against Google and Apple's app store dominance.
Felix Herranz
Felix González Herranz is the Co-Founder and CEO of FounderNest, an AI-powered market intelligence platform serving Fortune 500 companies with tools for innovation scouting, competitive analysis, and M&A research. A Fulbright Scholar and Stanford GSB Arjay Miller Scholar, Felix built FounderNest from a problem he lived firsthand - helping companies find signal in a sea of 54 million company profiles. Before FounderNest, he worked at the Inter-American Development Bank across 20+ countries, consulted at The World Bank, and co-founded JuntoSalimos during Spain's 2009 economic crisis to support Spanish-speaking entrepreneurs. His clients include L'Oréal, Roche, Telefónica, AstraZeneca, and Novo Nordisk.
Victor Perez
Víctor Pérez is the co-founder and CEO of Krea.ai, a San Francisco-based generative AI platform that has raised $83 million and grown to 20 million users. A Barcelona native who studied audiovisual systems engineering at UPF, Perez received the prestigious laCaixa Fellowship (a scholarship from the King of Spain) to pursue graduate studies at Cornell University — but spent just one day on campus before convincing his co-founder Diego Rodriguez to drop out and build Krea instead. A researcher whose work has appeared at NeurIPS and ICCV, and a graffiti artist at heart, Perez leads a company whose mission is to put creators in control of AI — not replace them with it.
Adeyemi Ajao
Adeyemi 'Ade' Ajao is a Nigerian-Spanish serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist who co-founded Base10 Partners, the first Black-led VC firm to surpass $1 billion in AUM. Before building Base10, he sold Tuenti (Spain's dominant social network) to Telefónica for ~$100M and co-founded Identified, acquired by Workday. In 2023, he became the first Black investor ever named to the Forbes Midas List, and his fund's portfolio includes Nubank, Figma, Instacart, and Rappi. His contrarian bet on automating the 'Real Economy' — logistics, food, healthcare, retail — has generated over $3 billion in portfolio returns.
Mar Hershenson
Mar Hershenson is a Spanish-American venture capitalist, electrical engineer, and serial entrepreneur who co-founded Pear VC (originally Pejman Mar Ventures) in 2013 with no prior VC experience - learning the trade from Amazon-purchased books. A Stanford PhD who holds 14 patents and founded three startups (two acquired), she has grown Pear VC to over $800M AUM with a portfolio that includes DoorDash, Guardant Health, Gusto, and Dropbox. A perennial Forbes Midas List honoree (#29 in 2021), she also teaches Stanford's Lean Launchpad course, champions women in VC through All Raise and her Female Founder Circles initiative, and is known for her conviction that great founders are made, not born.
Tomas Pueyo
Tomas Pueyo is a Franco-Spanish writer, strategist, and newsletter creator best known for his wildly viral COVID-19 articles that reached 60 million readers in 2020 and for his Substack newsletter Uncharted Territories, where he explores tech, geopolitics, AI, and the forces shaping civilization. A Stanford MBA and former Silicon Valley executive (Course Hero VP of Growth, Ankorstore CPO), he voluntarily cut his income by 80% to write full-time - building a 123,000+ subscriber audience without spending a dollar on advertising.