EUROPEAN sTARTUPS INVESTING IN bcn

The pace of capital that flows to European startups does not stop growing in the last decade and entrepreneurs and investors take advantage of the growth of this market to seek new opportunities. Thousands of emerging companies and strong investors have met with this intention in the EU-Startups Summit, in the second edition that the summit is held in Barcelona, after being four years in Berlin. The congress has shown that the European European startup market is "sufficiently mature", although it is still far from its main American competitors, Pablo Hernández explained the event's operations director. In this sense, Hernández pointed out that this positive dynamic is explained by normative changes, institutional support and the promotion of entrepreneurship.

So, Barcelona has once again welcomed the international meeting of entrepreneurs and investors this Friday at a congress that "is consolidating" in the Catalan capital, Hernández said. Organized by a digital publication on emerging companies, the summit has brought together a European public, of which 70% come from outside the State. The organization has enabled an application to facilitate contact between participants and has assembled experienced entrepreneurs and investors workshops to help emerging EU companies to become more competitive.

One of these startups is the ADD group, which is in the process of reinvention of a conventional company that was dedicated to organize events to a specialized robotics and artificial intelligence. "Here we have the opportunity to meet investors, companies that want to collaborate with us, very interesting suppliers, very unknown solutions that can help us to make our robots more powerful," said Robert Mendéndez, company

"The vast majority wants to find investors, but there are also service providers that are looking for synergies: everyone looks for their counterpart," Hernández said. In general, the event's operations director has assured that Europe has "good investors and good startups". "The European ecosystem is growing a lot, before it had more regulatory constraints but they have been diluted and education in entrepreneurship is fostering a lot in Europe," he explained.

All these factors have allowed the growth of the market for emerging companies in the EU, which now has several projects that can reach values of one billion dollars, entering the club of about two hundred startups called unicorns and where there are companies like Uber, AirBnB, Snapchat or Dropbox, Hernández pointed out. "I am convinced that the next unicorn will be European and we hope that it will come from Barcelona," he emphasized, before reminding that Glovo's distribution company closed a 150 million euros financing round this Tuesday.

In addition to the possibilities of making contacts and materializing projects, the congress has hosted presentations by successful entrepreneurs. One of these speakers, the founder of Marfeel, Xavi Beumala, said that the European startup ecosystem has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. "It is noted in the capital that flows, now companies have it easier to finance and start," he said. However, he said that "the last stage of life of startups", its sale, is still in a "very late" phase in Europe, because large European companies still do not bet to acquire emerging companies as if What Americans do? "It has to be shown that these acquisitions make sense and that they give one or two cases of success," he said.