The international corporates and financial investors at the Southern Europe TechTour event in Bilbao, who thronged its main celebratory dinner held on Wednesday inside the Basque capital’s famous Guggenheim museum, commented on how many of the presenting companies at the conference had strong business cases, reflecting well on Spanish entrepreneurship.
TechTour’s chairman Sven Lingjaerde said in his speech welcoming guests to the event that the long-term solution to the crisis dogging Spain and Europe, would not come from cutting debt or raising taxes but new revenue creation by the fast-growing companies assembled in Bilbao. One can only hope he is right. On the same day, the country’s incoming president Mariano Rajoy was being criticised by the country’s unions for "opening a war" by committing the country to meeting deficit reduction targets designed to restore faith in its solvency.
Signs indicate that the Spanish entrepreneurial companies will progress well. A particular hit with many of the delegates was a mobile payments start-up set up by one of the founders of Spain-based social network Tuenti, which sold to Telefonica for €70m. This Spanish entrepreneur, Joaquin Ayuso de Paul, won plaudits for an interesting business model, which targets retailers as clients, rather than operators, and he could be seen surrounded by nearly every venture capitalist in the room after his talk.
The event also brought out some of the virtues of Spain’s oft-maligned autonomous structure of government, which by giving a lot of power to individual regions, also ensures resources to set up entrepreneurial companies are provided in a more decentralised manner than many European economies. The regions’ local politicians may not be fiscally prudent, but the flipside of their largesse revealed a surprisingly buoyant entrepreneurial scene in Bilbao. This appeared echoed across Spain with entrepreneurial companies attending from not just Madrid and Barcelona, but also smaller cities like Santiago de Compostela, Seville and Zaragoza.
Other companies that looked impressive included Kinamik, a data tracking company, Scytl, an electronic voting company, Nanogap, a biomedical company, Agnitio, a voice tracking company, and Fractalia, a technology logistics company targeting telecommunications companies. The sessions were run by Inmaculada Martinez, a partner at Opus Corporate Finance, who ensured there was lively interaction between the panellists and the audience.
In our December issue I will be surveying the wider burgeoning corporate venturing market in Spain, with mini-profiles of new market entrant Gamesa, the Spain-based renewables company, and of Spain-based Telecoms company Telefonica, which has a new digital business unit that places an increased emphasis on venture capital.
The TechTour also went to Italy, after the Basque event, although I didn’t join them on this second leg of the tour. I am extremely hopeful that the quality of the entrepreneurs there were equal to the strong line-up from Spain. If so, the debt woes of the two countries’ governments may dominate the headlines, but the future companies these countries produce are likely to help pull Spain and Italy out of their present crises.
Thanks go to TechTour for having Global Corporate Venturing along to the event. Thanks are also due to the Basque government for hosting the event and organising a traditional welcome dance for attendees at the Guggenheim, called Aurresku (Carlos Polo, founder of e-mail analytics start-up Doocuments, loaded the photo on-line).