The art of entrepreneurship comes together at BBVA Spark Summit 2024
The BBVA Spark Summit 2024 brought together 400 key figures in Barcelona, including funds, founders and other industry leaders. The event, which featured the announcement of BBVA Sparkâs new office in London, also included discussions on challenges such as financing, the internationalisation of startups, the growth of the ‘climatech’ sector and growth opportunities for the Spanish ecosystem.
Entrepreneurship is an art. This was evident at the new edition of BBVA Spark Summit 2024, where leaders of the entrepreneurial and investment ecosystem shared experiences, challenges and successes at the Joan MirĂł Foundation in Barcelona.
For the second consecutive year, Barcelona hosted this meeting organised by BBVA Spark, BBVA’s unit focused on supporting startups and high-growth companies. With more than 400 attendees, including CEOs and founders of technology companies, investors, financiers and other ecosystem leaders, BBVA Spark Summit served as a meeting point to discuss the various challenges and opportunities and exchange ideas.
Carlos Torres, Chairman of BBVA, took the floor to recall that the creation of BBVA Spark sought precisely to align the bank with the needs of technology entrepreneurs and reaffirmed the bank’s commitment to the growth of its companies, with a goal of enabling Spanish companies to expand and compete in a global context. “We are helping 100,000 Spanish companies every year, 20,000 of them Catalan, with their internationalisation”, recalled Torres, highlighting that in 2023, BBVA provided new financing to companies amounting to 80 billion, 8% more than in the last year.
New BBVA Spark office in London
In line with the necessary internationalization of Spanish technology companies, Roberto Albaladejo, head of BBVA Spark, took advantage of the event to announce the opening of a BBVA Spark office in London to cover Europe, making the United Kingdom the fifth geography where this unit is present, after deploying its solutions in Spain, Argentina, Mexico and Colombia.
“We hope to continue growing to be able to support more companies beyond our borders”, said Albadalejo, who recalled that, in its two years of existence, BBVA Spark has managed more than 900 million euros in venture capital funds in the four countries in which it has operated to date. “BBVA has been driving innovation for years, but since the creation of BBVA Spark, we have achieved an even greater impact,” said the director. The recent million-dollar agreements with Insurama, Twinco and Exoticca are proof of this impact.
The challenge of financing
One of the main topics addressed at the event was financing in an environment where capital has become more restricted. “It’s gone from one extreme to the other: from funding everything to funding being too rational“. This was summed up by Ander Michelena, General Partner at Acurio Ventures, during the first session, where he exchanged ideas with JosĂ© Manuel Villanueva, co-founder and co-CEO of the sustainable construction company 011h, and Nils Henning, co-founder of the real estate software Casafari.
Along the same lines, Villanueva highlighted the difficulty of financing projects outside the traditional parameters. “Most funds don’t make decisions outside of ‘ABC’, which makes it difficult to finance an innovative business model”, said 011h’s co-CEO, who thanked BBVA Spark for its openness to funding such projects. Henning, on the other hand, stressed the importance of financial discipline in this more restrictive context. “You have to learn to work as if you have no money“, he said, referring to the transformation taking place in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Despite the challenges, Michelena recalled that the venture capital funding landscape is improving: “There has been a market correction, but everyone has already adapted to the new reality and many deals are already being closed”.
âCimatech’, a booming sector
BBVA Spark Summit 2024 had a space exclusively for ‘climatech’ companies and their specific financing needs. In a panel discussion moderated by Santiago Muguruza, Managing Director of Bilbao Vizcaya Investments, Jamie Gilbert, Principal Investor at TPG Europe, and Bastien Gambini, Managing Partner of Klima (Alantra), discussed the criteria that guide investors’ decisions in this field. This is one of the sectors that is receiving the most attention from investors: 27% of venture capital investment in Europe in 2023 went to climatech startups, tripling the levels of 2021, according to data from Atomico.
Gilbert explained that what he values most as an investment partner is the credibility of the business plan: “How are you going to get from point A to point B”. For his part, Gambini referred to the importance of identifying which areas will have the greatest growth potential. In this regard, he predicted that energy storage will be one of them: “We are starting to be able to store electrons efficiently, and that is attracting a lot of investors interested in long-term solutionsâ.
Spain: a rapidly expanding ecosystem
The growth of the Spanish entrepreneurial ecosystem was another key topic of the day. In 2023 it exceeded a total value of 100 billion euros, having multiplied its value by 2.7 times over the previous five years, according to Dealroom data. Aquilino Peña, co-founder and Managing Partner at Kibo Ventures, offered a historical perspective on this growth, recalling that “it was very flat until 2010, but since then, it has been exponential”. Peña emphasised that not only has the economic value multiplied, but also the talent and the capacity to expand: “We’ve seen a major change in the founders. There is a lot more ambition to build global companies”.
These insights were made during a conversation moderated by LucĂa Hojman, Head of Business Development at BBVA Spark Spain. During the event, Laura Urquizu, President and CEO of brand protection company Red Points, pointed out that there is still much to learn from some foreign markets, especially in the English-speaking world. “I still envy the U.S. ecosystem”, she said, adding: âNot so much for the large investment figures, but for the presence of talent with prior experience in scaling businesses, which is less abundant here because there havenât yet been many âexitsââ. Meanwhile, Felipe NavĂo, co-founder and co-CEO of Job&Talent, pointed out that the key to expansion “is a mixture of not being afraid and thinking big, and in Spain what we have lacked is the latter”.
As for the host city, the speakers highlighted Barcelona’s role as Spain’s leading technology hub and the fifth European city in terms of the number of scaleups. Roberto Albadalejo recalled that half of BBVA Spark’s customers are Catalan, while Jordi Valls, Fourth Deputy Mayor of Barcelona, said that the city “is called to play a key role in reducing the gap between Europe and the United States in innovation and technology”. The political representative added that the entrepreneurial ecosystem at the Spark Summit will have “much more to contribute” to all the topics that will shape the public discourse in Europe in the coming years, such as decarbonisation or digitalisation.
Life after the âexitâ
Another of the highlights of BBVA Spark Summit 2024 came with the session in which several entrepreneurs reflected on life after selling their companies. In Spain, 52 companies achieved an ‘exit’ 2023, while in Europe as a whole 1,234 reached this milestone, according to Dealroom data. What some see as the end of the road, for entrepreneurs is always the beginning of a new one, as the speakers explained.
Xavier Pladellorens, investor and advisor in several companies and former CEO and founder of deporvillage.com, stressed that selling a company can be a problem in terms of the “radical change it represents in the entrepreneur’s life”. Pladellorens explained that it was challenging for him to go from managing a single project to juggling multiple tasks in different areas. He recalled that he does not know of any entrepreneur who has dedicated himself to a contemplative life after selling their business. “None of us have gone to the Caribbean”, he said. Andrea Barber, co-founder and CEO of RatedPower, outlined the increasingly common example of founders deciding to stay on in the acquired company for a while. “My partners and I decided to stay in the company after the sale, and we have doubled in value since then”, Barber explained. However, she also admitted that it is inevitable to think about the opportunity cost of not starting something new.
In this sense, Javier Fontdevila, co-founder and co-CEO of Holded, reflected on the “FOMO” (fear of missing out) that selling a company can generate and added that the ‘exit’ does not always have to be the best outcome”. In a similar vein, Enrique Linares, co-founder of the second-hand portal Letgo, recalled how he sold in complicated circumstances due to the pandemic: “Selling from home, while in lockdown, was not ideal”. The operation allowed him to found Plus Partners, a venture capital fund operating in southern Europe, with which he aims to bring some of the knowledge acquired in his career in the US to these ecosystems.
