Every day we face the proliferation of forms of all kinds to fill out from different devices and applications, endless and ineffective online information searches… Time is an increasingly scarce commodity and although technological advances can help us make better use of it, we often the opposite happens. Therefore, solutions that speed up any daily digital task are destined to succeed.
The young startups Qbeast, Kimera, Toddl, Remuner and Saigu, which presented their proposals yesterday at Banco Sabadell’s BStartup stand, are the ICT profile in which the entity has most recently invested, and which were born to simplify our relationship with technologies at work and leisure.
Who has not at some point become desperate when they cannot easily find the desired product or service in an online store? To remedy this, the Valencian startup Kimera Technologies has developed pioneering software that, through computer vision – a branch of artificial intelligence – transforms visual content (both images and videos) into useful data. In this way, it helps companies optimize their e-commerce and marketplace management and improves user search and recommendation processes.
“We managed to create a very fast and efficient search engine that finds anything in milliseconds among millions of images. To do this, we take images and texts, transform them into numbers and find which client’s products meet those characteristics. We use cutting-edge and very powerful technology, but the product can be used by everyone, it generates a precise and customizable user experience,” said Carles Igual, Co-CEO of the company and doctor in Artificial Intelligence.
Kimera is a B2B SaaS founded in 2021 by five partners from the world of science and investment: Álvaro Igual (Co-CEO); Alberto Castillo (CTO); Luis Morgan (CFO), Jorge Igual (scientific researcher), as well as Carles Igual. Their team is made up of twenty people and although they have just launched their product on the market, they already have some large clients such as Base.net or Wannastyle, under monthly subscription. “We are having a very good response, since everyone is aware of the failures of the search engines, but they assume that they cannot be improved. So there has been a wow effect due to the qualitative leap.”
Accelerated by Lanzadera, this startup obtained 660,000 euros last year in the pre-seed round introduced by Bstartup. For Carles Igual, its premiere at 4YFN within the entity’s stand has given them the opportunity to “meet with investors and partners, give visibility to the brand, meet potential clients and other startups and know what is happening in the ecosystem.”
Managing variable compensation for teams can no longer be a nightmare for companies thanks to Remuner, a cloud sales commission platform that helps align company and employee objectives by automating all aspects of the plans. variable commissions.
“Not only is it a tool that saves costs and time, but it also helps the seller focus on what they do. We transform something that companies manage as a fixed cost that fluctuates over time and is complex to manage, and we transform it into a lever for growth. With a revenue increase of up to 40%, it helps you make better decisions,” said Sergio González, CEO of Remuner, with a solid career as an entrepreneur, since he previously founded Cornerjob and was COO of Signaturit.
According to González, “Remuner allows you to be totally autonomous in the design of commission plans and any eventual modifications you want to make in real time. You don’t have to know programming, anyone can do it and you avoid the cost of time and calculation errors of Excel.”
With a team of ten people and companies from the real economy as clients (retail, industrial, insurance, energy…), it is one of the most recent additions to the BStartup portfolio, since it passed its first pre-seed round of two million of euros in December 2023, which was led by Pear VC, from Silicon Valley. So his participation in 4YFN marks his first big event. As Sergio González details, “the atmosphere is spectacular, it hasn’t been here since before the pandemic and it has grown a lot. It seems to me to be a brutal initiative for Barcelona, ??the city’s flagship event. Here is the best of the entrepreneurial world and it helps a lot to make the brand known and network.”
“Many talk about AI, but before incorporating it it is important to have a good data strategy, with a platform to access that data,” said Cesare Cugnasco, CEO of Qbeast. This spin-off of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) founded in 2020 focuses on Big Data analysis in the cloud, reducing both the time and cost of obtaining knowledge in large data collections. This is a patented technology after almost ten years of research that allows you to speed up analytics up to a hundred times.
In 2021 QBeast closed a round of half a million euros in which BStartup participated and in 2023 with Sabadell VC they raised 2.5 million. Currently the staff is made up of 12 people and its business model is Pay per use, you pay for the amount of data that the tool manages. It operates in Spain and Italy and its first client is a cybersecurity company. In addition, their product is already working on Amazon and they will soon launch it on Google Cloud. Its future plans include scaling more sales with the integration of cloud marketplaces and accessing new markets, starting with Germany and the United Kingdom.
The company has already participated with BStartup at 4YFN 2023, and in this edition Cesare Cugnasco has perceived “a very open environment, people are very receptive and quite informed about data management and technology, which helps us. We are very happy with the leads and contacts we are having. Mobile has that advantage of the mix between large companies and emerging companies.”
Any mother or father of young children has ever experienced the stress of searching for extracurricular activities, camps, places to celebrate a birthday… and the corresponding management of payments and authorizations. To centralize all these tasks that take up so much time and energy, the Barcelona startup Toddl has created the first SaaS platform in Europe tailored to connect families and organizers of children’s activities in a few clicks. Its all-in-one, cloud-based tool helps streamline your bookings, payments, and customer management.
Its founders, the Canadian programmer Stephanie Meagher (CEO) and the American Lorin May (CCO), with eight years of experience at Ebay, met at their respective children’s daycare in Barcelona in 2020 and decided to launch a marketplace to find activities of all kinds for children, and at the same time, software to simplify the administrative tasks of companies and organizing entities. In 2022, Cristina Garcia, CSO, who was also the founder of compraextraescolares.com, joined the project, which brought academies and families into contact. “We joined forces and instead of being competition we decided to work together for the same objective. We have gotten along very well and each one contributes their sector of experience,” they explained.
In 2023 they raised their first round, of half a million euros, in which BStartup contributed the first ticket and the majority Fondo Bolsa Social, an impact investor. Currently, ten people make up the team and work with more than 500 activity providers, who pay a subscription in different modalities. This year they focus their expansion on Spain, although later they want to expand into Europe, starting with France.
Although they were already visitors at the last edition of 4YFN, this time they are making their debut by participating in the BStartup stand. According to the CEO of Toddl, this experience “has allowed us to talk to funds that may not invest, but then talk about us with others. Furthermore, seeing people we know and meeting other entrepreneurs reconnects us with the ecosystem, gives us a different energy than our daily life in coworking.”
Purchasing beauty products made with natural ingredients and accessing advice from professionals and influencers on how to get the most out of them with minimal environmental impact is the proposal of Saigu Cosmetics. This digital native company founded by two Menorcan entrepreneurs in 2019 currently has a team of 25 people that wants to distance itself from the operation of traditional makeup and cosmetics companies, betting on sustainability and transparent management.
The startup obtains a good part of its online sales through social networks – although it also has a physical store in Barcelona – and has made profits in the last three years. Their first round, in which BStartup participated and raised 400,000 euros, was in 2022 and now they are preparing the second. In this sense, its CEO, David Hart, considered that participating in 4YFN will help them “meet as many interesting people as possible and catch up, in addition to connecting with other entrepreneurs that we have not seen in a long time.” According to Hart, “there was a very cool atmosphere and I haven’t stopped talking to people, there has been a lot of attendance.”
Their future plans include “putting resources into physical stores, expanding the number and locations in Spain, where we have an immense journey, although we also want to reach Europe and we will begin our internationalization this year, because we believe that the brand has to be global.” .
