Anna Martin, the entrepreneur who brought a university project to Silicon Valley

BarcelonaThe Catalan technology sector often boasts about the talent pool offered by the country's university ecosystem. Any technology company that remains in Catalonia explains much of its success due to the foundation provided by research and educational centers, which allow access to high-level ideas and professionals without leaving home. Atom H2, one of the rising stars of the country's emerging fabric, is an example: the start-up has developed an alternative to diesel generators that generates and stores energy to support strategic infrastructure. And they did it, as recalled by Anna Martín (Barcelona, 2001), co-founder and CEO of the company, on Fridays after class.

Atom H2 is the work of Martín herself along with her classmates in the industrial design degree at Elisava, Marcel Rovira and Mariona Figueras, and the then-student at the Institut Químic de Sarrià, Lucas Vicén. In the first instance, Martín and Rovira met "every Friday afternoon to work on their own project." "We realized that a lot of renewable energy was being generated, but storage is a major bottleneck," recalls the co-founder. Then Vicén joined, who brought the chemical "vision" to a solution based on hydrogen, "a very good option for maintaining long-term energy."

In 2022, the three students already had a prototype of what would later become the Atom H2 product: an eight-foot container that integrates solar panels, lithium batteries, and their solid-state hydrogen system, the company's innovative core. It was then that they entered CaixaBank's ImaginPlanet Challenge, which allowed them to incubate the product in Silicon Valley. "We already had a prototype, but we lacked the business side, and there we found a very interesting industrial part," observes Martín.

Upon returning from the USA, they turned the initiative into their final degree project, a phase in which Figueras joined them. "We worked on it as a product, but also on market validation: we spoke with companies, and we saw that the sector most in need was telecommunications," the co-founder remembers. In 2024, in fact, it is one of the emerging companies selected by the Cellnex Foundation, with a successful pilot test at their facilities. Later, Marc Perales, in charge of software, joined the founding team.

Since then, recognition has lined up for the company: in 2024 alone, Atom took home the national phase of the prestigious James Dyson design award. This year they received one of the EmprènXXI awards, presented by CaixaBank DayOne, and the magazine Forbes has included the four founders in its list of the 100 most creative people in the business world.

The potential of the solution is extremely broad: "Even when we were creating the product, we had a vision for it that was scalable, modular, and adaptable to different places and sites," recalls Martin. Its fit in such a strategic field as telecommunications, among others, offers a market with almost no limits. In fact, by 2028 the company expects to deploy a hundred units of its generator, and they aspire to reach 700 operational units by 2030, both within Spain and abroad. "The product fits the market: there are clients asking for our solution," celebrates the executive director.