From seed to unicorn: 15 years of the start-up boom

In 2010, 15 years ago, the word start-up It wasn't yet part of our everyday vocabulary. Or at least, not in Catalonia. In fact, in the ARA (Catalan newspaper), it didn't begin to appear frequently until 2013, evidence that the tech startup boom was brewing, but hadn't yet exploded. The first official reports we have in Catalonia, from ACCIÓ – the Catalan government's business competitiveness agency – date from 2016 and already positioned the Principality as a leading region in Europe in the creation of start-ups and with growing potential to attract international investment and talent. At that time, there were more than 1,000. By 2025, ACCIÓ already counted some 2,300, a record figure that had increased by 9% in one year, an ecosystem that employs 22,840 people and generates a turnover of 2.33 billion euros.

Even so, the world of technological entrepreneurship began to take shape long before we started to see its fruits in the pages of the newspaper. In fact, the first start-ups Startups (newly created companies that share a disruptive and technological component, with an innovative idea) date back to the second half of the 20th century in the US, with examples like Hewlett-Packard (HP), and somewhat later, from the 1970s onwards, with the emergence in Silicon Valley of tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.

The explosion of the internet and the dot-com bubble triggered the creation of digital businesses, mainly focused on e-commerce, and it is here that this ecosystem began to take shape in Barcelona. Initiatives like Privalia, LetsBonus, and Wallapop, among many others, emerged in Catalonia in the early 2000s, a new glocal business model that was here to stay. Companies like these are the forerunners of what we know today as the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Catalonia; In fact, the public-private initiative Tech Barcelona was founded around 2010 due to the need for these companies to partner with each other, initially under the name Ecommerce Barcelona Tech, as its president, Miguel Vicente, recalls.

15 years ago the world of start-up It was still in its infancy in Barcelona, ​​and little was thought at the time that it would eventually become an economic engine in itself, making daily headlines and even lending its name to business supplements, books, podcasts, and master's programs. "The e-commerce revolution and smartphones were the starting point that enabled the growth of initiatives like Glovo, Badi, Housfy, etc.," Vicente points out. The boom in new projects occurred around 2011, after the world start-up expanded into sectors other than e-commerce, also generating a revolution in the financial world (fintechwhich "allowed the sector to grow, with services increasingly geared towards startups and the digital economy." hype (excitement in English and in entrepreneurial language) from the early years reached the administration, which in 2014, taking advantage of the fact that the Mobile World Congress had already been in Barcelona for a few years, created 4YFN, a congress attached to the mobile one but dedicated to the start-ups

"If I compare the first company I launched exactly 14 years ago with how it is to do it now, the financing conditions for the start-ups "Things have changed a lot," emphasizes the president of Tech Barcelona. "Now there's more funding and support. When I started, they asked me to put up my house as collateral to get a POS terminal so I could collect payments from customers," recalls Vicente. "Now there's more investment funding, there's been a lot of public-private collaboration, the press has also helped a lot with visibility, and the fact that Barcelona has been building a technological ecosystem for Catalonia's GDP for 20 years."

Key Events

This new way of doing business has also brought about significant changes in the economic world, at the business, labor, and social levels. The explosion of platforms like Glovo, founded by Oscar Pierre and Sacha Michaud in 2015, to give just one example, has changed the way we consume, but it has also led to a fight against the use of bogus self-employment – not only at Glovo, but also at other delivery companies like Uber Eats and Deliveroo – which is the approval of the Rider Law in 2021 And a back-and-forth between administrations and platforms. A conflict that has reached the courts, with multimillion-dollar fines.

Nor can we forget the frenzy of funding rounds and business valuations. Just when we were already used to the word start-upOthers began to be used, and suddenly the unicornsNot fantastic beasts, but startups valued at over €1 billion. first The Catalan company that won the award was Glovo: it took the title in December 2019 after closing a €150 million funding round. This category became a milestone for new projects. At that time, investment rounds were constantly pouring in, venture capital was handing out money left and right, and was beginning to look towards Europe in general and Barcelona in particular. To date, seven start-ups Catalan women have been crowned as unicorns: eDreams Odigeo, Wallbox, Glovo, Letgo, Adevinta, TravelPerk and Factorial. However, Achieving this title has not made their lives any easier.Many continue to suffer losses.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the soufflé remained and, in fact, grew larger. Lockdowns, dependence on technology, temporary layoffs, and a student body increasingly skeptical of traditional businesses fostered new ways of making a living, and above all, provided them with more time and tools to innovate. Investment in technological projects and new disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and deeptech (Advanced technology) boomed: there was money, talent, and ideas. But the soufflé always collapses. Between 2021 and 2024, investment in seed projects, the earliest stages, began to decline. One of the first signs was the surprise sale of Glovo to the German company Delivery Hero on January 1, 2022, a desperate move by the company to find capital. Funding rounds ended up being raised like mushrooms for projects without a clear business model and with an eye on profitability, as explained in this article. report on the ARA in July 2022

Some of the complaints at that time were directed at the administrations and the bureaucracy, and all of this ended up leading, in November 2022, to the creation by the Spanish government of the law on start-upsA specific regulatory framework was established to provide administrative, tax, and commercial support to these companies.

Since then, the storm has subsided. Sectors such as biotechnology and medicine have captured a large share of the new initiatives, which, along with the emergence of AI and the deeptech They are the basis of new initiatives that frequently arise with the support of universities and research centers. Now the focus is on added value: "We must continue to invest in projects that generate greater competitive advantages, based on deeptech"AI, research, and biotechnology, for example; this is one of the things that makes us different, and we must continue to develop it. We need to generate more projects from the scientific community and technical universities," Vicente concludes.