Barcelona Startups Changing the Spanish Tech Landscape

Barcelona may not be the official capital of Spain, but it certainly takes the crown as the country’s startup capital. Producing notable startups across a range of verticals, it’s one of Europe’s hottest innovation hubs for 2022.

Labelled as a “unicorn territory”, the city ranks 4th in Europe for financing rounds for startups. From the likes of Glovo and TravelPerk to Adevinta and Heura, it makes sense that the hottest Spanish startups join many of our Orange Quarter team in calling Barcelona their home.

This list of the best Barcelona tech startups is a mixed bag of hyper-growth scale-ups, disruptive startups and everything in between.

We work with some of Barcelona’s fastest growing Tech companies to hire Senior Engineers. Ready for a new challenge? Check out our open vacancies here.

D-EDGE 

Transforming hotel tech since 2019 and established from the merger of two long-established hospitality digital solutions providers, D-EDGE offers leading-edge cloud-based e-commerce solutions to more than 12,000 hotels in over 100 countries. Combining technical excellence with digital marketing expertise, D-EDGE brings a holistic hospitality technology infrastructure under one roof. The integrated range of solutions covers all stages of hotel distribution which encompasses Central Reservation System, Guest Management, Data Intelligence, Connectivity Hub, Digital Media and Website Creation.

With a team of 350 experts located in over 20 countries, D-EDGE provides localised support, services and tools. With its global network of 500+partners D-EDGE’s ever-expanding ecosystem is a positive place to do business and grow. Taking care of the technology, so you can take care of your hotel’s guests.

Midokura

Founed in 2010 and in recent years acquired by Sony who are on a mission to help them become the leader in next-generation AI services. With offices in Tokyo and Barcelona. Midokura aims to create a platform to easily deploy and run AI workloads on edge devices, taking advantage of AI accelerators and to run complex distributed workloads on a cluster of IoT devices, the fog/MEC, and cloud, all managed by a SaaS platform.

With a current headcount of 75 people, their Engineering department is split into 7 teams that consists of QA, Backend, Embedded, AI & Research and Product. 

Novicell Spain

Founded in 2000, Novicell is a digital strategy consultancy expert in digital marketing, SEO and web development. Providing digital solutions for companies. Reliability and ease of use for their customers perfectly describe the software solutions Novicell works with. Specialists in .NET and PHP technology, at Novicell they use content managers or custom software solutions, depending on the complexity of the project.

Ukio

Founded in 2020 by two brothers, Ukio, which is Japanese for “living in the moment”, is a startup offering premium long-term rentals. Right as remote work becomes the norm, the Barcelona-based company offers rentals of one month or longer in Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon, and Berlin. In 2021, the company raised $9 million from top European investors, and this year has plans to scale to more than 700 apartments across six continental capitals. 

Qogita

One of the leading global wholesale B2B platforms, Qogita is a tech company that simplifies B2B trade. Founded in 2020 (again by two brothers!) the international e-commerce company supplies both the larger wholesale organisations and smaller retailers. Earlier this year Qogita completed its Series B funding round, raising an impressive €80 million. 

Marfeel

The cloud-solution company, Marfeel, offers a platform that revolutionises the way publishers create, optimise, and monetize mobile websites. Guaranteeing top-paying ads from premium advertisers, Marfeel’s mobile monetization solution had been recognized by the likes of Google and the IAB. Marfeel’s customer base includes Elle, ABC, PopSugar, and The Washington Times. 

Lodgify

Lodgify, the SaaS for property owners to manage vacation rentals, has been making waves in the vacation rental industry since 2012. Priding itself as one of the best channel managers on the market, Lodgify has been recognized by Airbnb as a Preferred Software Partner for three years in a row. They’ve also been featured twice in the coveted Wired’s 100 Hottest European Startups list. 

TravelPerk

On a mission to make business travel better, the all-in-one platform TravelPerk allows users to book flights, hotels, apartments, trains, and cars, for individuals or entire groups. You can search, book, pay, invoice, and report your travel all in one place – the dream. Off the back of a stream of acquisitions, TravelPerk reported that its recurring revenue has increased tenfold since 2020 and shows no signs of slowing down. 

Adevinta

The global online classifieds specialist, Adevinta, provides technology-based services to connect buyers and sellers and facilitate transactions. Adevinta’s portfolio spans more than 40 digital brands, including top-ranked leboncoin in France, Germany’s leading classifieds sites mobile.de and eBay Kleinanzeigen, Marktplaats in the Netherlands, fotocasa and InfoJobs in Spain, Subito in Italy, and 50% of fast-growing OLX Brasil. With their new CEO Antoine Jouteau off to a strong start, Adevinta saw a total revenue growth in Q2 of +8% year-on-year. 

Payflow

Payflow, founded in 2020, is a financial wellbeing platform that allows employees to get paid on demand. A favourite with work councils and labour unions, this year Payflow became the most funded on-demand salary solution in the EU, after banking $9.1M to fuel its super app growth strategy. This brings the fintech’s total raised since its conception in 2020, to a whopping $13.6M. 

Vitaance

A life insurance that rewards you for living better? What’s not to love.Vitaance combines life and disability insurance for businesses with a wellbeing platform for their employees. It achieves this through a gamified system of both individual and team challenges, as well as rewards, from a free massage to yoga lessons. In 2021, the insurtech closed a financing round of €3 million, as the first in Southern Europe.

Glovo

The fastest-growing and first carbon neutral delivery player in Europe, Western Asia, and Africa, Glovo gives everyone easy access to anything they want in their city, when they want, where they want. This year joining forces with Delivery Hero as majority shareholder, the partnership allows both companies to leverage each other’s technological and operational expertise and makes both forces to be reckoned with. 

Heura Foods

Empowering people to change the food system into a sustainable one, Heura is a plant-based startup that is proudly mediterranean. With their main focus on soy-based meat alternatives, unlike other products on the market they have a short ingredient list and are further enriched with vitamins and nutrients. Who doesn’t want the taste of meat with a fraction of the water, emissions and farmland required?

Want in on the action? Speak to our Barcelona-based specialists Santiago, Ivan and Louis today.