While in a meeting talking about the offices of the future, Eduard Albors witnessed an employee trip over a co-worker's electric scooter. What for many would have been a simple unimportant anecdote, gave Albors a lot to think about. “I studied the problem and saw that the owners left the scooters loaded wherever they could, without there being a reverse space where they were not disturbed and were protected. Also, they had to bring their charger from home because there was no universal charger,” he explains.
As an architect dedicated to the design of offices for multinationals, Albors began working to bring order to this matter. The result is charging and parking stations that can be located both inside and outside office buildings, educational, sports or commercial centers... You are not alone in such an adventure. He has teamed up with José Bauza, an economist and "lifelong friend," and with Joaquim Sant, the engineer behind the stations' technology. The three of them founded the start-up Qoob in November 2019.
Fate wanted the covid to catch them just when they had just launched their first pilot project, in the Glòries tower building in Barcelona. But there is no harm in the world: "We took advantage of the confinement to develop a platform of services associated with electric micromobility," says Albors. From this platform the user can, for example, solve a breakdown without having to go to a workshop or know the details of the use of their vehicle in real time.
Currently, there are more than 2,000 users of the Qoob app, and its stations are located in buildings throughout the country and even have a small presence in Brazil. They have patented the solution in Spain, France, Portugal and Italy and are processing the patent in the United Kingdom, with a view to making the leap to these markets. To accelerate growth and internationalization, the founders are testing the possibility of carrying out an investment round in the coming months.
Based in Barcelona and with a team of five people, Qoob manufactures its stations in Zaragoza. The start-up has the help of Netmentora, the European network in which business leaders help entrepreneurs. In 2021, they reached a turnover of 185,000 euros, and this year the entrepreneurs expect to reach 450,000 euros.
Few stumbles have been as profitable as the one Albors witnessed.
