Thousands of entrepreneurs and investors will participate over the next four days in 4YFN (4 Years From Now) with the determination to meet and promote the growth of their respective businesses. The event celebrates ten years consolidated as a successful international platform for connecting startups, scaleups, investors and corporations, as confirmed by the data: 60% of the nearly 95,000 visitors to the MWC, from all over the world, dedicate time to visit 4YFN, and this percentage grows year after year.
For the first time, the meeting will be held in two pavilions, 8.0 and 8.1 of the Fira de Barcelona Gran Via venue, to accommodate more than 800 exhibitors. It will have four networking spaces and seven stages through which around 350 speakers will focus on six major topics: Age of AI, Growth, Startup Funding, Corporate Innovation, Art of Innovation, Decentralization
Banco Sabadell's BStartup, which has also recently reached its first decade, has supported 4YFN since its first edition and does so once again as Main Sponsor. “We believe that this event is a value for the Spanish entrepreneurial and innovative ecosystem and for the city of Barcelona,” says Yolanda Pérez, director of BStartup.
Achieving financial resources to start or grow your project is a priority for the vast majority of entrepreneurs who will come to 4YFN. For them, the BStartup stand will constitute a point of reference to obtain information and financial advice that will allow them to move forward with their business plans. It will also be the place where 15 of the projects that the BStartup team has most recently incorporated into their portfolio are announced.
With the aim of being another agent in the startup ecosystem, facilitating networking and valuable contacts, BStartup has prepared a complete content program for the event, with the collaboration of prestigious speakers and investors.
“We try to address topics of interest to both startups and investors, always with the goal of being practical sessions, from which they can learn. And this year we wanted to focus especially on financing and investment, because it is an issue that worries more than in previous years," considers Yolanda Pérez, who adds that "at the macroeconomic and investment moment, startups and scaleups are more attentive than ever to alternatives, or to complementary financing to Venture Capital.”
The first of the three sessions that BStartup organizes within the official 4YFN program, and which will take place this afternoon, will be dedicated to the challenges of financing a startup today. And, although good projects always end up finding financing, startups currently have a wide variety of financing options available, both dilutive and non-dilutive. Therefore, they do not have to limit themselves to a single option, as long as they define the short and long-term strategy considering the different offers on the market.
Tomorrow afternoon, the second panel within the official program of the event will revolve around the perspectives of investment in Venture Capital, access to capital and trends in the coming years. And on Wednesday morning, to give an overview of the investment priorities and focus areas of health and biotechnology investment funds, BStartup organizes a round table in which the leaders of some of the most relevant funds in Spain will participate. in health investment. Finally, Sergio Pérez Merino, Director of Sabadell Venture Capital, will participate in a panel on the rise of Venture Debt.
In addition, a total of 15 small format sessions will be held on the stage of the BStartup stand, with the participation of key actors from the entrepreneurial ecosystem throughout Spain, such as Barcelona Health Hub, Seed Rockets, the Spanish Chamber of Commerce, Basque Tek Ventures, Andalucía Emprende or Barcelona Global, among others. Today at 5 p.m. in this space, seven female investors representing different investment vehicles - from large corporations to Venture Buliders, Family Offices and accelerators - will share their different perspectives on the current moment of investment.
Although BStartup is open to investing in any type of initiative, in this edition of 4YFN it has proposed “to find scalable projects that seek to contribute to the decarbonization of the planet through technology and innovation, that promote the energy transition, Smart cities, sustainable mobility, industry 4.0 or the circular economy,” explains Yolanda Pérez.
Thus, Banco Sabadell's service for startups wants to give new impetus to its Green vertical, which it launched four years ago to support technology companies that facilitate the transition to a more sustainable world.
Along these lines, for the first day of the event BStartup has selected five promising companies in the field of sustainability that will present their projects at its stand: Bia Power, a software platform that monitors the charging infrastructure of electric vehicles (EV) and controls the process to ensure that they obtain the cheapest and cleanest energy; Improfit, which provides interactive tools aimed at rehabilitation and training to improve people's quality of life; Newe, a technological solution that allows retailers in any industry to offer circular models such as rentals and/or subscriptions for their products from their own channels; Moa Foodtech, which promotes the circular economy by combining biotechnology and artificial intelligence to convert waste and byproducts from the agri-food industry into a nutritional product with high added value; and Ocean Ecostructures, whose technology (Bio Boosting System) reverses the negative impact that marine structures have historically had, turning them into centers of biodiversity.
Another sector that generates greater interest in the entrepreneurial ecosystem is health and biotechnology. For this reason, tomorrow it will be the turn of five of the 16 startups in this sector from BStartup's Health line, which will present their projects at the entity's stand: Oxolife, Nanobots, Time is Brain, Able Human Motion and Sycai Medical.
On the last two days of the event, the invited startups will be Toddl, Saigu Cosmetics, Kimera Technologies, Qbeast and Remuner, representing different sectors. As Yolanda Pérez argues, “we always try to give priority to BStartup's most recent investments, but we also highly value that they can make the most of the showcase of exhibiting their project at 4YFN. That is why we also take into account those that are seeking an investment round or are expanding.”
