Albert Rodes Berenguer, Gabriel Fernández Ubiergo and Francesc Pinyol Margalef work for the same company in the online broadcasting or streaming sector. "The clients were basically the media, so the technology was not reaching companies or public administrations, which were far from taking advantage of it," recalls Rodes. With the mission of “democratizing streaming”, the three partners founded the startup Watchity in July 2015, “when practically the only thing that existed was the Skype platform”, in the words of Rodes.
Watchity's has been a long road. “Our goal was to create a solution that would allow, from any computer, to operate as if you were an audiovisual professional. This required simplifying the entire process and bringing together all the functions on the same platform”, explains the co-founder. Developing this tool has meant six years of development for the three entrepreneurs and an economic investment of three million euros. Of these three million, two have been public financing and one million have come from private investors, among which Wayra, Telefónica's entrepreneurship initiative, stands out.
"Technology is like a long-distance race and, in this sense, we didn't want to start growing until we had a well-established product," says Rodes. In 2017 they began to carry out the first pilot projects and fate wanted the covid pandemic to catch them with the already very advanced product. “Traffic skyrocketed. Our website went from registering around 1,000 monthly visits to 30,000. We were contacted by many companies that needed to virtualize their day to day with video calls, webinars…”, explains the co-founder.
Currently, companies such as Banc Sabadell, MediaMarkt, L'Oréal, the Generalitat de Catalunya, Generali or Volkswagen are on Watchity's client list. “We are the only ones that cover these three services: facilitating professional audiovisual production, allowing content to be broadcast with quality streaming, and the option for the audience to participate,” says the entrepreneur. The company operates throughout Spain and has begun its international expansion in Europe, through Germany and the United Kingdom, and the American continent, through Mexico.
With headquarters in Catalonia and a staff of ten people who work remotely, the partners aim to reach a million euros in turnover this year and are studying the acquisition of a company that could boost the turnover to 2.5 million euros.
