Cuatrecasas Acelera, the accelerator of business initiatives based on legaltech or of a high legal complexity, ended its third edition by holding its Demo Day. The six participating startups presented their projects to investors and business angels in a pitch and at DemoLab, a space created for the event. The event brought approximately 100 attendees from the startup ecosystem together at the Cuatrecasas Barcelona office.
Cuatrecasas Acelera is a program by Cuatrecasas and Telefónica Open Future, supported by Step One; the current edition has put a focus on blockchain-based projects. Due to the new focus, the accelerator has a new addition: Alastria, the Spanish multisectoral consortium providing a semi-public blockchain infrastructure.
The winners of this edition are Blocktac, a blockchain-based service for converting information to avoid falsification, and FuVex, a company offering drones with all the legal guarantees and security. The panel, created for the occasion, assessed the level of innovation, the originality of the idea, the team’s dedication, as well as the viability and scalability of the business. The members of this expert panel were Rafael Fontana, senior partner of Cuatrecasas; Diana Rivera and Alejandro Payá, partners at Cuatrecasas; Ricardo Torgal, partner at Indico Capital Partners; Carlos Conti, partner and director at Inveready Technology Investment Group; Carlos Grau, CEO of Mobile World Capital Barcelona; Jesús Murillo, corporate venturing manager at ACCIÓ; Alberto Moratiel, coordinator of institutional relations at ENISA; and Almudena Moreno, global head at Telefónica Open Future.
Rafael Fontana, senior partner at Cuatrecasas, highlighted the quality of the projects participating in the third edition of Acelera. “This year, we decided to accelerate projects of a high legal complexity, beyond the fields of legaltech and regtech, as this is where we can offer greatest value, enabling us to also steep ourselves in startup talent and know-how in less developed areas. With the third edition behind us, we set the course for the fourth edition for which we are equally committed to helping business initiatives to mature, and continue to acquire new synergies with strategic partners.”
Almudena Moreno, global head at Telefónica Open Future, highlighted the importance of the joint efforts: “Cuatrecasas Acelera is extraordinary proof of how valuable the cooperation between such consolidated companies as Telefónica and Cuatrecasas is, to promote and learn from the development of our industries through the entrepreneurs, their startups and the innovation they contribute. Telefónica Open Future wholeheartedly thanks our partner because the program has developed and the technological level of the accelerated startups has increased since the first day. It is an outstanding example of how joint efforts prevail over individual ones, in the search for talent with innovative and disruptive solutions of value for our businesses.”
Francisco Guillén, general manager at Blocktac, stated “Cuatrecasas Acelera has offered us the support of top-level legal advisors and has brought us into contact with other projects with interesting challenges from which we have also learned.” Carlos Matilla, CEO of FuVeX, emphasized “the importance of regulation in the field of aircraft and the importance of participating in a program such as Cuatrecasas Acelera to overcome the legal challenges.”
During Demo Day, there was a round table on “Blockchain como herramienta de innovación” (Blockchain as an innovation tool) whose participants were Carlos Barrabés, chair of the Barrabés group; Álvaro Bourkaib, partner at Cuatrecasas; Santi Casas, CEO of ValidatedID (winner of the second Cuatrecasas Acelera program); and Montse Guardia, general manager at Alastria Blockchain Ecosystem.
The experts analyzed the main blockchain trends, highlighting (i) the increased use of technology in business, (ii) the use of artificial intelligence to make smart contracts more intelligent, (ii) the growing pressure to adapt the regulatory environment, (iv) the integration of IoT and blockchain, and (v) how ethics and privacy will gain importance.
The third Cuatrecasas Acelera program includes a new innovation: the fast track process, in which the Latvian startup Summarizebot and a team of engineers and lawyers from the firm co-developed a minimum viable product or MPV. The parties developed a product based on artificial intelligence and data processing that enables massive and decentralized data anonymization in documents. The parties presented the solution on Demo Day.
The Cuatrecasas Knowledge and Innovation Group already uses the solution that enables it to increase efficiency by 70% in these kinds of tasks. Another advantage of this product that guarantees anonymity is that it meets the requirements under the General Data Protection Regulation.
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