Esade BAN invests €4.1 million in 27 new projects in 2021

Esade BAN, the Esade Alumni business angels’ network, invested €4.1 million in 27 new projects in 2021, the second highest figure in the history of the network. The average investment received by each project was €170,000. Each investor invested an average of €30,000 per start-up.

The network of private investors serves as a meeting point between investors who are looking for investment opportunities and entrepreneurs with innovative projects requiring finance in their early stages. Esade BAN was founded in 2006 and consists of 230 private investors, most of whom are business angels, family offices and venture capital representatives, and corporate and investment groups. In the last 16 years Esade BAN has invested around €40 million in 240 companies. The network is characterized by its focus on entrepreneurs and its on-going training for investors through the Business Angels School, plus the possibility of investing as a group with a lead investor who coordinates the operation.

Deep tech, the sector that has received most investment

Despite the uncertainty caused by COVID-19, 400 projects were submitted to Esade BAN. The 97 projects retained were presented at the 18 investment forums (seed forum, growth forum, expansion forum, healthcare forum and seed deep tech forum). New initiatives in 2021 included the TravelTech, Tourism and Hospitality Challenge, involving sectors which have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic, and the Seed Deep Tech Forum, organized together with Barcelona Activa and five more universities. A new edition of the PropTech program focused on the future of the real estate sector was also held.

Moreover, the sector to receive most investment, with 61% of the start-ups, was the deep tech sector, which relies on technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, augmented or virtual reality, photonics, and deep learning to offer solutions. “The entrepreneurial ecosystem has changed considerably in the last few months, and after two years of struggling with the effects of the pandemic, we have seen an upward trend in projects related to value added technology or deep tech, which has become an increasingly essential attribute among start-ups with high growth potential. In this respect, we hope that even greater investment can be made in these types of projects in 2022,” said the Esade BAN director, Fernando Zallo. “The mission of the Esade Alumni business angels’ network is to offer its network of investors the best opportunities. One example of this is the presentation of high-growth start-ups such as Cabify, Red Points, Kantox, Glovo, Wallapop and Exoticca at its investment forums in recent years,” Zallo added.

One of the start-ups that clearly illustrates the growth of deep tech investment is Unblur. This initiative, led by co-founder and CEO Alfonso Zamarro, an Esade Alumnus (BBA, 2014), uses artificial intelligence integrating real-time information from video cameras on drones, sensors, cartographic information, and traffic, in order to improve the response of emergency services such as Firefighters, Police and Civil Defense. The start-up has garnered €180,000 from 13 Esade BAN investors.

Start-ups and outstanding projects

Besides Unblur, other operations of note undertaken by the Esade Alumni business angels network in 2021 include Dinbeat, an initiative that uses the Internet of Things to offer veterinary telemedicine services and in-home care for people, which has received €1.1 million in investment; Nymiz, software that protects and anonymizes network data, preventing it from being shared, which has obtained €253,000 from the private network; and iXorigué, a solution offering GPS collars to monitor livestock, which has received €95,000 from Esade BAN investors.

Further initiatives presented at Esade BAN investment forums include Competize, a system for sports enthusiasts that organizes leagues and tournaments; Cavli Wireless, a solution that democratizes the Internet of Things in everyday environments; Mapsi Photonics, a start-up that detects gases and biochemical products using a patented platform; and April Plants, an online plant store.

In addition to connecting start-ups and investors, Esade BAN provides all its entrepreneurs with a comprehensive entrepreneurial ecosystem through Esade and Esade Alumni. In this ecosystem, entrepreneurs can find all that they need to develop and launch their projects and companies and make them grow quickly and successfully. In particular, Esade BAN has strong synergies with the Esade Entrepreneurship Institute, the center dedicated to entrepreneurial initiative, and its business project creation and acceleration program, eWorks.