AI-Powered Startups Revolutionize Healthcare and Business in Madrid and Lisbon

The Hottest Startups in Madrid in 2024

The Spanish capital is drawing talent from Latin America, and its eye-catching startups are working on smarter payments, eldercare, and an AI-powered virtual nurse. Having spent many years as second fiddle to Barcelona, Madrid surpassed its Catalan cousin in 2023 with startups securing €605 million ($672 million) investment above Barcelona's €457 million ($507 million). "Lots of Latin American talent is arriving thanks to the recent entrepreneur visa and talent programs run by Telefonica to bring promising startup founders from Mexico, Argentina, Columbia and Venezuela," explains Bu Haces, innovation consultant at Madrid's Impact Hub. The city has seen solid growth in transportation, mobility and fintech startups during the last three years with AI and deep tech supercharged by an astonishing 56 universities. "The business schools in particular are providing lots of startup networking opportunities, and are keen on developing an entrepreneurial ecosystem," says Miguel Arias, general partner at VC K Fund. With Meta, IBM, Google and Amazon all expanding in the city, the main worry is lack of housing stock for the flood of students, engineers and entrepreneurs. "We need more accessible housing if we continue like this," Haces warns. When Invopop co-founder and CTO Sam Lown worked as CTO for Cabify, a Latin American rival to Uber, he found that the company had to issue invoices in different formats in different countries. More than 30 governments across South America and Europe also insist that online businesses report every sale to tax authorities as they happen, often with different reporting rules. "I thought it would be great to send all that to one place and have a company deal with it," he explains. Invopop's platform converts sales into electronic invoices and reports them to the local tax authority in the correct format. With CEO Juan Moliner Malaxechevarría, Lown raised €2.2 million ($2.4 million) from Y Combinator, Rebel Fund and Wayra. Since its launch, Invopop's 500 business customers -- including Property Management Services, Amenitiz, Fever and Sunday -- have issued more than one million invoices in 25 countries. This year they launched the Invopop App, which connects to Slack, Chargebee and Google Drive. invopop.com Uelz is designed to simplify online payments for companies that use a variety of payment methods, such as credit card billing, mobile payment and buy now, pay later services. It's also designed for international companies that use different payment providers in separate countries. Uelz's platform connects with all payment gateways including Apple Pay, Visa, Global Payments, Klarna, Stripe and Truust.io. It automates subscriptions and one-off payments and selects the most appropriate payment provider -- for instance, if rates of commission vary between countries, Uelz will ensure the gateway with the lowest commission is used. The company tracks payments and provides data to sales teams and finance departments. Co-founded by Xandra Etxabe and María Luke Astigarraga (the former goalkeeper for Atlético Madrid), Uelz has raised €2 million ($2.2 million) from Angels Capital and Wayra. The company is expanding into Latin America in 2025. uelzpay.com Tucuvi is a healthtech company offering a voice-based conversational AI and "virtual nurse" called Lola. The service monitors patients after they leave hospital to reduce readmissions. Lola leads patients through a structured conversation and sends the results to the patient's medical team for review. Co-founded by María González Manso and Marcos Rubio in 2019, the company obtained €5.5 million ($6.1 million) in funding from the European Innovation Council. Offering Lola in Spanish, Portuguese and English, Tucuvi has worked with more than 60,000 patients in Spain, Portugal and the UK, reducing hospital stays by 26 percent and cutting the 30-day readmission rate by more than 50 percent. tucuvi.com iFeel is a workplace mental health platform aimed at companies as a service to employees or as part of health insurance cover. People talk to an AI that assesses their levels of stress, depression and anxiety. It then decides what sort of attention is needed -- from an online therapist to a standard self-care wellbeing program. iFeel claims its treatment halves working hours missed, with 90 percent of users reporting improved emotional and mental wellbeing after using the service. Available in 26 languages and 30 countries, iFeel customers include Glovo, Insud Pharma, Cabify, TravelPerk, Spotahome and H&M. Launched in 2020 by co-founders CEO Amir Kaplan, COO Martin Villanueva Ordas and Gabriele Murrone, the startup has raised €40 million ($44 million), with a recent €20 million ($22 million) Series B investment round co-led by FinTLV Ventures and Korelya Capital. The new funds will support international expansion. ifeelonline.com Luzia, created by Spanish engineer Álvaro Higes, is a WhatsApp and Telegram-based AI personal assistant which uses OpenAI and Meta's Llama to provide a ChatGPT-style service. Luiza can research topics, suggest help with your math homework, create pictures and use translation tools. Founded in April 2023, Luzia secured a $2.5 million (£1.9 million) seed round in June 2023. Further rounds -- $10 million (£7.6 million) series A in September 2023 and $19 million (£14 million) series A1 in April 2024 -- are funding international expansion. The company has more than 20 million users and 15 million app downloads, topping the Android and Apple Store charts across most LATAM countries. Luzia.com Embat co-founders Antonio Berga and Carlos Serrano García-Lisón worked together at JP Morgan where, says Berga, "we were seeing clients struggling to manage multiple banks and banking platforms. It took hours." They founded Embat with Tomás Gil, ex-CTO at Fintonic, in August 2021 to centralize financial operations on a cloud-based platform for 600 companies in 60 countries and 50 currencies. €6.5 million ($7.2 million) pre-seed and seed series were backed by Samaipata, 4Founders and VentureFriends. February 2024's €15 million ($16.6 million) Series A will fund further international expansion. Future plans include developing AI for fraud detection, insurance underwriting and recommending investment opportunities. embat.io Senniors is an at-home care company for elderly people. It provides wearable tech from Fitbit to monitor users' health and needs, and gives families access to the data through the Senniors app. The company also connects elderly users to healthcare professionals when needed, provides a longevity program in partnership with Fitbit as well as insurer Klinc to improve activity, sleep and emotional well-being. Co-founded in November 2020 by Claudia Gómez Estefan and José de Diego Abad, Senniors raised €5.3 million ($5.8 million) in a seed round led by SixThirty Ventures. The company has provided 800,000 hours of home care to more than 40,000 families in 100 Spanish cities. US expansion is planned for 2025. hola.senniors.com Boopos is an online broker for buying and selling businesses, founded in 2020 by Juan Ignacio García, the former CFO at Spain's first unicorn Cabify. Many of the companies for sale on the platform are predominantly small online firms. The Boopos team vet them, while making sure they are profitable and have been operating for the last two years. García has raised $20 million (£15 million) in three rounds led by Bonsai Partners and K Fund. With almost $80 million (£60.9 million) transacted on the platform, Boopos has 5,000 active buyers and 200 businesses for sale, and will break even by the end of the year. "We want to scale," says García. "There's a wave of baby boomer business owners retiring and selling up." boopos.com Onum is a cloud-based platform that monitors companies' data as it moves from collection to storage. Using AI algorithms, Onum spots anomalies, potential security risks, and system issues. It also helps "separate the noise from the signal," identifying what should be discarded, archived, or analyzed, and claims customers cut the cost of managing data by up to 80 per cent. Founded in October 2022 by Pedro Castillo -- former CEO of cybersecurity unicorn, Devo -- he's joined by co-founders Lucas Varela and Pedro Tortosa. Onum closed two rounds of funding for a total of €38 million ($42 million) led by Kibo Ventures and Dawn Capital. onum.com Shakers is a digital workforce platform that helps companies build, manage and pay teams of freelancers. It can select an entire group from scratch or add new members to an existing talent pool. Founded by CEO Héctor Mata, COO Nico de Luis, CPO Adrián de Pedro and COO Jaime Castillo in 2021, Shakers has raised €7 million ($7.7 million) in rounds led by Brighteye Ventures, Adevinta Ventures and Wayra. The company claims it has grown 350 percent in revenue in the past two years. Charging businesses for access to the platform, it has worked with more than 600 Spanish companies including Inditex, Telefónica, Uber and Microsoft and more than 7,000 freelancers. Expansion across southern Europe is planned for 2025. shakersworks.com

The Hottest Startups in Lisbon in 2024

The Portuguese capital's most exciting startups include a platform to help entrepreneurs get going, a smart punchbag, and the Uber of hair salons. Two years ago, Jon Fath moved with his family to Portugal from the Netherlands with the sole purpose of launching a fintech startup there. "This country is brimming with talent and ambition," Fath says. "I thank Lisbon for welcoming me, along with so many other expats and entrepreneurs, so warmly." Indeed, it's no surprise that the European Commission named Lisbon as 2023's European Capital of Innovation, while the Financial Times, in partnership with Statista, ranked two Portuguese startup hubs in Europe's top ten startup hubs -- including the Unicorn Factory Lisboa, which launched in 2022 and has already supported more than 820 startups and helped raise more than €1 billion ($1.1 billion) . "Portugal offers unique advantages, such as its climate, safety, and cost of living, which make it an attractive choice over countries in central or northern Europe," says Nuno Pereira, CEO of Paynest. Government has played a role too, with policies such as residence visas for entrepreneurs and tax incentives to startups engaged in R&D. "That was instrumental in allowing the Portuguese startups to come across the other side alive, after the VC drought of the past two years," says Mauro Frota, CEO of fittech startup Bhout. Before launching Rauva in Lisbon, Jon Fath had been a startup CEO in Amsterdam, co-founded a logistics company in Frankfurt and worked for an investment management firm in Beijing. "I decided to start Rauva based on my experiences working with entrepreneurs and co-founding other companies," Fath says. "I took the plunge to build a one-stop shop to make entrepreneurship accessible to everyone." Rauva allows entrepreneurs to register their businesses online in a matter of minutes, offering a raft of features like debit cards and invoicing. "In addition, if the company has not yet been created, Rauva offers that service with the support of lawyers," Fath says. "Our solution helps reduce the time spent on bureaucratic processes." The startup, launched in 2022 by Fath and Sam Mizrahi, has also recently partnered with researchers to design a faster and more accurate credit scoring system using machine learning and quantum computing. Currently, Rauva has more than 3,000 users and has helped create more than a thousand new companies. rauva.com Currently, there are nearly 9,900 active satellites orbiting the planet, a number estimated to grow by an order of magnitude by 2030. "The risk of collisions caused by space debris is escalating," says Chiara Manfletti, the founding president of the Portuguese Space Agency and CEO of Neuraspace. "These collisions can destroy satellites, leading to substantial financial losses and disrupting essential services such as bank transactions, the internet, GNSS (global navigation satellite system), and Earth observation. The current manual decision-making processes are inadequate to handle this scale." Neuraspace addresses this problem by using AI to analyze various datasets, including radar and star trackers, and automatically predict potential collisions and suggest avoidance maneuvers. This space traffic management platform is currently tracking more than 300 satellites from satellite operators such as Spire, Nanoavionics and the European Space Agency. Founded in 2020, the startup has raised a total of $27.5 million (£20.8 million). "The big vision for Neuraspace is achieving self-sustaining, autonomous space activities," Manfletti says. neuraspace.com In 2021, Mauro Frota opened a gym featuring a unique piece of equipment: a smart boxing bag. Developed by Frota and Pedro Barata, the Bhout bag comes with an AI processing unit, biometric sensors and a smart camera that can track the accuracy, speed and power of every punch. "The idea came to me in a dream," Frota says "I lost count of the number of iterations to get there. We were creating a new product from scratch." The punching bag is also equipped with a set of light rings that nudges gym-goers into different workout rhythms. Its core is made of foam layers and filled with water, mimicking the feeling of hitting another boxer. According to Frota, 20 new Bhout clubs are already confirmed in Portugal and Spain. Soon, it will also start selling the Bhout bag, at prices ranging between €6,000 to €10,000 ($6,1000 to $11,000) to clients including LinkedIn and Marriott Hotels. In 2023, the fit-tech startup raised a €10 million ($11 million) seed round co-led by Explorer Investments and Lince Capital. bhout.com MyCareforce is bringing the gig economy to healthcare. "Hospitals often lack the necessary staff to meet demand and they don't have the appropriate tools to hire people for extra shifts quickly," says CEO Pedro Cruz Morais. "We knew many doctors who were using WhatsApp to find extra shifts and we realized we could solve this problem with technology." MyCareforce provides an intelligent platform that connects nurses to hospitals and clinics, allowing them to apply and immediately book available shifts. The platform, launched in 2021 by Cruz Morais and co-founder João Hugo Silva, has more than 15,000 nurses registered on the platform and works with more than 70 healthcare units, such as hospitals and clinics, in Portugal and Brazil. It has raised a €2 million ($2.2 million) round led by Portugal Gateway, Shilling and Demium Capital. mycareforce.co Oscar allows users to book more than 150 at-home services -- from cleaning to blind repairs -- for a fixed fee and within 30 minutes. "The idea came about after a bad experience trying to call a plumber to fix my water heater," João Marques, founder and CEO of Oscar, says. "After wasting hours contacting multiple technicians and comparing quotes, I scheduled a service and the technician never showed up. It was obvious that an Uber home service was missing." The platform, which is available in Portugal and Madrid, currently hosts more than 20,000 technicians, which are admitted after a rigorous selection process and background check. According to Marques, their annual revenue is currently €12 million ($13.4 million) and growing 40 percent every quarter. They have raised more than €6 million ($6.7 million) in a round led by Lince Capital and Indico Capital Partners. oscar-app.com Francisco Nogueira's cousin was 40 when she detected a lump in her chest. "She thought it was nothing, but three months later, the lump had not disappeared," says Frederico Stock, CEO of Glooma. Unfortunately, the lump was a malignant tumor and she had to have a mastectomy. "Francisco decided to create Glooma so that women in the same situation can act sooner." The startup, launched in 2020 by Nogueira and Stock, is developing SenseGlove, a glove equipped with smart sensors that women can use to do a breast self-exam. "It can track changes in breast tissue over time and notify doctors when there's an abnormality," Nogueira says. According to him, an early proof-of-concept trial showed that the SenseGlove correctly diagnosed cancer 88 percent of the time, with a rate of 12 percent false positives. The startup, which has raised more than €600,000 ($671,000) is now undergoing clinical trials with the most recent prototype. The team hopes to receive FDA-approval by 2025. glooma.pt "When you need a taxi, you have Uber; when you need a hotel, you have booking.com, but what do you do when you need a hair salon or a spa?" asks Miguel Ribeiro, CEO of Sheerme. According to Ribeiro, 85 percent of wellness and beauty services require prior booking, but only 10 percent can be booked online. "Sheerme fills that void," he says. The platform allows users to find, book and pay for services provided by 7,000 health and beauty merchants. "We have also partnered with L'Oréal and created a white-labeled solution called SAL(ON)," says Ribeiro, who founded the platform with Karly Alves and Shakil Satar. The startup, which has more than 250,000 users across Portugal, Brazil and Spain, has raised a €5 million ($5.5 million) seed round led by Lince Capital. sheerme.com Sqill is an AI-powered mobile video editor for social media brands. "With our social media suite and with one single click, anyone can create better content than a social media expert," says Afonso Coimbra, co-founder and CEO of Sqill. The platform uses AI for a range of tasks, such as recommending what to post or automatically adding subtitles. Founded in 2021 by Coimbra, Rui Ascenso and André Perdigão, the startup has raised €2 million ($2.2 million) by GED Ventures. It has clients in Portugal, Spain, Brazil and the US, including L'Oréal, the online marketplace Worten and the Portuguese football club FC Porto. sqill.so More than 300,000 students in more than 20 countries have used online learning platform Ubbu to learn coding and digital skills. "Our platform is built for the everyday teacher, even for those with no coding experience, who account for around 90 percent," says João Magalhães, CEO and founder of Ubbu. "It's accessible to everyone because we want to reduce the barriers to enter the tech market." Aimed at children between the ages of 6 and 12, the platform is available in four languages and includes Ubbox, a tool that allows projects to be made using a programming language via blocks. A research study by Universidade Nova Lisboa found that Ubbu students could improve their math grades by up to 17 percent compared to a control group. Ubbu.io Founded in 2022 by Nuno Pereira, Paynest is a platform for companies to manage their employees' finances. "Our mission is to help companies address all of the financial needs of their employees everywhere while empowering them to gain greater control over their finances," Pereira says. Features include simplified expense management, early access to salary and bonuses, financial coaching, and access to financial literacy tools. Paynest is currently used by more than 30,000 workers from more than 50 companies in Portugal, Greece and France. It has also raised a total of €3 million ($3.3 million) from investors such as Lince Capital and Bluecrow Capital. paynest.co