AI-generated summary
Startups are defined by their high innovation content and pursuit of disruptive opportunities, emphasizing a cultural mindset that challenges the status quo rather than just technological advancement. Success hinges on multiple factors, including funding and market potential, but fundamentally on the synergy between an innovative entrepreneur and a disruptive idea that addresses a specific market need. The story of Landbot, a startup offering a no-code chatbot platform for businesses, exemplifies this. Founded in 2015, Landbot evolved its business model from a personal WhatsApp butler service to selling chatbot tools that enable agile, personalized digital customer communication, leading to a €6.5 million Series A funding round and a global team of 60 employees. This highlights the importance of flexibility and market adaptation for startup survival.
Other Spanish startups, such as Frenetic and Rosita Longevity, similarly illustrate innovation driven by addressing real market demands. Frenetic uses AI to create lighter, smaller mobile chargers, earning clients like Airbus and HP, while Rosita Longevity offers personalized health programs aimed at extending healthy life expectancy for older adults. Both benefit from the Scaleup Spain Network, a program supporting the growth and maturation of promising startups through mentorship, networking, and skill development. The exchange of ideas among entrepreneurs is crucial, as founder Jiaqi Pan notes, underscoring that collaborative talent is essential to startup success.
The encounter between a restless entrepreneur and a disruptive idea unleashes the magic. This is the story of three startups that were born from thinking outside the established limits and succeeded.
By definition, a startup must have high innovative content and pursue opportunities related to disruption. The market is hungry for original, innovative ideas that break the mould and open up new opportunities, but innovation should not be confused with mere technological evolution. It is rather a cultural process that predisposes to a critical and creative attitude towards the status quo.
The success of a startup is determined by many factors, including, of course, the ability to find funding and the identification of a market with untapped potential, but the most important element, the one that unleashes the magic, is the encounter between an entrepreneur with an innovative mindset and a disruptive idea.
Now, How do you understand if an idea is so innovative as to merit the creation of a startup? The first thing, without a doubt, is to understand if the idea responds to a specific market need. In many cases, in fact, an idea may be good but not find anyone capable of appreciating it.
Landbot, an AI startup
An instructive success story is that of Landbot, one of the companies participated in our Venture Capital program, which has developed a ‘no-code’ chatbot generator. This tool allows non-technical users to automate lead generation, customer support, product recommendations, and many more business processes through conversational experiences.
Jiaqi Pan, CEO and co-founder of Landbot, explains that this technology has democratized a service in which “your level of programming no longer matters.” There were two needs: to personalize digital communication with customers and to be able to do it in an agile way, Landbot has responded to these market demands.
The company was established in September 2015 after the founders, Jiaqi Pan, Cristóbal Villar and Fernando Guirao, met again at an entrepreneurial talent selection event in Valencia. The three launched Yexir, the first personal butler that worked through WhatsApp. At the same time, they developed a platform capable of managing these conversations at scale, with functionalities such as the creation of tickets or the issuance of payments.
After managing more than 3000 orders, the scalability of the service was presented as a threat as a significant investment in personnel would be required, with the consequent cost. Other competitors in markets such as the United States or Germany already had hundreds of agents in their ranks taking orders. The startup then decided to change its business model and start selling its tool to companies.
This is how Helloumi was born, a customer service software through WhatsApp, Messenger or Telegram. Finally, a live and partially automated chat arrived that companies could put on their website: Landbot, which now has 60 employees distributed in different parts of the world, after closing a series A of €6.5M in 2020.
Flexibility and Troubleshooting
This case demonstrates how flexibility and the ability to adapt the proposal to the needs of the market, finding a competitive gap in which to overtake the competition of large companies, is the greatest virtue of startups, as well as a necessity for their survival.
From the analysis of the market, which must be defined and clear, all the characteristics of the target audience are examined. There are many visualization tools that help identify them: one example is canvases, structured visualization models that support the anarchic phase of brainstorming.
“Our first years,” explains Pan, “were not easy, and we have had to study the market a lot, analyzing our end customer: they have been years of many moments of trial and error.” Finally, says the CEO of Landbot, “we saw how many companies accustomed to physical sales and contact with the customer in traditional channels were looking for other ways to be closer to them. More scalable, efficient and sophisticated forms, but no less human. And that is where chatbots play a very important role and so related to the digital transformation of more traditional businesses.”
Frenetic and Rosita
Landbot is not the only example present in the Spanish ecosystem of a great idea that came up with a team of restless and innovative entrepreneurs, willing to think outside the established limits. Frenetic and Rosita Longevity are two successful realities that tapped into the same creative spark.
Frenetic, another of the startups participated in by our Venture Capital program, It has revolutionized the manufacture of chargers and batteries for mobile phones, making them lighter and smaller thanks to an artificial intelligence system. Since 2018, the startup has been marketing a system that optimizes the design of transformers and even helps predict their useful life and operation.
The programming of the algorithm required many years of research, driven by the awareness that the market was asking for a solution. The company now counts among its customers companies such as Airbus, HP, Siemens and Indra. Its founder,
For its part, Rosita Longevity offers a tool that proposes classes, activities and tests to keep people between 60 and 75 years of age healthy. Clara Fernández, the founder, came up with the project at the Longevity School of the Cofrentes Spa, which she directs. From there, the team had the idea of scaling the process from the physical to the digital world.
The differential aspect of the application is that it sets the ambitious goal of increasing healthy life expectancy by five years, combining exercises and personalized plans, which include physiotherapy, breathing, education on aging, secondary prevention, emotional health.
Scaleup Spain Network, the boost to startups
Both Frenetic and landbot have in common their participation in the Scaleup Spain Network program of Fundación Innovación Bankinter, Endeavor and Wayra, created to support the scalability of the most promising projects in the country. The objective of the program, free of charge and lasting six months for the selected companies, is to help scaleups in their maturation and transformation process through the anticipation of the challenges they will encounter along the way. As well as the development of its founders and management team, and the creation of a collaborative network between entrepreneurs to establish links, share experiences and learn together.
The contamination of ideas among entrepreneurs is the fuel of any ecosystem that aspires to generate success stories. As Jiaqi Pan emphasizes, “the greatest learning of all these years is to have surrounded myself with a large group of human talent, without whom nothing would have been possible.”
