AI-generated summary
The Bankinter Innovation Foundation’s Akademia program stands out for its rigorous selection process, practical and innovative curriculum, and excellent instructors, fostering students passionate about innovation. Arkaitz Bastida, an alumnus and CEO of Sabbatic, exemplifies how Akademia shapes entrepreneurial thinking. His journey—from university through a Michelin-starred restaurant internship to founding a Fintech approved by the Treasury—highlights the program’s emphasis on creativity, autonomy, and rapid learning under pressure. Akademia’s approach challenges traditional academics by encouraging students to act swiftly and embrace imperfection, skills crucial for entrepreneurship.
Arkaitz’s experience redesigning a restaurant’s wine cellar management without prior knowledge taught him to innovate through observation and trial, a mindset he later applied in creating Sabbatic. Founded in 2013, Sabbatic automates invoice and receipt digitization using AI, complying with tax regulations despite technological and regulatory challenges. The company’s success lies not only in technology but also in overcoming market visibility and sales hurdles, adapting to digitization laws as opportunities rather than obstacles. Arkaitz advises aspiring innovators to share ideas, embrace change, and iterate continuously. Sabbatic’s agile, customer-focused culture fosters ongoing improvement and looks ahead to empowering finance teams with no-code solutions, embodying Akademia’s spirit of curiosity, commitment, and action-driven innovation.
Arkaitz Bastida, co-founder and CEO of Sabbatic, tells us how his time at Akademia marked his way of innovating, undertaking and leading. A story of speed, uncertainty... and invoices
At the Bankinter Innovation Foundation, we are very proud of the alumni who have been trained in our Akademia programme.
The uniqueness of the program lies in its design and execution: it ranges from a demanding student selection process to a practical and avant-garde approach to the content of the classes, complemented by the excellence of the teachers. This combination results in students who are enthusiastic about innovation, ready to bring new ideas and creative solutions in their respective fields.
We resume the series of interviews with former students of Akademia, with Arkaitz Bastida as the protagonist. His career is an inspiration for those who believe that innovation can also be applied to something as everyday as an invoice.
The Akademia program: where it all begins
Arkaitz Bastida, co-founder and CEO of Sabbatic, tells us – in this interview with Claudia María Diz, head of the Akademia programme – how his time at Akademia changed his way of understanding innovation, entrepreneurship and learning. A journey that begins at university, continues in a Michelin restaurant and culminates in a Fintech approved by the Treasury.
Arkaitz was part of the 3G generation of the iNNoVaNDiS program at the University of Deusto, from where he participated in the Akademia program. What he found there was something very different from the traditional academic environment: “It was like a break with the standard dynamics. A breath of fresh air… but with discipline,” he recalls.
Unlike conventional classes, Akademia did not focus so much on theory as on developing one’s own criteria, exercising creativity and acting autonomously. According to Arkaitz, this made a big difference: “We were a very restless group. There was energy. We all wanted to contribute.” And while the program was voluntary, it involved a high level of commitment: “If you missed a session, you felt like you were missing out on something important. Everything was very fast, very intense.”
One of the lessons that marked him the most was speed: doing a lot in a short time, without seeking perfection, but reaching that turning point where each extra hour ceases to provide substantial differential value. A key skill for entrepreneurship, which she has applied since then.
Unscripted Practices: Innovating from Uncertainty
One of the experiences that marked her the most was during the internship associated with the program. He was assigned a challenge that, a priori, seemed disconnected from his studies: to redesign the management of the cellar of a restaurant with two Michelin stars. With no experience in restoration or oenological knowledge, he was faced with a blank sheet of paper. “My project said: ‘propose a new way of managing the winery’. Period. No indications. No guidelines.”
Faced with bewilderment, the only option was to move: ask, observe, make mistakes and try again. “At first I was very lost. But that search process taught me something key: even if you don’t know where to start, you can build something valuable if you listen, if you get involved, if you take the plunge.”
That experience, closer to a real challenge than to an academic simulation, was a school of autonomy, rapid learning and action under pressure. “Real life is that. No one gives you the project chewed up. You have to build it from scratch,” he reflects.
Sabbatic: approved innovation
This practical approach, which mixes exploration, agility and commitment, would be applied years later when he founded Sabbatic, a platform for the automatic digitization of invoices and tickets. Today, Sabbatic is approved by the Tax Agency and the Provincial Treasuries, and allows companies to eliminate paper receipts in their accounting processes with total legal security.
But getting there was not easy. “We are talking about 2012 or 2013. There was no AI like there is now. And it wasn’t even clear that reliable information could be extracted from a photo taken with the mobile phone,” says Arkaitz. At that time, Blackberry devices were still on the market and Nokia was a strong competitor. Talking about scanning tickets with your mobile phone sounded like science fiction.
The biggest challenge was to adapt an emerging technology to a regulation designed for another era. “The regulation that allows the elimination of paper receipts is from 2007. It doesn’t talk about apps. Talk about benchtop scanners.” So the Sabbatic team had to reinterpret the rules, map the processes step by step, and demonstrate that their solution met all legal requirements. “It was an engineering job… and normative translation,” he sums up.
Since its founding in 2013, Sabbatic has evolved into a SaaS provider that is part of the Fintech ecosystem. Its technology, based on applied artificial intelligence, is characterized by speed and reliability in data extraction. It allows you to automate accounting processes and completely eliminate paper, complying with all tax regulations and required security standards.
The platform offers a very intuitive user experience and allows advanced configuration, adapting to each type of process and company. Thanks to this flexibility, it can be easily integrated with any ERP on the market and synchronize all digitized data with its own reporting system, making Sabbatic a complete, scalable and frictionless solution for expense and invoice management.
Today, thousands of users in startups, SMBs, and large corporations rely on Sabbatic to simplify and digitize financial processes that were previously slow, costly, and error-prone.
The triple challenge: technology, regulations and sales
But beyond the technical and legal aspects, Arkaitz highlights a third and much more human challenge: selling.
“Excel holds everything. But then you go out to the market and no one stands in your window. Or worse, they stop at the one next door, which offers a worse product, but more visible.” Learning how to sell, connect with customers and generate traction has been, according to him, the most complex and, at the same time, most decisive challenge for Sabbatic.
From Threat to Opportunity: Taking Advantage of Regulatory Changes
In a world where companies are obliged to digitize by law, Arkaitz invites us to change the approach. “You can lock yourself away to cry or take advantage of that moment to rethink processes, break what already worked and build something better.”
He experienced it himself when digitization regulations became the perfect excuse to redesign the entire process of document capture and management in companies. “Regulations sometimes force us to innovate where we didn’t dare before.”
Lessons from the entrepreneurial path
One of the mistakes Arkaitz acknowledges was trying to do everything “in-house”. From accounting to legal procedures. “To save a few euros, we lost valuable time. Today I would outsource everything except the core of the business, including technological development.”
He also learned that it is not enough to have the best product. While they were perfecting the technology, their competitors were already selling half-baked solutions. “We had to learn that the perfect product does not exist. We have to go out earlier, communicate more and test as soon as possible”.
Tips for Future Innovators
To those who are now at Akademia with entrepreneurial ideas, Arkaitz gives a clear piece of advice: share the idea. “The fear of being stolen is unfounded. The difficult thing is not to have an idea, but to assemble it, execute it, scale it. And for that you need feedback.”
He also recommends embracing change and letting go of clinging to the initial idea. “You don’t have to fall in love with the first version. Customers are going to change everything. You have to be prepared to iterate constantly.”
Team culture and continuous improvement
At Sabbatic they have been working with agile methodologies from day one. Every two weeks they release new versions of the product, with improvements based on suggestions from customers and the team itself, from development to marketing.
“We meet biweekly, all the teams, and we share what we have done. This is how new ideas, synergies and improvements emerge. And many times, a great idea from a product is dismantled in five minutes when the support team explains that the customer will not understand it. That’s real innovation: crossing perspectives.”
Looking to the future: no-code management
For Arkaitz, the future lies in empowering management teams without relying on IT. “Today, many finance departments still can’t change anything without asking IT for help. That will change.”
The challenge will be to go from having a lot of data to knowing how to ask good questions. “Technology already allows everything. The challenge is to know what to order. It’s like having carte blanche to the Three Kings: now there are no excuses.”
Epilogue: from Akademia to Sabbatic
Arkaitz Bastida is a clear example of how the Akademia spirit – curiosity, commitment, agility and critical thinking – can be transformed into a business project with real impact.
Today he leads a Fintech that helps companies throughout Spain to digitize their accounting, comply with the Treasury and gain efficiency. And he does so with the same mentality he cultivated at Akademia: there is no innovation without discomfort. And there is no progress without action.
Thank you very much, Arkaitz! And many successes!
If you want to know the testimonies of other Akademia alumni, you can see them here.
And if you want to know more about the Akademia program, we invite you to visit the Foundation’s website.
