BStartup, Banco Sabadell’s programme to support entrepreneurs has, once again, acted as a gold partner of the 4YFN event, a benchmark event in the ecosystem which seeks to connect the international community of startups, investors, talented persons with corporations.

From 25-27 February, 4YFN has showcased the latest innovations by new technology companies located throughout the world, with this being it’s most successful edition to date. This event, which forms part of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) has just closed its sixth edition, beating all expectations and consolidating its international weight: more than 23,000 attendees, 760 exhibitors and startups, investors and corporates from more than 136 countries.

BStartup has participated with its own schedule of events which included opinion leaders in the sector such as Martin Casado, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Ravi Kurani, partner at Earlybird Venture Capital and the public capital company Enisa. Furthermore, the BStartup stand has hosted 14 investee startups through the BStartup and #SabadellVentureCapital programmes, who were able to present their business models to entrepreneurs and investors in daily Pitch and Coffee.

Banco Sabadell Stage: a meeting point for talent

For another year, Banco Sabadell Stage, with enough space to host 500 people, has hosted speeches by benchmark international speakers such as Mitchell Baker, Chair of  Mozilla; Omar Khan CPO of magicleap and Martin Casado, the guest invited by BStartup, who is General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, amongst others. Martin Casado, co-founder and CTO of Nicira, acquired by VMware for 1.26 billion dollars showed the power of convening through his brilliant keynote speech “Growth, Sales, and a New Era of B2B” presented by  Yolanda Pérez, Director of BStartup.

#4YFN19 | @martin_casado (@a16z) on the @BancoSabadell Stage about the modern enterprise #startup:

✔︎ Startup focused on simple use case
✔︎ Gets bottom-up adoption
✔︎ Becomes a well-known brand
✔︎ Overlays sales
✔︎ Products grow in complexity and value pic.twitter.com/UnaFrzV7Pq

— BStartup (@BStartup) 26 de febrero de 2019

Another of the greatest moments on this now emblematic stage was the Biohacking On Stage demonstration, in which Banco Sabadell, through its new digital business hub and corporate venture arm, Innocells demonstrated a new Biohacking system to carry out payments with a simple wave of the user’s hand.

During the live session a NFC chip was inserted into the participant’s hand. With regards to the uses that this application could have (such as interacting with a smart house, or payments) at the end of the session the Bank carried out a live payment, showing that in the future, payments may be carried out through any means and become integrated into different processes, and even becoming invisible. InnoCells developed an application which read the NFC of the chip and processed the payment through a virtual POS, in collaboration with the Payment Methods Division.

Also as part of the official schedule of events, InnoCells held a workshop on the TermSheet, led by Paula Blázquez, Strategic Investments Manager of InnoCells, and Sabadell Venture carried out a workshop on alternative financing moderated by Sergio Pérez with the participation of Ignacio Puig.

Furthermore, during the 3 days over which 4YFN was held, several small format activities were carried out at the Banco Sabadell stand by José Manuel Carol, Director of BStartup10. As part of these activities, Roger Olivet, Manager of Blockchain Solutions, explained how the bank adopts new technologies to interact with its customers.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain and Tech4good were the protagonists of this edition of #4YFN19 with sessions that stood out, and which were carried out across the seven stages of the event. Back on the Banco Sabadell Stage, Pier Paolo Rossi, Director of Business Intelligence of Banco Sabadell, moderated the sessions Nowadays many companies are Data Driven…really?with the participation of Mikael Journo, VP Marketing Strategy at King, Eric Baldellou Gönnemann, Head of Data Governance at Privalia and Elisenda Bou, CTO of Vilynx, where the role of data-driven companies was debated in three different stages. These companies base their strategic decisions on data analysis and interpretation.

#4YFN19 | “Nowadays many companies are Data Driven…really?” Join this panel of leading experts moderated by Pier Paolo Rossi (@BancoSabadell) Sabadell with @elisenda_bou (@Vilynx); Eric Baldellou (@Privalia_es) and Mikael Journo (@King_Games) NOW at @BancoSabadell Stage. pic.twitter.com/fXbzqfjmV0

— BStartup (@BStartup) 27 de febrero de 2019

To close this fantastic get-together of startups, in which more than two thirds of emerging companies were international, Boxmotion, an investee of BStartup and winner of the 2018 4YFN Award awarded this year’s prize to the Israeli company Nanolock Security, for their innovative project which offers an administration and security solutions to minimise the impacts of technology attacks which range from a virus such as “ransomware” to the manipulation of codes stored and configuration information.

4YFN18 Award Winners, @boxmotions, take the center of the big @BancoSabadell stage to hand over the #4YFN19 Award. ¡Congratulations @NanoLockSec, see you next year! pic.twitter.com/qIE6MvSt7F

— BStartup (@BStartup) 27 de febrero de 2019

Upon the end of this sixth edition, the 4 Years From Now lounge has consolidated its international role as a global benchmark platform for technology startups. We’ll see you next year!

The final day of Day 3 was absolutely epic. We can’t say it enough – thank you so much to everyone who was involved! ??? ??? pic.twitter.com/PTjlyIlByh

— 4YFN (@4YFN_MWC) 28 de febrero de 2019