Our story
From a university garage to a startup ecosystem. 16 years building technology companies out of Barcelona.
Our mission
To give knowledge, a place to work and capital — and lunch while we are at it — to the people who believe the next generation of world-leading technology companies can be built from Barcelona.
- Investing in startups
- Workspace
- A founder community
The numbers
- Companies built
- 12Companies built
- Exits of our own
- 4Exits of our own
- Portfolio startups
- 25Portfolio startups
- Years in
- 16Years in
The team
The people who keep the ecosystem running.
Bernat Farrero
CEO
Founded itnig in 2010. Has driven the creation of a dozen companies, among them Camaloon, Quipu and Factorial.
Jordi Romero
Partner
Investing partner and co-host of the podcast. Fifteen years building and scaling technology companies.
Txell Viladomat
CEO of itnig Spaces
Runs the coworking spaces and the experience of the community that fills them.
Carla Rodríguez
Space Manager
Runs the spaces day to day and looks after the people working in them.
Marta Vidal
Head of Food
Runs the café and the restaurant. More than thirty years in hospitality.
Masumi Mutsuda
CTO
Responsible for itnig's technology and, back in 2010, for its first podcast.
David Buendia
Media Manager
Produces the podcast and runs itnig's communications and digital presence.
Marcel Queralt
Investment Partner
Leads investing at itnig Capital: sources the deals and works with the portfolio.
Irene Antón
Fund Manager
Runs the fund: administration, reporting to investors and the relationship with the regulator.
Jose Luis Nuñez
CFO
Runs group finance and the financial strategy of the ecosystem.
Sergio Gomez
Media Ninja
Editing, distribution and growth for everything itnig publishes.
How we got here
16 years in the startup ecosystem.
Starting in a garage
Bernat Farrero founds itnig as a development consultancy at the computer science faculty of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. The work starts, literally, in a family garage in Barcelona — and almost from day one so does itnig's first podcast about technology and current affairs, with Masumi Mutsuda and Jordi Romero.
Camaloon is born
itnig agrees with a client to turn a consulting project into its first product of its own. That is Camaloon, a site for designing custom products online. It sells more than €200,000 of magnets and badges in its first months; eight years later it is past €15M, with a huge catalogue and an international team of more than 200 people.
The hacker accelerator
After Camaloon, itnig moves to a startup acceleration model, first called The Hacker Accelerator. It starts with Playfulbet, which reaches 1,000 users in 22 days. itnig soon stops selling consulting to build its own products instead: twelve companies over the following years.
A knowledge hub
From the start, part of every week goes into sharing what we know with the local community: framework arguments, training on every web technology going, founding Barcelona's Lean Startup Circle, and hackathons with far too many people in the room.
Factorial is born
Factorial, an HR software company, is founded by Bernat Farrero, Jordi Romero and Pau Ramon. It is the meta-company that comes out of running several businesses and hundreds of people inside itnig, and the last one itnig founds as a venture builder. Years later it would be a unicorn.
itnig Coffice
The “itnig Coffice” coworking space opens at Carrer Pujades 100: 900 m² of shared offices, event rooms and a café. It is the start of a stretch that would reach more than 10,000 m² across Poblenou.
Investing as business angels
itnig starts writing pre-seed and seed cheques: Syra Coffee, Hireflix, Payflow, Stockagile, Hamelyn and Latitude, among others.
The unicorn
Factorial closes an $80M Series B led by Tiger Global and becomes the first unicorn to come out of the itnig ecosystem.
The podcast passes 50,000 listeners
The itnig podcast becomes one of the most listened to Spanish-language shows in the startup niche, past 50,000 listeners, with episodes in the hundreds of thousands — Mercadona's Juan Roig among them.
The fourth exit
Quipu is sold to the private equity firm PSG and merges with France's Sellsy. It is the last exit of the venture builder years, after Playfulbet, Gymforless and Parkimeter.
itnig Capital
itnig Capital launches: an early-stage venture capital fund approved by the Spanish regulator, €13M in size.
A whole ecosystem
Fifteen years on from the garage, itnig is a complete ecosystem: capital, media, space and events.
Want to be part of the story?
Join the ecosystem and build from the inside.