Great to see another good turn-out at our latest Venture Network Verticals event, this time focused on the Cloud Computing & Cyber Security sector. This is a very topical space at the moment, with concerns around privacy and security high on the minds of consumers and businesses alike. Spain is home to a number of very exciting businesses in this area, testament to the strong engineering talent found here. Once again we saw over 100 people make their way down to the basement here at IE’s Area 31 for a Heineken, a little chit chat and to see three exciting young start-ups pitch to our expert panel.

First off we heard from Jorge and Christophe from Smoobility pitching their way to help people manage documents across multiple devices. This was their second pitch that day (busy guys!), great to see one of the Area 31 teams up there. They were followed by Guillermo from Torus Software Solutions who have a new protocol to accelerate applications by bypassing TCP/IP. This is a big market they are tackling and with a patent and a solid team behind them they seem set for good things. They walked away with our prize this month, which includes two tickets to the Sherpa Summit in Bilbao on 06 May and the opportunity to pitch at one of IE’s international Venture Network or Venture Day events (London Venture day is on 5 June, might be a good one guys?). Rounding out the event Oscar from Prot-on pitched their encryption software which lets users control access rights to documents stored in the cloud.

 

Big, big thanks to these guys for coming down and presenting their ideas. And a very special thank you to our amazing panel. Asking the tough questions this week we had Moisés Israel, the Chairman and Founder of Gigas, one of Spain’s largest cloud hosting businesses; Yalda Pourian from Microsoft Bizspark; Rocio Pillado from Adara Capital Partners; Carlos Rodriguez-Maribona, Senior Associate at Axon Partners Group and our very own Liz Fleming.

                     

None of this would be possible without the support of IE Business School and the Sherpa Summit who generously supported our prizes this month and our long time sponsor Heineken for ensuring we don’t go thirsty.

 

Next month – Food Technology

Next month we’re focusing on Food Technology. This is a hot space at the moment following Just Eats billion Pound IPO earlier in the month. We’ll send out some more detail on this soon but if you have a start-up in this space or know someone who has applications are open –  www.ieventurenetwork.co/apply-pitch. Hopefully someone will bring in something for us to taste!

In the meantime our weekly events are on as normal, 7pm each Thursday at Area 31. We hope to see you there.

Sadface

This is the last event for Cian, Peter and myself. Alas, we’re at the end of our programme at IE and unfortunately that means we have to return to the real world [insert sadface]. I think we’ll all be lurking around Venture Network for a few months to come but we leave you in extremely safe hands with the team of Hadar Barak, Chris Holman and Yoav Shachar. Make sure you say hi to these guys.