Roca Group Ventures has participated in the annual event that Angels Capital, the investment vehicle of Juan Roig for start-ups, organizes. In this occasion the event has got together 250 investors coming from all around Spain and Europe. The participants have had the opportunity to receive firsthand pitches from 13 top innovative start-ups and the opportunity to hold interviews with other startups of the ecosystem.

The entrepreneurs have had the opportunity to explain the advantages of their products, demonstrate solid traction and explain their expansion plans and how are they going to scale their businesses in the following years. Additionally, the entrepreneurs looking to raise funds had the opportunity to pitch tier-1 investors their businesses and capture their attention.

Marc Gasol, former NBA player and General Manager and Founder of Spanish premiere league Basketball team Basket Girona opened the session explaining his own personal and professional experience in his successful business project. RGV had the opportunity to meet several startups with potential to deliver value to Roca Group and involve business areas in the analysis of the opportunities.

After having defined in many work sessions with more that 11 Roca Group business units of different functional areas more than 75 challenges, those were prioritized and consolidated by Roca C-Level executives to 9 ambitious challenges that were announced and communicated through social media. The one year collaboration between Roca Group ventures and Lanzadera is now starting to deliver the first POC proposals and imminent projects launch, that will deliver win – win outcome between Roca Group and the start-ups engaged and selected in such amazing journey.

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From 15-18^th June was held in Paris Viva Technology, an international trade fair dedicated to technological innovation and startups.

A delegation of 7 Catalan companies visited the fair to discover the innovation ecosystem of the Paris region and to foster links between Catalan and French actors and Roca Group was one of them.

During our visit, we exchanged with the Open-innovation Managers of TotalEnergies, EDF, Orange, L’Oréal, RATP Dev, Dassault Systèmes and Software République. We also visited STATION F, the world’s largest start-up campus, and RaiseLab, a hybrid space designed to foster innovation and collaboration between start-ups and large corporations.

The mission was organised by ACCIÓ and the Paris office of Catalonia Trade & Investment.

From June 8th to 10th our team was at South Summit to discover start-ups that may work with Roca and bring innovative ideas that enrich our services and/or processes.

Specifically, our colleagues Daniel Valverde and Enrique Dupuy de Lome were on the jury on June 8th in the start-up pitch sessions that will take place in the Next Big Thing stage in the Energy Transition & Sustainability and Industry 4.0 tracks respectively.

On Thursday June 9^th, Frank Gómez, from the Digital Transformation team took the floor as speaker in the panel “Cognitive Cities: Beyond Smart” in the Playground Stage. The panel where Frank contributed talked about the power of data and its impact on cities, mobility, and homes and how the citizen is affected and what is the value it brings.  Mercè Tell was on the same day part of the jury of the Final Challenges – City XXI within the 15th edition of the EmprendeXXI Awards of Caixa DayOne.

You may check Franks’ contribution to the panel in this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEzerl0KYVs&list=PLUb1bJ-vHsxC3IWFN4kXvSdPMhPCW5wt0&index=8&t=19s

Representatives from our business units met at Lanzadera’s Valencia facilities for a working session to review the challenges for this year and, most difficult of all, to prioritize them.

Among our internal champions, and in a demonstration of our group’s commitment to innovation and entrepreneurship, we had the presence of managers from the areas of Innovation, Furniture Competence Center, Digital Transformation, Talent, Corporate Operations and New Business, Commercial and Sales and our Ventures team.

The mission of the day was that everyone could know Lanzadera and its innovative initiative and way of working with start-ups and offer them pitch sessions with start-ups that may have an angle of collaboration with Roca.

The excitement and desire to work with start-ups was remarkable throughout the day and after a difficult vote the main challenges to be worked with Lanzadera this year were agreed. We hope very soon to be able to give you news of the implementation of collaboration agreements or the launching of pilots with companies in the Lanzadera environment since we are sure of the value of many of them.

Stay tuned!