Sevilla never really sleeps. On March 19 and 20, the city’s TechPark was alive with 15,000 founders, investors, engineers, and ministers. One thing was clear: Spain is no longer sitting on the sidelines while Europe’s tech story unfolds in London, Berlin, and Stockholm.
CTX Tech Experience, the country’s most ambitious tech event so far, which Tech Funding News attended, made a big impact from the start. The Junta de Andalucía opened the show, pointing to a 20% jump in regional tech companies and a 28% surge in sector revenue.
According to organisers, the event generated over €10M in direct economic impact, with a projected €80M in potential investment. A notable result for a first edition.
But beyond the numbers, a more important question emerged: If Spain is so well-positioned for AI, why is its venture ecosystem still underweight?
Spain: perfectly positioned but not quite ready?
Steve Cadigan, former VP of Talent at LinkedIn and adviser to Google, Salesforce, Twitter, and BBVA, has spent years watching how countries adapt to AI’s demands.
His message at CTX was clear. “Artificial intelligence can give you an advantage or not. Are you ready for that advantage? AI means experimenting. There’s no predictability, no plan, no playbook. You just have to try,” Cadigan shared with TFN.
In places where hierarchy and process dominate, open-ended experimentation is hard to accept. This theme surfaced repeatedly in conversations throughout the event. On the basics, Cadigan is fully behind Spain: clean energy at scale, affordable land, a young and skilled workforce, strong data privacy laws, and a government willing to experiment.
He also highlights something often missed in policy: geography. Subsea cables carrying transatlantic data land on the Iberian Peninsula before heading north to the UK and Europe.
Cadigan says, “The big race right now for AI is the data centres. A significant share of transatlantic data enters Europe via the Iberian Peninsula. I think Spain is in a great position to make that happen.”
He’s more cautious about the mindset gap between being structurally ready and having a culture that embraces risk. “Culturally, I think there’s still a bit more fear of taking risks here than in America. But curiosity is stronger, and there’s also a sense that we need an edge. We’re not winning the game. We need to win it.”
This tension came up in many conversations that followed.
Spain’s AI advantage: infrastructure is not the problem
You could feel that tension at CTX. Take Shakers, a Madrid-based platform that connects companies with tech and AI freelancers. They grew from 45 to 110 employees in just ten months, expanded into Italy, Portugal, and the UK, and expect more than half their 2026 revenue to come from AI-skilled professionals.
“We’ve had to change solutions three times in seven months because the AI infrastructure market is moving fast,” co-founder Jaime Castillo Parages told TFN.
The company also uses a fully AI-driven interview agent that talks with candidates, creates structured assessments, and sends reports directly to hiring companies. It improves with past data but can vary in new areas.
Parages believes that, over time, enterprise work will shift from fixed roles to skills, with people and software agents working flexibly on projects. “Companies will move from hiring for roles to hiring for skills. Organisations will change from individuals holding roles to pools of people with specific skills working across projects, alongside agents,” Parages added.
That same early-bet, Europe-first mindset drives Irene Hernández, founder and CEO of Gataca, a company pioneering the global infrastructure for ID Wallet-based digital identity. After experiencing the Equifax breach (300 million records exposed), she realised the problem was architectural. Her solution was to build ID wallets: credentials stored locally, shared only when needed, never centralised.
Focusing on Europe first was once a bold move, but now it seems smart. New EU rules require member states to issue digital ID wallets, and regulated industries must accept them. “If this architecture is going to happen, Europe will be the early adopter, mainly because of GDPR.”
She moved her operations to Spain to tap into the talent pool, but admits there’s still a long way to go. In Europe, female-only teams account for 6% of the venture capital market, according to Atomico’s State of Europe Tech Report, and most capital flows to sectors where Spain already has an advantage.
The capital gap: no one is pretending it isn’t real
One conversation at CTX shifted the mood from ambition to frustration. Cristóbal Alonso, Managing Director at Wolver Ventures, who focuses on Iberia and Italy, paused when asked about recent times and said, “It’s been crap.”
On paper, 2025 investment numbers look steady, with startup investment in Spain reaching €3.108 billion. But the reality is tougher: while domestic private fundraising hit a record €4.07 billion in 2024, new funds have struggled as processes lengthen, and investors focus on managing existing portfolios.
There remains a significant pile of undeployed capital from the 2021–2022 peak, and larger exits, particularly those over €100 million, remain a ‘pending subject’ compared to other European hubs.
“While tech is growing, traditional local investment still heavily favours sectors like real estate. Furthermore, of the €4 billion Fond-ICO Next Tech public program, deployment has been gradual, prompting the launch of a new ‘open and continuous’ system in February 2026 to accelerate the flow of capital into the market. A country of 50 million should have a 12-15 billion market. We have 4,” Alonso said.
His advice is clear: focus on performance before policy. More exits. Bigger ambition. Better returns. “We need to deliver better results. We need to be much more ambitious. We just need to create more success in the next three to five years.”
Parages had a founder’s answer: build in Spain, but raise funds as a European. Shakers set up its Series A as a pan-European story from day one: supply from Europe, demand from Europe, capital from top European funds. And it worked.
“In Spain, the VC and investment world is maturing faster than ever. The good entrepreneurs are raising money,” Parages adds.
What does CTX Sevilla mean for Spain’s wider tech scene?
Walking out of Sevilla TechPark on the second night, it didn’t feel like a perfect ecosystem or a broken one. It felt like a country at a real turning point, finally starting to act like it.
The infrastructure is real. The founders are serious. The regulatory support in identity and data privacy is quietly becoming Spain’s secret weapon.
But the gaps are just as clear: a VC market that’s still only a third of what Spain’s size demands, a culture still learning to embrace uncertainty, and a gender funding gap that leaves some of the best infrastructure bets underfunded.
Cadigan concludes, “The biggest advantage is your human ability to connect and inspire. That’s how you make yourself more valuable than AI by becoming a deeply human being.”
Spain has the hardware, as evidenced by a renewable energy sector that now accounts for 55.5% of national electricity generation, providing a massive cost advantage: Spanish wholesale power prices are €92.7/MWh, lower than Germany’s €110.88/MWh and France’s €133.35/MWh. Furthermore, Spain’s digital infrastructure is among the most advanced in the world, boasting approximately 194 operational data centres.
CTX Sevilla was, in the end, a very public debate about whether the software can catch up.
