startups

The mayor of Lisbon has turned it into a magnet for European startups

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Carlos Moedas does not feel like a conventional politician. The current mayor of Lisbon and former European Commissioner for Innovation recently insisted in which his training as an engineer marked his management. The idea: less rhetoric and more structural solutions. And it certainly seems to carry out this proposal, because it is leading a transformation that seeks to position the Portuguese capital not only as a tourist destination, but as one of the most relevant technological nodes in Europe. unicorn factory. The nerve center of this transformation is the call Unicorn Factorya hub of innovation that was launched in 2022 and that has become the flagship project of its mandate. Since its creation, this initiative has multiplied its size by five, and today it already houses thematic divisions specialized in cutting-edge sectors such as AI, blockchainhealth or green technologies dedicated to the agricultural field. The success is tangible: 17 “unicorn” companies (valued at more than $1 billion) have moved their operations to the Portuguese capital. Attracting startups. Moedas explained in comments to Financial Times how the real challenge of Lisbon is not to see companies born, but to help them grow. The project attracted 300 companies in 2025, a figure that represents notable growth from 250 the previous year. Among them there are companies with founders from the US, Brazil, or Denmark. Favorable conditions. To attract these startups Moedas has used several levers. The first is to sell Lisbon for what it is: a safe capital with a great quality of life. The second is to highlight that the tax regime for qualified immigrants is advantageous, and there are also tax credits for R&D, which of course is a strong argument for companies that consume a lot of resources in those initial phases and can thus receive aid in this process. But. The road, Moedas openly acknowledges, is not without potholes. Portuguese bureaucracy remains complex – the same thing happens in Spain – and that can deter entrepreneurs. The mayor of Lisbon states in the interview that a good part of his time is spent talking on the phone with foreign founders and helping them overcome these bureaucratic barriers. “Politicians do not create jobs, the markets create them,” he repeats: their job is to facilitate, not hinder, or at least that is the message. Competence. Although the activity is notable, there are founders of companies who know that the market is raffling them off. María Ribeiro Soares, from Immersiv Studios, warned of the difficulty retaining talent compared to markets with higher wages such as the United Kingdom or Germany. The other venture capital. There is another peculiarity in this entrepreneurship market. Lisbon startup founders have realized that while traditional venture capital is cautious, the so-called family offices are very willing to bet on these projects. These investors, often experienced, high-net-worth former founders, provide funding but also advice. Lisbon is not alone. The rise of Lisbon as a technological node is also accompanied by other Portuguese innovation centers such as Braga and Porto, where, for example, the biotechnology sector flourishes. There is also a direct connection with universities oriented to this market, and in that northern region of Portugal alone there are already some 1,200 startups with a combined valuation of close to 9 billion euros, according to the FT. The other great challenge. Portugal’s efforts to attract external talent have led to the arrival of numerous digital nomads, but this has had a counterproductive effect: it is causing an exodus among young Portuguese. They cannot access a housing market adapted to the pockets of those nomads, who charge triple. Rental prices have skyrocketed, and that has created tension that the mayor must manage. Image | EU2017EE Estonian Presidency | Aayush Gupta In Xataka | Portugal’s radical proposal to stop touristification: an underwater cable that connects with the US

Chinese startups have been relying on NVIDIA chips to train their models for years. That is already changing

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The name of the Chinese startup Zhipu AI (Z.ai) may not sound familiar to you, but perhaps GLM, its AI model, does a little more than its latest version, GLM-4.7already competes with Claude Sonnet 4.5 or GPT-5.1. The real surprise of this “Chinese AI tiger” is the launch of GLM-Image…and not so much for what he does, but for how he has managed to do it. what has happened. GLM-Image is a multimodal generative AI model that focuses on image generation. The idea, of course, is to compete with options like Nano Bananafrom Google. That’s interesting, but even more striking is the fact that the model has not been trained with conventional chips. Trained with Chinese chips. According to those responsible for Z.ai, this model is the first developed in China that has been fully trained with “local” chips. Specifically, it has been trained with Huawei’s Ascend chips thanks to the use of servers Huawei Ascend Atlas 800T A2 and a framework called MindSpore. Thus, traditional NVIDIA AI chips, which are usually the usual choice for AI model developers in Chinese startups, have not been used. Turning point? This milestone demonstrates the real feasibility of training high-performance generative AI models on a platform developed entirely in China. We are not dealing with something minor: it is validation that it is possible to continue innovating in this area despite the restrictions imposed by the US. In fact, Zhipu AI — included last year on the US blacklist — has intensified its collaboration with other local manufacturers, such as the promising firm Cambricon that has risen from the ashes thanks to tariffs. Threat to NVIDIA. The news comes at a unique time, because NVIDIA has not stopped pressuring the US government to once again allow it to sell its advanced AI chips to Chinese companies. He has obtained that permission—which It won’t be free—, but now the one that might not be interested is China, which he hasn’t said anything at all. That chips from companies like Huawei are a valid alternative for training quality AI models can change many things in this area. Zhipu goes like a shot. The Chinese startup has also just gone public, and since it has done so its shares they have shot up more than 80%. Investors see the company no longer as a rival to Google or OpenAI, but as a banner. One that shows that it is possible to compete without depending on the US and its companies. Huawei, great beneficiary. If the trend continues, Huawei can become the Chinese NVIDIA, and the company prepares an increase in production of its AI chips. It is not the only one: Cambricon plans triple your production by 2026, which seems to make it clear that the Chinese industrial machinery is moving quickly to neutralize the impact of US vetoes. Challenges…Despite everything, Zhipu already has warned that the price war in the AI ​​sector will become international. If Chinese companies end up controlling the entire chain (or rather, their chain), they could offer AI services at much lower costs than their Western competitors, who must pay NVIDIA’s margins and Big Tech’s cloud infrastructure. …and unknowns. This technological achievement raises other questions. One of the most important is how powerful and capable Huawei chips are compared to NVIDIA’s in these processes: is training much slower? Is it more expensive in time and resources? The efficiency of the MindSpore framework compared to Pytorch or TensorFlow is another of the key components of these developments. In Xataka | Faced with the US strategy, China has a plan to revive its technology industry: that AI belongs to everyone

Ten AI startups have skyrocketed their valuation by $1 trillion in 12 months

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Logic tells us that companies that they lose money consistently should have a black future. What is happening in the world of AI is just the opposite, and right now ten startups in very red numbers They have achieved something unusual in one year: in one year they have grown by one trillion dollars in their joint valuation. It is something simply extraordinary… and disturbing. The big three. OpenAI is of course the protagonist of this select group, and today it is estimated that its valuation amounts to half a billion dollars. Elon Musk’s company, xAI, is valued at 200 billion, while Anthropic is also close to that figure according to a Financial Times study. In one year the valuation of these AI startups has skyrocketed. Source: Financial Times. And his immediate followers. Databricks, which was founded in 2013, was quick to join that segment and now has an estimated valuation of $100 billion. Figure (robotics), SSI (Sutskever’s startup), Scale AI, Perplexity, Thinking Machine Lab (Mira Murati’s startup) or Cursor complete this group of new startups (almost all of them) and with skyrocketing valuations. Investment fever. This growth in its valuation is due, of course, to the fact that all of these firms have raised multimillion-dollar investment rounds by firms that trust in a future full of AI. In fact, venture capital and investment companies in the US have injected 161 billion dollars throughout this year, and they have done so without being able to see even a hint that their bet is going to be a winner. All these AI companies They burn money like there’s no tomorrowand its profitability—and future—is an absolute unknown. bubbles are good. “Of course there is an (AI) bubble.” The person who says it is Hermant Taneja, president of the venture capital firm General Catalyst. His firm has invested in Anthropic and Mistral, and has done so without batting an eye because according to him, “Bubbles are good. Bubbles align capital and talent into a new trend, which causes some carnage, but also creates new lasting businesses that change the world.” Maybe it is, but only for a few.. Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, also think there is a bubblebut it coincides with that positive vision because it is probably him who will benefit (if everything explodes). Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, already indicated a year ago that the bubble will end up bursting and that only 1% of companies will survive. Bezos adds to that perception: “this is the good type of industrial bubble that is totally contrary to financial bubbles. The banking bubble, the crisis of the banking system, that is simply bad, as happened in 2008. These bubbles are the ones that society must avoid.” It happened with dotcoms. The analogy with the dotcom bubble It’s inevitable. At that time something similar happened with the inflated valuations of internet companies, and when the bubble burst only a few survived, but those that did managed to become the mistresses of the world. ANDThis bubble is much bigger. At least, from the point of view of the figures invested. In the dotcom fever, venture capital companies invested 10.5 billion dollars, which if we adjust for inflation becomes about 20 billion dollars. In 2021, these same firms invested 135 billion in startups in the SaaS (Software as a Service) segment. This year, investment in AI companies will likely exceed $200 billion, according to PitchBook. One of the directors of these firms describes this with a strong word. “This is FOMO“. And the valuations are skyrocketing. Startups that have $5 million in annual recurring revenue are seeking investment rounds that value them at $500 million. That they pursue those valuations that are 100 times their income makes ridiculous the excesses that already occurred in 2021, for example. Although venture capital firms know that they will lose money on most of their bets, they also hope that one or two that they get right will more than make up for that entire bet. Not investing is losing forever. Mark Zuckerberg shares this vision of venture capital firms, and his company is making colossal investments to avoid missing out on AI. The founder and CEO of Meta recently explained that He doesn’t care about losing 200,000 million dollarsbecause it would be much worse to be left behind in this race. Marc Benioff, co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, agrees and believes that a trillion dollars of investment will end up wasted, but AI will end up producing 10 times that in value: “The only way we know to create great technology is to try as many things as possible, see which ones work, and then focus on the ones that succeed.” Time will tell if they were right and if this bubble, as investors defend, is “a good one.” In Xataka | OpenAI is making the tech industry unite its destiny with yours. For the sake of the global economy, it better work

His startups are born thinking of global

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Factorial announced a few days ago that It has already reached 100 million dollars of recurring annual incomebecoming one of the twenties Scaleups European that achieve this figure in the last decade. The human resources startup founded in Barcelona by Jordi Romero, Bernat Farrero and Pau Ramon already serves more than 14,000 companies in ten countries. Why is it important. This figure marks a change of mentality in the Spanish ecosystem. For many years, the country startups have focused on the domestic market of 48 million inhabitants (since this year already 49), Treating international expansion as an optional second step. Factorial is different: since 2019 he thought of global, not local. “We are equally ready, handsome, high and strong anywhere in the world,” Its founders have said. A phrase that summarizes the new attitude: Spain as a trampoline, not as a final destination. In perspective. Other recent cases reinforce this trend: Lingokids He has raised 120 million dollars to climb his global educational product. Ultralyticswith headquarters in Madrid and London, it processes 2,000 million daily inferences in 200 countries. Wallboxborn in Barcelona, ​​quotes in New York and sells electric loaders in more than 80 markets, although it has been collapsing for years. Jobandtalent It has expanded strongly in the United Kingdom and the United States After consolidating in Spain. Glovo demonstrated the ability of a Spanish startup to expand to dozens of countries in record time, although it is in the hands of Delivery Hero. There are also less brilliant examples, such as Faver, today turned into a global reference of entertainment, which failed in his first attempt to internationalization and had to forward his strategy before growing again. Cases that show that going out soon is an opportunity, but also a risk. The context. Talking about the “49 million” is to fall short: it is not only the size of the market, but its fragmentation. Climbing a B2B product in Spain is to face regulatory barriers, client dispersion and a purchasing power lower than that of the greats hubs Europeans There is the difference with markets such as Germany, France or the United Kingdom, where many startups can grow at home before going outside. In that sense, Spain is approaching the logic of small countries where unicorns proliferate, such as Lithuania (Vinted, Nordvpn) or Norway (Opera, Remarkable), forced to be born global. Between the lines. The change goes beyond the strategy. It is a mental revolution that leaves behind the “Spanish imposter syndrome”. In 2000 and 2010, success used to be selling a foreign buyer (such as Tuenti to Telefónica either Social Point A Take-Two). Today, the horizon is different: Maintain independence. Quote in the bag. Become buyers instead of acquired. Factorial has rejected purchase offers and plans to reach 1,000 million income without selling. The threat. This new ambition also uncovers the shortcomings of the ecosystem. They are needed … Funds capable of leading rounds of 50 or 100 million. An international talent that still does not flow with the same ease of Madrid or Barcelona as towards London or Berlin. And a investment culture more willing to assume long -term risk. The Spanish venture capital market has grown, but is still limited to the hubs Dominants from Europe. Deepen. Spain, however, has structural advantages to sustain this turn: Spanish connects with 500 million speakers and opens a natural bridge to Latin America. The geographical position places the country as a hinge between Europe and America. Talent costs remain competitive in front of large European centers (Aka “We are cheaper”). In a world where teleworking allows you to attract engineers and managers from anywhere, Spain can become an attractive pole not only to create, but to retain global companies. At stake. The turn to the global is a change of role for Spain in the digital economy. Spain can become an exporter of technology with a global influence capacity, or resign to remain an acquisition nursery for foreign multinationals. The difference will be made by the maturity of its venture capital, the ability to attract and retain international talent and the ambition of its founders. Factorial and its contemporaries have shown that it is possible, now it remains to be seen if they will be exception or precedent. In Xataka | The Spanish unicorn that does not stop growing: the unstoppable promotion of factorial within the technology industry Outstanding image | Factorial

Chinese startups are unseatting the owner and lady of Asian technology: Baidu

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In the stock market there is a metric that is observed almost with reverential respect. It is about Per (Price to Earnings Ratio), which It allows us to know If an action is expensive or cheap. And when we observe the technological market in China, there is a company with a worrying per: Baidu. Fall of a giant. This Thursday Baidu has published terrible financial results: Fall of quarterly income It is the worst of the last three years and that has caused a 3% drop in the value of the shares in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Source: Bloomberg. Per worrying. Not only that: Baidu is now around 9.7, which is the least of all the companies that are in benefits in the Hang Seng Tech index (Hstech) than It serves as a reference When comparing Chinese technology companies. The action, speaking in silver, is too cheap. The search engine loses bellows. For decades Baidu has been considered “the Chinese Google”, but over time its relevance has been blurred. The Chinese young They do not know what is to search in Baidu or Googleand have come to other ways to find answers. Fierce competitors. Platforms such as Tiktok or Instagram have become a spectacular alternative for new generations, and in China we have seen as similar social networks –Xiaohongshu and Douyin– They are getting that. Eric Shen, analyst at the consultant Third Bridge, explained How “these rivals have created content ecosystems that seem more dynamic and attractive, which moves users of the most static and Baidu website.” A disappointing 2025. But there is also AI. And there Baidu has a problem. Baidu’s action has lost a 3% value since the year began. The figure is surprising, especially since its competers focused on AI have a 24%win. Where is Baidu AI? Baidu reacted relatively fast and presented its competitor to Chatgpt in March 2023. It was called Ernie, but from the beginning The performance of that model gave problems. Since then his trajectory has been irregular, and the rise of Deepseek and of Other Chinese models like Qwen (Alibaba) or Doubao (Bytedance) has put it in more and more problems in that market of “IAS Socialist”. An AI that tries to overcome. In February Baidu wanted not to get off the revolution caused by Depseek, so he offered a free version of Ernie last April. Your last model, Ernie 4.5, It’s Open Source – initially they had adopted a proprietary model – but even that does not seem to have encouraged things for now, and there is not too much talk about their capacity: the popularity of other models such as Deepseek or Qwen is now greater. Baidu Lance Ernie 5.0 is expected at the end of August, and it will be then when we can check if this edition does compete in a specially frantic market. Back in view? Analysts believe that Baidu’s latest strategic decisions could help her recover the good path. Among them include investments In Robotaxis And, of course, in new initiatives to boost their AI models. Image | Baidu In Xataka | Deepseek has given the starting gun in the race for a cheaper AI. And China starts with advantage

Something is happening in Silicon Valley. More and more startups are going to the day ‘996’ of China

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“If you want to leave at 5 you are not at the right work.” Lucy Guo said it, Founder of the Startup Scale AI. And it is not the only one. More and more Silicon Valley startups, especially those dedicated to AI, which are betting on this “extreme commitment” model that reminds us of the endless 996 Conference that were so controversial in China. What is happening? New culture. The culture of ultra-productivity defended by figures like Elon Musk It has been installed in Silicon Valley. In statements a WiredAdrian Kinnersley, CEO of a hiring company, says that “it is becoming very common. We have several clients who have as a prerequisite when selecting candidates who are willing to work on days 996”. Hysteria. In California, labor legislation is very favorable for workers and Kinnersley is surprised that many companies are “breastfeeding it.” It is one of the consequences of the AI career. Not only is there a great competition between China and the United StatesSilicon Valley has become the battlefield where small startups fight for being number one in his. The price: squeeze your workers. What was given was over. Not long ago, working in Silicon Valley was a dream for many. Companies like Google were known for offering gyms, coffee shops and even masseuses. All kinds of comfort for that employees felt at home. That is over. With the return to the offices after the pandemic, The dream began to fade. The tortilla has turned around. Today it is common for any startup to ask its employees to make marathon days and even work on weekends. Extreme commitment. It is another way of saying that you will not go through home much. We recently talked about the young CEO of Greptile and his controversial statements. “We do not offer conciliation”he said in Your X profile. The CEO says it directly in the work interviews: they work from 9 in the morning until late at night and, often, also on Saturdays. It looks a lot like China 996: from nine to nine, six days a week. The excuse: be competitive. In an interview, this CEO said that “nobody cares about the third best company, not even the second best, in any software category. If you are going to strive 95%, it is the equivalent of striving to 0%.” There are arranged people. In Spain we have attended the opposite in the hospitality sector: The waiters rebelled against the 12 -hour days, to the point that there was no labor. In Silicon Valley it seems that there are enough people willing to work 996. In Rilla, another AI startup, they say that 80% of their employees are working 72 hours a week. Even They put it in their job offers And they are not having problems hiring. His CEO says that there is “a very strong and growing subculture, especially in my generation (the Gene z), who grew up listening to stories by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, entrepreneurs who dedicated their lives to create companies that changed the world. ” 996 in China. The 996 day became popular in China among Chinese technology last decade. This model was the growth engine of companies such as Alibaba or JD.com for years, but there came a point where The workers were fed up and The protests began demanding better working conditions. The Chinese government ended up prohibiting The endless days and went from 996 to 1065 (from 10 in the morning to 6 in the afternoon, five days a week). Temporary and only for those who want. There are startups that defend a slightly more moderate hyper-productive culture. The CEO of Sotiraa startup that applies AI solutions to the logistics sector, sees it as something temporary: “During the first two years of your startup, you have to work in the 996 style.” He also states that these days are for the leaders of the companies and does not believe that the entire employee base must be imposed. This vision creates a kind of structure on two levels, where only a part of the company meets these schedules. It is what the CEO of the “Telesalud” Fella & Delilah company proposed to its employees in a Publication in your LinkedIn. Employees who adhere to this schedule will receive a 25% increase in their salary. Image |Ron Lach, Pexels In Xataka | Work tired, stress and generates burnout. There is a way to reduce all that impact: the four -day week

Almost all startups are dedicating themselves to it

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If you are a startup in the US and look for financing, it is almost mandatory And combinator. This accelerator has become a unique barometer of the technology industry, and what the candidates present there is a clear indication of where technological innovation moves. And now it moves towards the AI agents… and above all, towards AI in any sense. AI agents everywhere. Of the 144 startups that were part of the 2025 spring batch in and Combinator (YC), 67 were recorded in the accelerator database Within the group of “AI agents”. That means that almost 50% of the candidates work in one way or another in this type of technology, and demonstrates that technological startups in the US see this specific segment of AI as the most promising in the short (and perhaps long) term. Source: pitchbook Climbing to the car. As they point out In pitchbookthe evolution of the candidates that were presented to each of the annual editions of and Combinator (one per station) has been clear, and there are more and more that focus on developing agents of particular AI and in the AI ​​in general to solve a problem. In the last 2024 winter edition of the 260 startups that were presented, more than half were or developing an AI solution or using it for their projects. Diversity Tech, dep Artificial intelligence sweeps everything, and that is also true for those who seek to create new successful companies. Previous trends such as mobile applications, social networks or cloud services pass to the background or are already only components of the central focus, which is AI. Technological diversity, betting on other ways of solving problems, seems to be reduced to the minimum expression: everything can be (should it?) Resolve with artificial intelligence. Now is AI, before it was something else. And Combinator, created in 2005, soon became an oracle of technological investors. If something left there, their options to succeed were older. The trends followed, and while in the first decade of the millennium the startups bet on mobile applications and social networks (Dropbox and Airbnb left there at that time), in the last decade the ones that triumphed were Startups of Fintech, Health and B2B (stripe, doordash). New bubble in view? The expectations generated by AI are even greater than those generated in the past with mobiles and before with the Internet. The bubble of the Puntocom caused a huge correction in the market, but at that time what is happening in this happened: all startups wanted to point to the Internet (and then to mobiles) because they understood that these technologies could solve many problems. The reality is that they ended up transforming our lives, but in many cases these projects failed because they were not solutions to real problems, but solutions to a problem that did not even exist. The question is with this technology something similar will happen. And of course it is inevitable to talk about a potential bubble of AI. Many illustrious names. In addition to those mentioned, Twitch (which was born as Justin.TV), Coinbase, Cruise, Instacart, Reddit, or Helion Energy They took their first steps in and Combinator. One of the last examples is especially notable: Scale AI left and combinator in 2016, and a few hours ago an investment of 13,000 million by Meta has been announced, which in addition has signed its founder, Alexandr Wang. The startup success rate is Very modestbut the “durability” of those that leave YC is much higher than the average: more than 50% of the companies that leave there They are still alive After 10 years, compared to 30% usual in other environments. But that is not necessarily bad. As Andy McLoughlin, of the Uncork Capital investment company, indicated every year the same thing usually happens and “people complain that YC is oversatured with an X technology, but everything now is AI: all the companies in which we invest, which we look for and that it is going through yc is using AI, and the question is if they are good or if they are JOD ****** THE PROBLEM OF THE VALACIONES TRIBUTED. The AI ​​fever has done these startups quickly lift spectacular rounds even without having visible product. YC is a good example of this, and has become an elite event for startups, because there they usually get more financing than in any other event. These emerging companies – pequeñas and unknown – have initial assessments of about 70 million dollars, a spectacular amount for projects that always have a complicated future. Some investors even refuse to “play that game.” Others think otherwise and know that although many can fail, others end up having a spectacular success and it is worth investing “more expensive.” Image | And combinator In Xataka | Soon it will not matter who has the most advanced AI model: the authentic battle will be fought by AI agents

We do not know if the AI ​​is going to eat your work, but the CEO of some startups are determined to convince you of it

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AI comes for your work. It is the message that does not stop arriving since Chatgpt reached the market. And even before. The impact of artificial intelligence on the world of employment It can be hugebut for the moment They have not been noticed Its effects too much. That, they say more and more frequently the CEOs of technological companies, it will change. First, Shopify. Less than a month ago the CEO of Shopify, Tobi Lütke, He sent a memorandum To its employees with a clear directive: “Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation for everyone in Shopify.” In fact, he indicated that before expanding a workforce or investing in other tools, project managers should have exhausted all the ways to do that task with AI already available tools. Then Fiverr. The last to adopt a decision and speech of this type is Micha Kaufman, CEO of Fiverr, who in a memo to his employees emphasized the importance of protecting their careers in the face of the growing influence of AI. His message was overwhelming: “This is the unpleasant truth: AI comes for your work. Demons, it also comes for mine. This is a call of attention. It does not matter if you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer service representative, seller or financial: the AI ​​comes for you. You must understand that what were previously considered” easy tasks “will no longer exist; what were considered” difficult tasks “will be” difficult tasks ” Easy, and what was considered “impossible tasks” will be the difficult thing. Finally (for the moment), Duolingo. Luis von Ahn, CEO of Duolingo, announced its template A few days ago his intention to be “an Ai-first. Among the measures that the company will take is to “gradually stop hiring freelancers to do the work of which AI can be commissioned.” Of course, Von Ahn apostilled, “Duolingo will continue to be a company that deeply cares about its employees. This does not replace the DUOS (company employees) with AI. It is about eliminating bottlenecks so we can do more with the spectacular duos we have now.” Many said it before, many will say it later. The message is explicit, but of course it is not new. The appearance of Chatgpt caused this type of predictions to become increasingly frequent, and little by little we have seen how the CEOs of large companies have talked about the impact that AI will cause on work. Above all, in the world of programming: Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, was clear a year ago than No one should learn to programand they have also said Mark Garman (CEO of AWS) or Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. Mark Zuckerberg joined that prediction a few days ago and assured that in 12-18 months the majority of the code would be written by an AI. And I didn’t talk about the machines autocomplete code, but that they would write it completely. First it will help us, then (perhaps) it will replace us. Many experts believe that AI It will enhance our productivity And it will help us do more And better work than ever. It is what happened with the computer or internet, but with AI there is a clear fear that I end up going beyond and completely doing our work. The possibility is there, although with other technological revolutions, there will be more threatened jobs and others that will be less. Bill Gates, for example, believes that Doctors and human teachers do not have much future And Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, states that the impact of AI on employment “It is a huge, huge problem“. Perhaps 140 years of history point to a surprising future profession. Hairdressers. Between 1871 and 2011 Technology created more jobs than destroyed. The 2015 study published In The Guardian It focused specifically on data from the Census of England and Wales, and that allowed to assess the impact of technology on the world of employment. The most physical works clearly fell into a fee, but while or other professions were created, or professionals were added to which there were already. For example, surprise: the number of hairdressers grew prodigiously throughout those 140 years: just 0.1% of the workforce in 1871, this group went on to represent 0.6% in 2011. But the impact is inevitable. There are more studies and forecasts that occurred before the current “revolution” of AI. In 2018 the World Economic Forum (WEF) He published his report ‘Future of Jobs 2018’. In their conclusions they pointed out that automation would eliminate 75 million jobs by 2025, but would create 133 million new functions. The balance has changed five years later. In your 2023 reportthis agency pointed out that in the next five years it is estimated that 83 million works will be lost and 69 million will be created. The funny thing is that lately workers They seem to be somewhat more optimistic With his future. Image | Fiat Chrysler Automobiles In Xataka | Thousands of employees use AI in their work. More and more do not want their bosses to discover it

A Norwegian company is building an empire buying Spanish software startups for SMEs. With patience and without mergers

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Norway houses one of the biggest Spanish software startup buyers, although not well known beyond the niche niche. With five acquisitions since 2021 and more than 250 million euros invested in Spain, Visma has become a fundamental actor in the national technology and entrepreneuraccording to a long analysis of EcoTechers. Operational independence as a management model The Nordic giant broke into the Spanish market in 2021 with The acquisition of HoldedBarcelona business management software, which disbursed more than 190 million euros. Since then, has incorporated to declaring, woffu, quaderno and, The most recent, Tugesto, A Valencian startup that was participated by Angels, Juan Roig’s investment society, president of Mercadona. “I would expect something more this year for own ambition and project ambition. 2025 and 2026 are going to be years of many outings of Private Equity who entered the year 2021 and 2022. We are already beginning to see movements, “says Miguel García-Paredes, responsible for mergers and acquisitions for Spain and Portugal of Visma, according to EcoTechers. The most striking of its strategy is that, unlike other corporate buyers, Visma maintains companies acquired as independent entities, retaining their brands and management teams. “The idea of ​​visma is to set up an ecosystem rather than also from entrepreneurs and conserve the entrepreneur,” said García-Paredes. This philosophy was evident after the recent purchase of Tugesto. As reports The economist“It will continue to operate as an independent company under the same name and address.” Manuel Fandos, CEO of Tugesto, said That this union represents “a unique opportunity to revolutionize business management together, especially in a market such as payroll software, where much remains to be achieved and innovate in Spain.” Who is visma: the discreet multinational Founded in 1996 by merger It was privatized by the HG capital fund. Currently, its shareholding is distributed mainly between HG Capital (70%) and the Sustain Fund of Singapore GIC (14%). The company has closed the year 2024 with 2.8 billion euros of income, a growth of 17%, and 893 million EBITDA (+26.6%)according to data provided to EcoTechers. In Spain, where it has more than 400 employees, it hopes to reach 60 million billing this year. “Spain is one of the highest growth for visma,” said Merete Hverven, CEO of the group, to The economist In 2023. “From our landing in 2021, we grow at a rate of 70%.” Visma has perfected its acquisition strategy after More than 373 completed operations worldwide. Only between 2023 and 2024 closed more than 70 purchases. In Spain, its focus is on SME -centered software startupsan easy pattern to detect seeing your history. According to García-Paredes, they look for companies that meet or approach the “40 rule” for software, that is, the sum of the percentage of income in income and the Ebitda margin is equal to or greater than 40. The company, which has a presence in 27 countries in Europe and Latin America, sees in Spain a strategic market for its size – almost 50 million inhabitants – and for the “growing advance of digitalization”, factors that predict that there will be more acquisitions in the future. Outstanding image | VISMA In Xataka | The technological basis of quantum computers developed in Europe: what happened so that in the long term we lost the race

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