10 Barcelona Startups at 4YFN 2024 and What They Build
4YFN is the startup event of MWC Barcelona. In 2024, the year of its tenth anniversary, it ran from 26 to 29 February at Fira Gran Via, and the host city brought its largest stand to date: Barcelona City Council, through its economic promotion agency Barcelona Activa, accompanied 32 start-ups on a 202 m² stand in Hall 8.1, almost double the previous year’s space, according to the City Council’s announcement.
This article is deliberately narrow. It covers ten companies that meet two conditions: a public source places them in Barcelona, and their part in 4YFN 2024 is documented by the organisers, Barcelona City Council, Barcelona Activa or the tech press. Descriptions come from each company’s own website or its listing in the Barcelona & Catalonia Startup Hub, so they reflect how the companies present themselves today. Every claim links to its source.
The 4YFN Awards: a Barcelona winner and a Barcelona finalist
1. Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech
Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech was crowned winner of the 4YFN Awards on 28 February 2024, at a ceremony on the Banco Sabadell Stage. The organisers’ announcement explains that the winner was chosen after an on-stage pitching competition, judged by a panel of experts from the investor community and by a live audience, among finalists shortlisted from the 4YFN Top 50 Startups list. The company builds analog, full-stack quantum computers and gives its address in Barcelona’s Sant Martí district, and its own announcement credits CEO Marta P. Estarellas with the winning pitch.
2. Ocean Ecostructures
Ocean Ecostructures was one of the five finalists in the same competition, listed by the organisers as a finalist from Spain alongside startups from South Korea, Israel and the Netherlands. Its solutions include the Bio Boosting System, which combines regeneration technology, robotics to monitor results and artificial intelligence to process the data. Its Startup Hub listing sums up the business as solutions to restore marine life, and the company gives its address in Barcelona’s Sants-Montjuïc district.
Live demonstrations on the Barcelona Activa stand
New in 2024, some start-ups on the municipal stand had a showcase for real-time demonstrations, and the City Council named seven projects that visitors could try live. Four of them are profiled below. Most start-ups on the stand also gave a three-minute pitch to investors and a mixed audience at the Pitching Point in Hall 8.1, in two rounds held on Tuesday 27 February, according to Barcelona Activa’s 4YFN 2024 programme.
3. Additive Spaces
Additive Spaces puts additive manufacturing at the core of its work on processes, materials and building solutions, which it presents as sustainable innovation. It is based at Barcelona Activa’s Glòries incubator. Besides its live demonstration, it pitched in the first round.
4. SITEP
SITEP describes itself as a specialist in territorial information systems and in manufacturing high-performance drones. It develops custom information systems that simplify territorial management and planning for public bodies and private organisations. Its headquarters are in Barcelona, with offices in Madrid and Andorra la Vella, and its news section records earlier appearances at Mobile World Congress.
5. Feeder
Feeder is an AI-driven platform that analyses audience reactions to video content. According to its Startup Hub listing, it also helps online coaches and therapists assess the emotional impact and engagement of their clients in real time, and the listing gives a Barcelona address. Feeder gave a live demonstration on the stand and pitched in the first round.
6. Blindstairs
Blindstairs builds what it calls decision intelligence for people operations: an AI engine that fits into a company’s talent tools, standardises every evaluation and leaves the audit trail ready, across hiring, internal mobility and performance evaluation. It targets the public sector, enterprise HR teams and recruitment firms, among others, and signs its website as made in Barcelona. Blindstairs gave a live demonstration and pitched in the second round.
Pitches from the Barcelona Activa stand
The next four appear on the City Council’s list of start-ups with space on the stand, and all of them pitched in Barcelona Activa’s first round.
7. Lawwwing
Lawwwing automates legal compliance for websites. It generates legal texts such as privacy policies, cookie policies and terms and conditions and keeps them updated, adds a fully customisable cookie banner, and covers rules including the GDPR and ePrivacy, with plugins for WordPress and Shopify. It lists an office in Barcelona, and Barcelona Activa’s event page also includes it among the start-ups in the stand’s showroom.
8. Sycai Medical
Sycai Medical develops an AI-powered assistant that detects pre-cancerous lesions at a benign stage and helps radiologists monitor them by comparing new images with previous scans. It focuses on three organs: the pancreas, liver and kidneys. Novobrief describes it as a Barcelona-based startup that uses deep learning on routine medical imaging to predict which suspicious lesions are likely to become malignant.
9. Brickken
Brickken runs a tokenisation platform for institutions. Its Startup Hub listing explains that it allows financial institutions and companies to issue, manage and operate real-world assets, such as equity, debt, funds or property, as compliant digital tokens, and gives a Barcelona address.
10. Levelab
Levelab is an online platform for hands-on learning sessions: course creators can add practical sessions, automate the resolution of students’ doubts and use data to improve their courses. Tech.eu picked it among the startups showing their work at MWC and 4YFN 2024, noting that it complements training in tools such as Photoshop, Blender or AutoCAD. Its Startup Hub listing places it in Barcelona and names higher-education institutions, business schools and education platforms as its market.
What the ten have in common
Read together, the ten share a practical profile. None of them is a consumer app: each sells to organisations or professionals, from radiologists and HR teams to universities, financial institutions and public bodies. Several put AI to work on one well-defined professional task, such as flagging lesions on medical scans, standardising candidate evaluations or reading audience reactions to video.
They were not the only Catalan startups at the event. ACCIÓ, the Catalan government’s agency for business competitiveness, brought its own group of Catalan startups to Hall 8, and Biocat and TIC Salut Social led the first joint Catalonia Health Innovation Ecosystem Pavilion, with twelve life-science startups. Both lists are worth a look for anyone mapping the local ecosystem.
For Two.Zero, a product and engineering studio in Barcelona, the pattern is familiar: most of these companies turn one specific professional workflow into software. If your company is working on something similar, our digital development team designs and builds web platforms and apps, and our AI solutions team brings applied AI into existing business processes.
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