Subasta de Ocio Is Spain's Fastest Growing Startup

Subasta de Ocio, the company that lets you bid on the over-capacity of hotels, restaurants, and other leisure activities, was awarded last night as the fastest growing company in Spain.

For the past 3 years Ayden and The Next web have partnered up to make one of the most secretive but interesting events in Europe. The Tech5 event that celebrates the fastest growing companies in Europe. With 5 events held in Amsterdam, London, Barcelona, Paris, Stockholm they want to give a selective group of companies more visibility and a chance to speak on stage at the TNW Conference in May.

It was the third year the Tech5 event was being held in Barcelona.

This event has been analyzing the revenue, traffic and employee data each year of over a hundred companies across six countries in Europe, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, France, and Spain. And even though Spanish companies like Akamon, Cabify, Getapp ReviewPro and Kantox have been selected to participate in the event in past years; this time it was the first year that the event was actually held in Barcelona!

The Tech5 management team finally decided to experience the Barcelona Startup ecosystem and to give 5 tech Spanish companies the opportunity to network, celebrate and showcase their products, triumphs and challenges with their peers.

Previous Tech5 growth-heroes

Previous participants have been Fairphone, that raised over €9 million last year, Swiftkey awarded one of the best apps by Google Play in 2015, The Cloakroom acquired by Modomoto early on this year and the Spanish startup Packlink, that closed a financing round of $12.6 million last September.

The TNW and Ayden team have proven to have a good eye on spotting the best growing startups in Europe and entrepreneurs have up their game and actually proved that they deserved to be listed.

So for the 2016 participants, this meant, no pressure.

Also read: Barcelona Tech Investments Recap: Q1 2016 – Over €38.000.000 In 10 Companies

As excited as we are about everything that happens in this amazing city in terms of tech innovation and startups we head to the special dinner at Artte to witness first hand who was the lucky winner of this year’s Tech5 Spanish award.

Spanish fastest-growing young tech companies on the Tech5 Barcelona Event.

The Spanish nominees were companies from very different markets and with very different backgrounds. Fever, Subasta de Ocio, Northweek, Trip4real and Nubelo. All of this companies fulfilled the requirements of been founded later than 2011, based in Spain, having the fastest growing revenue in 2015 and building their own markets.

Did not expect to win

The winner of the Tech 5 Spanish edition came as a surprise, even to them! They applied 3 hours prior to the Tech5 deadline and even though they know their business is growing, they thought their chances were low with all the other amazing startups in the competition.

Subasta de Ocio, with over 50 employees and with future plans of expanding over the Mediterranean area, is doing a great job focusing on their business. They are not the most known startup in Barcelona but they do actually stand out for having a great Dutch-Spanish team behind it, and a scalable business idea that has been proven to be working their way up in the market.

Subasta de Ocio won the Tech5 competition in Barcelona

Subasta de Ocio was super thrilled to have won the Tech5 award. From the left CTO Julian Gardner, CEO Marc Zinck and COO and CFO Mark Knapen.

After winning the price, Marc Zinck, CEO and co-founder of Subasto de Ocio told Barcinno:

“Our secret to growth is that we have no secret. Some people say that 100 percent focus on product is the most important, but I disagree. Product alone is nothing if you don’t know how your users behave. We are obsessed on how our users behave, not what they tell us, but how they interact with our product”.

The startups CTO Julian Gardner also shared some wisdome after the victory:

“The thing that’s the truth today, may not be the truth tomorrow. That’s why we constantly try to figure out, what’s the truth for our company today”.

It will be interesting to follow Subasta de Ocio going forward, and with all the amazing Tech5 nominees and winners success rate as a standard, we are pretty certain that we will hear more from them in the near future.