Who’s backing us? Meet our team of advisors and investors

A couple of months ago, when Startupxplore was at inception, we realized that in order to succeed we should come up with a team of several players who had been traditionally isolated from each other.

Typically, founders and investors are seen as the only type of profiles ready to back up and invest in a project. However, we decided to form the best team, the best fit down the line, with three factors in common:

• They should be top professionals. The best for each role.
• They should have a passion for business strategy.
• They should have a different background to make our product more robust. These people will be our first customers. Tough customers, you know, they’ve seen it all.

Prove to yourself that your business, in micro-scale at least, creates value. If you believe it, you’ll find it that much easier to convince potential investors, partners and employees, too.Eric Ries

It was crystal clear to us that the perfect advisory board for a project like this should have top business angels, successful entrepreneurs, VC founders and game-changers. So that’s what we did. And we started to contact them.

To our surprise, not only did they believe in our product straightaway and agreed to join as advisors but also they decided to become investors.

Our first seed investment round: who’s backing us?

During the past months, we’ve combined our product development tasks with fundraising. To us, seed investment round was one of our priorities. As I said before, we expected it to be hard because seed rounds are a mix of proving product, market and business worthiness along with momentum. And since we were running first in stealth mode and afterwards in beta, momentum was right out of the equation by that moment.

Yet, it seems Startupxplore pitched itself and we hit our goal way before leaving beta! We decided to wait to announce our team of top angels after public launch. So without further ado, let me introduce you our team of investors and advisors.

We are extremely thrilled to announce today our first seed investment round, the team of investors and advisors powering Startupxplore:

• François Derbaix: Top Business Angel & successful startup founder of Top Rural (sold to HomeAway on 2012)
• Iñaki Arrola: Successful entrepreneur, investor and founder of Vitamina-K VC fund.
• Pedro Serrahima: CEO at Pepephone, the disruptive mobile telephone company that changed the rules of its market.
• Álvaro Ortiz: Founder of several startups, entrepreneur and business angel investor.

Internet business angel Francisco Gimeno and Plug and Play Spain have also participated in the seed round.

Definitely, we feel very lucky. On the one hand, we know how hard is to gather a top team of advisors and investors, and even harder before launching a product. On the other, our relationship is not confined to strict board meetings with them, they’ve fully immersed in the project, providing us with the most valuable feedback ever: their own experience as users. We frequently interact with them, which allows us to move and iterate rapidly.

Why is this good for you, as a Startupxplore user?

First, the fact of having financial back up frees up a huge amount of our task force, allowing us to focus on product development. As we announced during our launch day, there are many exciting features for our users on the roadmap, which are taking up most of our time. Our approach is to start up lean and, as such, resources are scarce and meant to be used smartly. This team has made this progress possible by trusting and investing in Startupxplore.

Don’t you feel in even better company, now?