Javier Sardina López, Carlos Cobas Gómez and Santiago Domínguez, the founders of the company MESTRELAB RESEARCH, have created SEMOLA Tech Ventures, an investment company aimed at financing projects, in seed phase, whose focus is life sciences and biotechnology.
Located in the historic center of the Galician capital, SEMOLA Tech Ventures was born with the idea of wrapping up the best startup projects focused on these matters. For this, its founding partners point out that, only at the University of Santiago de Compostela, more than 80 biotech companies; small businesses that, in most cases, only need a small financial boost to multiply their value in the short term.
The company will allocate the first year € 700,000 to the best biotechnology projects. “And that’s not all. We intend that SEMOLA Tech Ventures serve as traction for other investors to join us and mobilize at least 2 million euros of joint financing during the first year ”, has stated Santiago Domínguez, partner of SEMOLA Tech Ventures and CEO of MESTRELAB.
“If we look towards Silicon Valley, much of the secret of its success lies in the reinvestment of the profits that the first companies that arose in California have been doing later in other companies. The Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn or Twitters have behind capital that came from the profits of Paypal, Google or Facebook. At a much more modest level, we intend to take advantage of the success of Mestrelab to begin to have the same effect on Galician biotech, and we hope that other successful entrepreneurs will do the same ”, maintains Domínguez. Thus, SEMOLA Tech Ventures will provide critical seed funding for the take off of more Galician biotechnology projects.
In addition, they will not only focus on purely economic financing, but from SEMOLA Tech Ventures they will contribute to startups, both the know how technical skills that require in this seed phase such as experience in business development and market access through a minimum viable product.
An idea that underlies the three founding partners of MESTRELAB when creating SEMOLA Tech Ventures is to transfer the wealth generated by their company to have a multiplier effect as well as to support the creation and dimensioning of the biotech sector in Galicia. «Galician biotechnology, starting practically from zero 15 years ago, has already created more than 3,000 jobs in Galicia, with the wealth that this implies. We want to help make this first milestone just the beginning of much greater success “, explains Domínguez.
