©Reuters. Genially, a Spanish startup in the US, ready “to take on the world”
Por Ana Mengotti
Miami (USA), Apr 22 (.).- Conchi Ruiz Cabello, in charge of the US market at the Spanish interactive content creation startup Genially, which has 20 million users, is convinced of something after having represented the company in the final of the eMerge Americas contest: “we are going to eat the world”.
Arriving in the US 12 years ago, where at first she dedicated herself to selling olive oil, Ruiz Cabello from Granada defended Genially’s project in the final of the contest, which had a “Shark Tank” style format and Kevin O’Leary, ” Mr. Wonderful”, one of the protagonists of the popular television program, in the jury.
She was the only woman and the only foreigner of the five finalists and, although Genially did not win the more than 400,000 dollars (about 370,000 euros) in prize money, Conchi Ruiz Cabello tells Efe that the objective that the company had set by attending was achieved. to the eMerge Americas forum, held this week in Miami Beach.
“We were looking for visibility and contacts more than the prize,” says Ruiz Cabello, 40, who was supported by Juan Rubio, one of the three founding partners of Genially, a startup that experts see as having great possibilities of being “unicorn ” (over a billion dollars in value).
A POTENTIAL “UNICORN”
Created in 2015 by Rubio, Luis García and Chema Roldán and with an investment of 27 million dollars to date, Genially has 20 million users in 190 countries.
Its $20 million Series B funding round was led last September by US venture capital firms 645 Ventures and Owl Ventures, joined by European venture capitalists DN Capital and Brighteye Ventures and successful entrepreneurs such as founders of s16VC and Kahoot.
By number of users, Mexico is the number one country and by income Spain and France share the first position, according to Efe Ruiz Cabello, who points out that versatility and interactivity are the hallmarks of Genially.
“We’re trying to change the communication standard to leave flat content behind,” he says.
80% of Genially users come from the educational sector and the remaining 20% include large corporations and institutions, Red Cross, Volkswagen (ETR:), Michellin and Louis Vuitton among them, who use it as a tool for presentations, and digital content designers.
Content created with Genially produces what Ruiz Cabello calls the “wow effect” (“wow” in English) because “the visual impact is very strong.”
The entrepreneur, who joined Genially three years ago, has witnessed significant growth both in the company’s employees -today 180- and in users in that period.
“If we continue at this level, we are going to eat the world,” he says with Andalusian grace.
MR. WONDERFUL IS SURPRISED
During the eMerge Americas final, when the Spaniard mentioned Genially’s 20 million users in her three-minute presentation in English, O’Leary, a legend in the world of entrepreneurship for her role in “Shark Tank,” asked her if He had understood correctly and asked him to repeat the fact.
“It was the hardest of all,” says Ruiz Cabello, who had to answer questions about the company’s “numbers” made to O’Leary, who wrote everything down in his notebook like he does on the popular reality show ” of entrepreneurs in search of financing.
Of the five finalist startups, apart from the only non-US one, Genially was “the most mature” of all, in fact the only one that already had investment, says Ruiz Cabello.
That and the support of Juan Rubio helped Ruiz Cabello to calm the stress of having to speak in the main auditorium of eMerge Americas, a fair that annually brings together thousands of entrepreneurs, investors, public institutions and technology companies from various sectors already consolidated. .
In addition to nervousness, although he had the “speech prepared”, Ruiz Cabello felt “pride” for being a woman and also Spanish on that stage. “There’s a lot of men in the tech world,” she says.
Like Juan Rubio, who is a biologist and when devising the tool, he considered how “to communicate complex concepts in a way that everyone understands them”, Ruiz Cabello’s training is not technological. She has a BA in English Philology and an MBA.
Before Genially, he worked from the United States for Spanish technology companies and in the New York office of Extenda, the Andalusian export promotion agency.
After his presentation at eMerge 2022 he has “Linkedin on fire”, he says.
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