Spain’s Tech Rising Stars: 10 Startups Making an Impact in 2026

Spain’s technology ecosystem is entering an increasingly important phase. Long associated with strong entrepreneurial communities in cities such as Madrid and Barcelona, the country is now producing startups across artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, fintech, robotics, climate technology and enterprise software that are attracting international investors and expanding beyond the domestic market. Spanish startups raised approximately €1.7 billion across 142 funding rounds during the first half of 2026, according to Tech.eu’s funding data, with major investments flowing into companies across software, aerospace, AI and other technology-intensive sectors.

The companies featured in this list demonstrate the diversity of Spain’s emerging technology economy. They include businesses building intelligent robots for industrial environments, AI assistants used by millions of people, autonomous digital workers, infrastructure for identity and fraud prevention, private-market investment platforms and technology designed to support deforestation-free trade. This is not a ranking based on valuation, funding or revenue. Instead, these ten companies represent a selection of Spanish technology businesses whose products, commercial momentum, investment activity or ambitions make them particularly worth watching in 2026.

10 Spanish Tech Companies to Watch in 2026

1. THEKER

THEKER is a Spanish artificial intelligence and robotics company developing advanced autonomous systems for industrial environments. The company operates at the intersection of AI, computer vision and robotics, with a focus on building machines capable of understanding and interacting with complex physical environments. Rather than simply developing conventional industrial automation, THEKER is pursuing what it describes as the next frontier of robotics and intelligence, aiming to give machines greater adaptability and decision-making capabilities in real-world settings. The company has kept significant aspects of its technology and commercial strategy relatively private, but its emergence has attracted substantial investor attention.

In June 2026, THEKER secured a €74 million Series A financing round, making it one of Spain’s largest startup funding rounds during the first half of the year. The deal placed the company among major Spanish technology investments alongside companies operating in aerospace, fintech and enterprise software. The funding provides THEKER with significant resources to develop its technology and accelerate the commercialization of its robotics platform at a time when industrial companies are increasingly looking toward AI-powered automation to address labor shortages, improve productivity and make production systems more flexible.

THEKER’s opportunity is particularly interesting because advances in generative AI and machine learning are increasingly moving beyond software into physical systems. Robots traditionally require highly structured environments and carefully programmed instructions, but AI has the potential to make them more capable of interpreting changing conditions and responding autonomously. With substantial new capital behind it and an ambition centered on the convergence of robotics and intelligence, THEKER represents one of the more ambitious companies emerging from Spain’s rapidly developing deep-tech ecosystem.

2. Luzia

Luzia is a Madrid-based consumer AI company building a personal artificial intelligence assistant designed to make generative AI accessible to everyday users. Founded in May 2023 by Álvaro Higes, who serves as founder and CEO, Luzia has focused on creating a simple conversational interface capable of helping users with activities ranging from answering questions and translating text to analyzing images and documents, transcribing audio and generating images.

The company initially gained significant traction by making its assistant available through familiar communication channels and mobile applications, particularly among Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking users. Luzia’s growth has been remarkable for a European consumer AI startup.

By May 2025, the company reported more than 65 million users across over 40 countries and nearly $49 million in total funding, before subsequently describing its cumulative financing as approximately $50 million. Its investors include Prosus Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Monashees and Endeavor Catalyst. The company’s latest major financing announcement was a $13.5 million round led by Prosus Ventures, with existing investors Khosla Ventures and Monashees also participating. Luzia said the funding would support product development, recruitment and expansion across Latin America, particularly Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Argentina. The company has also established its headquarters in Madrid, with additional offices in Barcelona and Alicante.

Luzia’s strategy reflects a broader opportunity in consumer AI: while many advanced AI products originate in Silicon Valley, large global populations still want assistants designed around their languages, cultures and everyday communication habits. By focusing on accessibility, privacy and Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking markets, Luzia has built one of Spain’s most internationally visible AI companies and remains a significant startup to watch as consumer AI becomes increasingly competitive.

3. Maisa AI

Maisa AI is a Spanish-founded enterprise AI company developing what it describes as accountable digital workers capable of handling complex business processes with greater transparency and reliability than conventional generative AI systems. Founded in 2024 by CEO David Villalón, formerly Chief AI Officer at Clibrain, and Chief Scientific Officer Manuel Romero, a prominent Hugging Face contributor with more than 700 open-source models, Maisa is targeting one of the biggest challenges facing enterprise adoption of AI: trust.

The company’s argument is that businesses need more than AI systems capable of generating impressive answers; they need systems that can perform mission-critical work through processes that are traceable, evidence-based and controllable. Maisa therefore combines AI reasoning with more deterministic computational approaches to create digital workers that can follow natural-language instructions while maintaining greater accountability.

Investor interest in the company has grown rapidly. Maisa raised $5 million in pre-seed funding in December 2024, led by NFX, with participation from Village Global, Sequoia’s Scout Fund and individual investors. In August 2025, the company followed that financing with a $25 million seed round led by Creandum, with participation from Forgepoint Capital International, NFX and Village Global. The funding is supporting the expansion of Maisa’s platform for enterprise automation and its vision of enabling non-technical employees to create trustworthy AI workers.

As businesses increasingly move beyond experimental chatbots toward autonomous systems capable of performing actual work, the reliability of those systems will become increasingly important. Maisa’s emphasis on accountability therefore places it in one of the most important emerging areas of enterprise AI: building agents that organizations can trust with increasingly consequential tasks.

4. NeuralTrust

NeuralTrust is a Barcelona-based cybersecurity company developing infrastructure designed to secure AI agents as enterprises increasingly deploy autonomous systems into production. The company operates in an emerging area of cybersecurity created by the rapid rise of agentic AI. While organizations have spent decades building security frameworks around employees, applications and cloud infrastructure, AI agents introduce new risks because they can access information, use tools and take actions with a growing degree of autonomy.

NeuralTrust is building a platform designed to help enterprises secure and govern those systems, making it easier to identify and manage risks as AI agents become part of business operations. The company reached a major milestone in June 2026 when it announced a $20 million seed round, described as the largest cybersecurity seed financing raised by an EU company to date. The round was led by Alstin Capital, with participation from VentureFriends, Seaya, Kibo Ventures, Banc Sabadell, EA Ventures Plug and Play Fund and Finaves, the venture capital fund associated with IESE Business School.

NeuralTrust has also received public backing from the European Innovation Council and Spain’s State Research Agency. The new financing is being used to expand engineering capabilities, strengthen integration across the company’s products and accelerate European expansion.

NeuralTrust’s timing is particularly important because enterprises are moving from AI experimentation toward operational deployment, creating a growing need for security infrastructure specifically designed around autonomous systems. Traditional cybersecurity tools were not necessarily built to manage agents that can independently retrieve data, interact with software and perform multi-step tasks. By positioning itself as a security platform for this emerging class of AI systems, NeuralTrust is targeting a market that could expand rapidly as agentic technology becomes more deeply integrated into enterprise operations.

5. Didit

Didit is a Barcelona-founded identity technology company building infrastructure for identity verification and fraud prevention. Founded in 2023 by identical twin brothers Alberto Rosas and Alejandro Rosas, the company initially focused on digital identity verification before expanding its ambition toward a broader infrastructure layer for identity and fraud. Alberto Rosas serves as CEO and leads go-to-market strategy, hiring and fundraising, while Alejandro Rosas serves as CTO and oversees product and engineering.

Didit’s platform supports a wide range of identity-related workflows, including KYC, business verification, anti-money-laundering screening and fraud detection, allowing organizations to integrate verification systems through APIs and software development kits. The company has also designed its technology for the AI era, incorporating hundreds of fraud signals intended to detect risks including deepfakes, synthetic identities, document forgery and replay attacks.

Didit joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2026 batch after previously raising approximately $2 million, before announcing a further $6 million financing round in May 2026 that brought total funding to $7.5 million. The company said it had become profitable, was growing by more than 30% month over month and had surpassed 2,000 organizations using its technology worldwide. Didit’s ambition is to make identity infrastructure more programmable, transparent and globally accessible, an opportunity that becomes increasingly important as online fraud becomes more sophisticated.

With AI making impersonation and document manipulation easier, organizations need stronger ways to establish whether the people and businesses they interact with are genuine. Didit’s rapid growth, Y Combinator backing and increasingly global customer base make it one of Spain’s most interesting emerging infrastructure companies in 2026.

6. Crescenta

Crescenta is a Spanish fintech platform working to make private-market investing more accessible to individual investors and businesses. The company operates in an area of finance traditionally dominated by institutional investors and wealthy individuals, offering access to private equity, venture capital and real-asset investment strategies through a regulated digital platform. Crescenta’s proposition reflects a broader transformation of private markets, where technology and new investment structures are gradually lowering the barriers that historically prevented smaller investors from participating in alternative assets. The company has continued to expand both its investment offering and management team during 2026.

In January, Crescenta launched its first Fondo de Inversión Libre, designed to provide access to three major private-equity strategies, while February brought the appointment of Marta Solé as COO, Alejandra Muguiro as Investment Director and Elisa de Mollinedo as Legal Director. The company reached another important financing milestone in April 2026 when it closed a €5 million funding round that included Endeavor Catalyst as a new investor. Crescenta has also continued to develop new investment products and partnerships, including a June 2026 agreement to provide personalized investment solutions for companies and a July agreement with Creand to distribute a growth-focused private-equity fund.

The company’s platform already displays a growing base of investors and investment products across private markets, demonstrating increasing demand for digital access to alternatives. Crescenta’s importance to Spain’s startup ecosystem lies not only in its fintech model but also in its ability to make traditionally exclusive investment strategies available through technology. As private assets become a more important part of global investment portfolios, Crescenta is positioning itself as one of the Spanish companies attempting to build the infrastructure that connects a wider investor base with private-market opportunities.

7. Rever

Rever is a Spanish-founded consumer technology and sustainability company developing software designed to make product returns easier, more efficient and less environmentally damaging for e-commerce businesses. Returns have become one of the major operational challenges created by the growth of online shopping, generating significant costs for retailers while also contributing to transportation, packaging and waste. Rever is building technology that helps brands manage the post-purchase experience, allowing customers to process returns and exchanges through digital workflows while giving merchants greater visibility into the reasons products are being returned and the opportunities to retain customers.

The company’s broader proposition is that returns should not simply be treated as a logistical cost but as a customer-experience and revenue-management opportunity. By making exchanges easier and helping merchants better understand return behavior, Rever can potentially reduce refunds, encourage customers to choose alternative products and improve retention.

The company has developed its platform around integrations with e-commerce operations and logistics systems, positioning it within the growing category of post-purchase technology. Its business is also connected to sustainability because inefficient returns can result in unnecessary transportation and products being discarded despite remaining usable. Rever’s technology therefore addresses both commercial and environmental problems for retailers.

As e-commerce continues to mature, the companies supporting merchants are increasingly focusing on the stages that occur after a customer clicks the buy button. Payments, logistics, customer service and returns are becoming major areas for specialized software innovation. Rever is worth watching because it operates in one of the less glamorous but increasingly important parts of digital commerce: helping retailers manage what happens when the original purchase does not go according to plan. With brands under pressure to improve margins while maintaining frictionless customer experiences, technology capable of transforming returns into a more efficient and potentially revenue-generating process could have significant commercial value.

8. Silbo Money

Silbo Money is a Spanish fintech company building financial products and digital tools around more flexible and accessible consumer money management. The company operates within a rapidly evolving European financial-services market where consumers increasingly expect banking, payments and credit products to function with the speed and simplicity of modern software. Rather than competing directly with traditional banks across every product category, Silbo is focused on developing a more technology-driven financial proposition designed around digital access and customer experience.

The opportunity for companies operating in this space is significant because financial services remain one of the largest and most heavily digitized industries in Europe, yet consumers continue to face fragmented products and complicated experiences when managing everyday financial needs.

Fintech startups are increasingly attempting to address those gaps by building narrower, more focused products that can later expand into broader financial ecosystems. Silbo’s development comes as Spain’s fintech ecosystem benefits from a growing pool of engineering talent, an increasingly sophisticated digital consumer base and stronger investor interest in financial infrastructure and consumer finance. The company is also operating at a time when regulation is simultaneously creating challenges and opportunities for new financial businesses.

Compliance requirements can create barriers to entry, but they can also make it difficult for large incumbents to move quickly. Technology companies capable of building compliant products while maintaining simple user experiences can therefore find significant opportunities. Silbo is particularly interesting because the next generation of fintech businesses is increasingly focused on combining software, data and financial infrastructure rather than simply recreating traditional banking products online.

As European consumers become more comfortable managing financial services digitally, companies that can build trusted, useful and scalable products around specific customer needs will have opportunities to expand. Silbo’s progress in this competitive market makes it a Spanish fintech company worth watching during 2026.

9. Coolx

Coolx is a Spanish climate technology company building digital infrastructure to help businesses participate in deforestation-free trade. The company was created in response to the growing pressure on global supply chains to demonstrate that products and raw materials are not linked to deforestation. Coolx combines technology, data and human expertise to help organizations analyze supply chains and prepare for regulatory requirements, particularly the European Union’s deforestation regulation. The company argues that compliance with these rules requires businesses to manage complex geographic, environmental and supply-chain information that cannot easily be handled through conventional spreadsheets and manual processes.

Coolx’s founding team includes CEO and founder Bruno Domínguez García, a biotechnologist who leads strategy, fundraising and sales; CTO and founder Cristian Jiménez Rodríguez, a physicist and former senior SAP consultant responsible for the platform’s technology architecture; and COO/CFO and co-founder Emilio Muela Pérez, who oversees operations, finance and sales. The company is developing technology intended to help organizations trace the origins of relevant commodities, analyze land-use information and establish whether products meet requirements associated with deforestation-free supply chains.

The opportunity is becoming increasingly significant because environmental regulation is turning sustainability data from a voluntary reporting exercise into an operational requirement for companies involved in global trade. Coolx is therefore positioned at the intersection of climate technology, geospatial data, supply-chain intelligence and regulatory software. Its potential market extends beyond companies that simply want to improve sustainability reporting; businesses may increasingly require reliable infrastructure to continue selling into regulated markets.

As governments, investors and consumers demand greater transparency around the environmental impact of global supply chains, technology capable of turning complex environmental information into practical business decisions could become increasingly valuable. Coolx represents Spain’s growing presence in climate-focused software and is worth watching as deforestation regulation reshapes the technology requirements of international trade.

10. 8Layers

8Layers is a Spanish cybersecurity company developing technology designed to address identity-based attacks at their source. Led by co-founder and CEO Daniel García Morán, the company is building a security platform around the growing recognition that identity has become one of the most important attack surfaces in modern organizations. As companies move more applications and infrastructure into the cloud, employees, contractors and automated systems increasingly access critical resources through digital identities. Cybercriminals have responded by focusing heavily on stolen credentials, compromised accounts and other identity-based techniques.

8Layers is developing technology intended to help organizations understand and secure this increasingly complex environment. The company reached an important funding milestone in July 2026 when it announced a €1 million extension to its pre-seed round, bringing total funding raised to €2.5 million. The extension brought Criteria Venture Tech, the venture capital arm of CriteriaCaixa, and Bankinter into the company’s investor base. Existing investors include JME Ventures, which led the round, alongside Lanai Ventures, Draper B1 and Secways. The financing provides 8Layers with additional resources to develop its technology and expand its approach to identity security.

The company’s market is becoming increasingly important because AI is also changing the cybersecurity threat landscape. More sophisticated phishing, social engineering and automated attacks can increase the risk that digital identities are compromised or misused. At the same time, organizations are managing a growing number of human and machine identities across increasingly distributed technology environments. 8Layers is targeting this fundamental security challenge by focusing on the identity layer rather than treating every attack as an isolated event.

With new backing from major Spanish financial-sector investors and a growing need for specialized identity security, the company is one of Spain’s emerging cybersecurity startups to watch in 2026.

Spain’s Next Startup Chapter Is About Scale

The ten companies featured here show that Spain’s startup boom is becoming increasingly diverse and technologically ambitious. Artificial intelligence is a clear theme, with Luzia, Maisa AI and NeuralTrust demonstrating how Spanish founders are building products for consumer, enterprise and cybersecurity markets. At the same time, companies such as THEKER, Coolx and 8Layers show that the ecosystem’s growth is extending into robotics, climate technology and advanced cybersecurity.

Spain’s challenge now is not simply creating startups. The next stage is helping more of them scale internationally. The country has demonstrated that it can produce ambitious founders, attract global investors and generate significant funding rounds, with Spanish startups raising €1.7 billion across 142 rounds in the first half of 2026 alone. The question for the years ahead is how many of these businesses can transform early momentum into durable international companies.

The startups on this list are pursuing very different opportunities, but they share a common ambition: building technology that can compete beyond Spain. If more companies successfully make that transition from promising startup to global scale-up, Spain’s technology ecosystem could become one of Europe’s increasingly important sources of the next generation of international tech companies.