Aticco Workspaces turns five!
Get to know our history with its milestones, its bumps and the lessons we have learned at each stage.
As we have probably told you on other occasions, our goal is to empower startups and entrepreneurs. We dedicate all our efforts to this. Today, however, we want to tell you how we have made what started as a small coworking startup, Aticco Workspaces, celebrate its fifth anniversary!
In 2016, three entrepreneurs in love with the flexible work model and its communities decided to open a coworking space in Barcelona. The three co-founders Gabriel Espín, Franz Pallarés and Juan Carlos Morales, found an attic – which gave the group its name – in an old courthouse building on Ronda Sant Pere. They were looking for an open, bright, large environment with a terrace to differentiate themselves from the competition by offering coworkers open spaces to hold events, networkings and, of course, parties.
After a first round of investment in which many friends, family members, and stakeholders participated, they opened the center that has been the beginning of this great adventure: Aticco Urquinaona.
Soon a strong growth stage began as demand kept increasing, and that's how the co-founders clearly saw that Aticco Workspaces was not going to be just a coworking space but a coworking company, in plural.
More than a coworking space
Four years later, in 2020, they already had five buildings in Barcelona (Aticco Urquinaona, Aticco MED, Aticco Hospitalet, Aticco Verdaguer and Aticco Bogatell) and were preparing to open their first center in Madrid.
“In Madrid, we visited many buildings until we found one that was central, with light and a terrace. This was in the ground zero of coworking spaces since we were surrounded by competition,” explains Franz Pallarés, COO of Aticco Workspaces. Even so, they were confident that even with other operators very close by, they had something more to offer and they were not wrong. Today, Aticco María de Molina in Madrid is operating at full capacity, and Aticco Workspaces' near future plans include opening a second center in the capital.
But, wait a moment, we said that this happened in 2020... there is something else that happened in 2020 and that put us all against the ropes. The same week that the Madrid center was confirmed, the home confinement began in Spain due to Covid-19. As Juan Carlos Morales, CFO of Aticco Ecosystem, explains, a very difficult moment opened up in which we learned many things: resilience, perseverance or even new technological skills.
Directing a project via Zoom
Can you imagine what it was like to set up the Madrid center in the middle of a pandemic? It seems unimaginable to us now too, but we did it! Our architecture team managed to direct the remodeling work through Zoom.
In record time, given the circumstances, Aticco Workspaces opened its first center in Madrid, with 2,262m2, on María de Molina street 39, in June 2020.
Aticco Ecosystem, the innovation support ecosystem
During this moment of impasse, a new Business Plan was developed in which the Aticco team filled up to 1111 lines of Excel with disruptive ideas. From here, proposals emerged to expand the group and incorporate new solutions for companies and startups.
Thus, AticcoLab was launched, the support platform for entrepreneurship and open innovation that has already turned one year old and has accelerated 16 startups through its acceleration program; it supports organizations such as Cellnex Telecom or DAS Legal in the design of their own accelerators; and has more than 150 mentors.
As Gabriel Espín, CEO of Aticco Ecosystem and Aticco Workspaces, explains, the goal of supporting startups had been present since the company's beginnings in 2016; in fact, the first logo included the tagline “startup incubator”, and now this has materialized with AticcoLab.
In the last year, this initiative has been joined by Aticco Living, a shared and flexible housing solution that adapts to the lifestyle and needs of the new generations of professionals.
This is how Aticco Workspaces has gone from being a coworking, at first; to a coworking company, secondly; to end up giving way to an entire innovation ecosystem that under its umbrella includes both Aticco Workspaces and AticcoLab and Aticco Living.
