Female entrepreneurship is changing the dynamic business world by redefining corporate success. With their innovative and unique vision, women are launching businesses in sectors that are crucial to the economic development of Asturias.
The entrepreneurial ecosystem is witnessing how the proliferation of women-led companies is redefining corporate success. With resilience and determination, and also by challenging stereotypes, these women are launching startups that are gradually changing the dynamic business world, showing better results and greater profitability when they themselves are at the helm of a company, regardless of its size. With that innovative and unique vision, they are proving that the future of business must be inclusive.
In this respect, programmes dedicated to supporting female entrepreneurship play a crucial role in shaping the business future. Bodies such as the European Business and Innovation Centre (CEEI) of the Principality of Asturias, through its various lines of action, make all their resources available to women so that they can keep scaling up and reaching new horizons. They mainly support the creation and growth of innovative companies, especially technology-based ones, given their importance for “diversification, economic development and the future” of our region.
The CEEI predicts that the number of women entrepreneurs will keep growing over the coming years. “As greater equality is achieved in most areas of society, women are increasingly present in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, as entrepreneurs, as business owners and as investors,” says its director, Cristina Fanjul. However, the public face of the Asturian body acknowledges that this change, with more women leading businesses, will be “slow”.
One of these women entrepreneurs revolutionising the business world, specifically the agri-food sector, is Verónica Menéndez. This Asturian heads Agrolinera Astur S.L., an innovative startup that sets out to digitalise the collection of agricultural and livestock waste such as slurry and whey from traditional cheese dairies and livestock farms in the smallholding areas of Asturias, as well as the rest of northern Spain and many other parts of Europe.
With this “pioneering” project, she aims to avoid “all the impact that this waste has on the environment”. “By optimising logistics you are reducing the carbon footprint,” she says. This kind of “mobile recycling point” can also valorise the waste. “Slurry, for example, would go to a biogas treatment plant and the whey would be collected to reintroduce it into the food chain,” she explains.
This business idea also has a “very big” social impact, as it makes it easier for livestock farmers to manage waste that is “limiting” their economic growth. “For a small farm or cheese dairy to be profitable it has to grow, and to grow it needs to produce more cheese or keep more livestock, which means more slurry or whey,” she states.
The fact that “mid-range and high-end” restaurants have aromatic herbs and vegetables in their larders all year round to prepare dishes that delight anyone’s palate is partly thanks to the work of Asturian Tesa Portillo. This biologist from Oviedo is behind Cantábrica Agricultura Urbana, a business project through which she, with the help of her partner Javier, sows and harvests plants of culinary interest 365 days a year. And she does so “differently from conventional agriculture”, with a cultivation method that is innovative across Spain.
She harvests inside a commercial ground-floor unit in the city, using vertical farming and hydroponics, a system in which plants do not need to be in contact with soil. “We control the whole environment: the temperature, the humidity, the light and even the nutrients that reach the plants,” says Tesa. In this way, the two biologists grow all year round, “maintaining consistent quality and being able to offer out-of-season produce, which gives the product added value”.
The online gaming industry is undergoing remarkable changes because innovation knows no limits. In this field, the startup launched by Asturian María de la Puente stands out, aiming to drive the growth of companies in the mobile game sector. Through HubApps, the Oviedo-born entrepreneur supports companies during the launch and expansion phases of video games and mobile apps, providing essential marketing and data analytics services.
“Hiring a senior professional specialising in performance marketing for apps is difficult because there aren’t many of them and they are also very expensive. That’s why companies that are not yet sure about the viability of their game turn to HubApps to launch their products and analyse the results,” she explains. In these cases, she and her team study the key metrics and advise clients on what data they should measure, before running the first paid marketing campaigns.
If the product shows potential, María and her team keep supporting the companies. “When we see that everything is going well, we bring in a team of specialists to help them with business expansion and the global launch,” the Asturian businesswoman notes. In this way, HubApps provides comprehensive marketing and data analytics support, from Asturias to clients all over the world.
Technology is also becoming one of the great allies of the healthcare sector. Healthcare professionals are using new technical advances to improve their patients’ quality of life. One of these medical devices used to support patients’ physical wellbeing is developed by the Asturian company Loutkar Robotics S.L., a company headed by social worker Sonia Aladro.
This company led by the Asturian designs and develops robotic orthoses “within everyone’s reach”. These small exomuscular medical devices, characterised by being “lightweight, accessible and modular”, enable people with lower-limb disabilities to walk again, regain their independence and improve their quality of life. Used under the supervision of the rehabilitation team, they make it possible to “complement therapy and help improve outcomes”.
Also with the mission of developing innovative new therapeutic solutions to improve human health, the biotech company Platelet BioTechnologies S.L. (PlaBiTe) was founded in September 2023. It is the first spin-off involving both the Foundation that manages the Institute, FINBA, and the University of Oviedo and its co-founder is Andrea Acebes, who is also managing director of the multidisciplinary team that makes up the company.
This Asturian company focuses on developing new platelet-based bioproducts and services for use in regenerative medicine. “Today, platelet-based treatments have a series of limitations, the most critical being how these products are applied,” says the expert, before explaining that because they are obtained “from the patient’s own blood”, individuals who are not in a healthy condition “would be excluded” from the healing process.
To address this situation, PlaBiTe has developed a method — currently subject to an international patent application — that “makes it possible to obtain a platelet bioproduct highly enriched in growth factors”, while also overcoming “some of these limitations”. It offers competitive advantages such as, for example, “the possibility of being applied universally – no patients would be excluded – and its immediate availability in the clinic”.
CEEI support, essential for this type of business
Launching each of these business projects and enabling these women to own their own companies has been possible partly thanks to the help provided by the CEEI. The Asturian public body has supported these Asturian women throughout the process of setting up their companies. To this day it continues to provide them, free of charge, with support that is “invaluable”. “For a small company like ours that is still validating its business model, the work they do is essential,” notes Menéndez.
From day one, the CEEI provides its services to people based in our region who want to launch, or have already launched, a business plan. It helps with everything related to red tape, while advising entrepreneurs and answering any questions they may have. At the same time, among many other actions, it attracts innovative and technology-based business projects from knowledge-generating environments such as the University of Oviedo or the Technology Centres.
Once the company has been set up, through its Acelera Startups programme they train the entrepreneurs and put them in touch with the region’s leading anchor companies. They also offer “personalised” advice and make “a whole host of high-level, quality resources” available to the new business owners. All with the aim of growing and consolidating the business plan.
The growth of these companies underlines the importance of supporting and promoting gender diversity in the business world. Moreover, the success of these Asturian women serves as inspiration for new generations of women to take the reins of their own business initiatives.