Skip to main content
< Back to news
Alfons Nonell-Canals, at the 'crowdequity' presentation event held on 15 September at PCB (Photo: Daniel Portales, PCB).
 29.10.2015

Mind the byte concludes the biggest round of biotech crowdequity in Spain

In just 43 days, bioinformatics company Mind the Byte, which specializes in products and services for computational drug design and is located in the Barcelona Scientific Park (PCB), has concluded an investment round totalling €234,310 through the crowdequity platform (for investment crowdfunding) Crowdcube. This figure represents not only more than double the funding target set by the company (234%), but it is also the largest round of crowdequity achieved in the biotech industry in Spain, with 115 private investors. The average investment amount was €2,037, with a maximum investment of €80,000.

 

The capital is intended to consolidate the plan for expansion and internationalization of Mind the Byte, for which company has relied on the strategic support of ACCIÓ, the Catalan Agency for Business Competitiveness set up by the Government of Catalonia. The first step was to establish a subsidiary in the Copenhagen Bio Science Park (COBIS), one of the most dynamic European clusters in terms of scientific innovation and technological transfer. The second step will be to “boost the marketing of our SaaS platform for drug discovery in countries like the United States, Denmark, Germany and Japan” explains Dr. Alfons Nonell-Canals, Founder and CEO of Mind the Byte.

The SaaS platform (Software as a Service), which operates on a pay-per-use basis and employs the latest software, was developed by Mind the Byte in order to break through the major technological and economic barriers of computational design for biotech and pharmaceutical companies and research centres. “We help to speed up the time to market of new drugs by as much as 1 to 3 years,” says Nonell-Canals.

Pepe Borrell, Executive Director of Crowdcube in Spain, says that Mind the Byte is just the beginning of alternative financing for biotech companies: “Crowdcube investors strongly believe in the development of these companies and support the importance of their business in today’s society”.

This is the second time Mind the Byte has expanded its capital, in late 2014 it completed a round of €200,000 under the leadership of the InKemia IUCT Group. Recently, the company received funding from the H2020 SME Instrument of the European Commission for Datanimbus, its personalized Big Data medicine project.

 

 

 Related news [+]