Miguel Arias

General Partner

2021 - Current

Privileged to help exceptional founders in their journey from early startups to global scale ups. Mostly SaaS, Data, IoT, Ciber, AI and infrastructure entrepreneurs, anywhere in LATAM and Europe. Board member / active investor in: - Quibim (Spain) AI-based medical image processing - Nflux (US) Computer vision AI copilot for manufacturing - Digibee (Brazil) New gen enterprise integration platform

Board Member / Advisory

2016

Advisory Board roles at various startups and companies such as Vizzuality, CARTO, Graphext, TinyBird...

Entrepreneurship external faculty

2009

I love to teach about my entrepreneurial and corporate experiences. I usually teach around the subjects of M&A for startups, Scale-up Management and Corporate Entrepreneurship through 10 session seminars. I have proudly won an award for Teaching Excellence at IE Business School multiple times over the last years.

Alumni Association Board Member

2012 - 2015

To promote an everlasting relationship among the members of the IE community, facilitating a common platform of business, career development and lifelong learning opportunities, with the objective to propel personal and professional development of IE students and alumni, in accordance with the principles and values of IE

Global Entrepreneurship Director

2018 - 2021

As global head of the entrepreneurship initiatives of the Telefónica Group, Miguel manages Telefonica's seed investment fund and all the operator's entrepreneurship spaces, including the 11 Wayra open innovation hubs and the 50 open future spaces around the world. He is responsible for leading the new stage in Telefónica's open innovation strategy; this is committed to seeking out and developing technological solutions to complement internal R&D while creating an improved connection with international entrepreneurship ecosystems. Wayra is a global platform designed to connect entrepreneurs, startups, investors and public and private partners around the world to capture innovation and business opportunities. Its goal is create a smooth interface for Telefonica to work with top innovators through a comprehensive model for business acceleration. The program incorporates Telefónica Group's open innovation, entrepreneurship and investment initiatives through a global network that is open to participation by external partners that wish to develop their own entrepreneurial and investment strategies and connect them with large companies. To date, over 750 startups have received investment and in excess of 1,700 have been accelerated. While more than 130 startups do joint business with Telefónica . Telefónica Open Innovation initiatives are present in 16 countries and over 200 million euros have been deployed to date.

Board Member - Telefonica Open Innovation

2018 - 2021

Telefonica Open Innovation includes all Open Innovation for the Telefonica Group globally, ranging from Wayra to Open Future and Innovation funds. With a portfolio of over 850 startups, from seed to growth stages in the areas of Cyber, AI, Video, AR/VR, IoT, Data, Networks, Enterprise SaaS, etc

Board Member - Observer

2020 - 2021

Co-Founder

2010 - 2021

Chamberi Valley is the leading network of consolidated tech entrepreneurs in Madrid. It is formed by tech startups in the ramping up phase (admission criteria: 1Mio € revenues and/or 1Mio € funding).

High Level Advisor to Startup Europe

2019 - 2021

The Startup Europe Advisory Board helps to identify the underlying problems that the Startup Europe initiative needs to tackle in order to create a real startup ecosystem in Europe. The Startup Europe Advisory Board reviews activities currently undertaken by the Startup Europe team and its projects. It assesses their effectiveness and makes suggestions to maximise the outcome. The board reports to the European Commission which limits board membership to visible and senior actors of the European entrepreneurship ecosystem.

Business Angel

2012 - 2019

Seed investor and advisor in various tech startups in Spain (web and/or mobile sector): Marfeel.com (exit in series A led by Nauta, BDMI and Elaia, april 2013) Reallylatebooking.com (exit to Hot.es, october 2013) Reclamador.es (exit in Series A) Dada Company Graphext Cream e-Sports Vizzuality Alte

COO & Board Member

2014 - 2018

CARTO leads the world of location intelligence, empowering any organization and individual to discover and predict key insights through location data and then makes it available to their organization or the general public in the form of location intelligence apps. CARTO has raised over $100 million US to date (Insight Venture Partners, Accel Partners, Salesforce Ventures, EarlyBird, Kibo Ventures...) and has over 1,000 paying customers. With offices in Madrid, New York and London and a team of +200 talented individuals. CARTO’s customers are organizations like Twitter, BBVA, Bloomberg, Vodafone... Main Roles and responsibilities: As COO, I managed the operations and sales activities with special focus on the scaling up of the processes and strategies to meet the demanding needs of a high paced startup and market. I have led the funding efforts with national and international VCs from the seed round to the series B. I have also led the global sales strategy and activities from 0 to 10 million ARR. While overseeing company building in different countries and markets, managing HR processes and legal initiatives.

Mentor

2011 - 2017