Startups tackle security, language, and maritime robots at MWC in Barcelona

Samsung, Huawei, and Nokia are some of the big names at the 2025 edition of the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona this week. However, WardUS, Bamboleo Talk, and Seabots are also present.

4YFN, the acronym for Four Years From Now, is the area at the MWC exhibition focused on startups. Occupying both sections of Hall 8, almost 900 different companies showcase their products.

Businesses can be vastly different, despite being fair booth neighbors and even coming from the same university, country, or environment. All have various fields of expertise, such as health, the latest upcoming technologies, security, or even learning. However, there is one common denominator among 60% of these exhibitors, and it is artificial intelligence.

“We have focused our event on artificial intelligence, as it is creating many opportunities for entrepreneurs,” Pere Duran, head of the 4YFN event, told the Catalan News Agency (ACN).

“We have invited the best experts in the field, from scientists developing the technology in labs to emerging companies and the ones that are leading the AI market,” he added.

Artificial Intelligence, according to Duran, “is something that we will all use.” He compared it to electricity.

One of the companies using AI is Alinia AI, a business-to-business startup that helps deploy generative AI in a trusted and controlled way that blocks the general public from accessing confidential information. The company was created by Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Ariadna Font, and it raised around €2.2 million before summer.

Robots and security

MWC 2025 has featured tri-folds, robots, and artificial intelligence. And a similar trend is observed at the 4YFN section of the fair.

Seabots is a Catalan company offering marine insights and analyzing biodiversity levels. The team has developed a robot that, using several sensors, explores the seabed and quantifies pollution or coastal erosion. The gathered data helps analyze the risks that infrastructure, such as ports, can face in the future.

“Robots allow us to reduce operational and personal costs and to digitalize the seabed,” Pau Simarro, head of innovation at Seabots, told ACN.

Seabots currently has six different robots, some of which are deployed across Catalonia to analyze the levels of carbon in posidonia, commonly known as Neptune grass.

While some startups explore the seabed, others focus on safety on the streets of Catalonia and Spain.

WardUs is an app whose primary “function is to press a button and send a distress signal to nearby people and your trusted contacts,” Roger Ayala, co-founder of the app, told Catalan News.

The free service was recently launched and allows users to record and send live video and audio, location, and the current situation to everyone on their contacts list. This allows them to analyze the level of danger a person is in and call emergency services.

Aside from the app, the company is developing a safe zones map on which it will color-code the safety level of the area in red, orange, and different tones of green, based on the government’s crime data.

“We are storing data on dangerous zones in the country, and this helps WardUs calculate the safest route between two places,” Ayala said to this media outlet.

Their goal is to keep the app free and open to everyone but to offer the security map feature to many companies, such as dating apps, to ensure safe dates.

Language and fun

At the 4YFN fair, all future ideas are present, including those that take the base of an existing company and completely reshape it.

One of these examples is the one imagined by Gerard Xalabardé, CEO of Cocopool: “a pool-sharing marketplace.” To explain the concept, he compares it with Airbnb.

“We are like Airbnb, but for pools,” meaning that the company connects swimming pool owners with those who need to rent a pool, such as “families, groups, and companies for birthdays, barbecues, team buildings, or even baby showers,” Xalabardé told Catalan News.

The company currently operates in Barcelona and Madrid, but this year, it will expand to cities such as Girona, Tarragona, Valencia, Alicante, Seville, and Toledo.

Founded in 2022 at Catalonia’s Polytechnic University’s Tecnocampus site, Cocopool has around 400 pool owners listed. They rent the pool for an average of €400 per six-hour use for around 10 people, and they take around 25% of the commission for the service.

There are two different targets among the users: those who own a pool and mainly live on “the outskirts of big cities” and families, groups of friends, expats, and even companies looking to enjoy pool time.

“It is a growing market for team building use,” Xalabardé explained.

While some mimic Airbnb, others personalize their experiences with language learning apps like Duolingo.

“We use technology for other things,” Ángela Agraz Capella, CEO and founder of Bamboleo Talk, told Catalan News.

Over 100 students, or bambies (as the app calls them) have used Bamboleo to learn with a mentor and one of the buddies for motivation.

”Bamboleo is the go-to platform for users determined to get fluent in second languages,” Agraz told Catalan News. The company has a “very exhaustive” selection process to hire the “best tutors” depending on the personality of the learner, who pay around €25 per one-hour remote lesson.

At the moment, bambies are learning Spanish and English, both in Europe and Japan, but there are also French, Catalan, and Korean lessons. “We have quite a range of languages,” Agraz added. Classes combine a mentor and buddy approach to let users be able to speak in a language in three months.