The UOC creates an investment company for start-ups with social impact

The UOC has created a company that will invest in start-ups in the education and ICT sectors that have a social impact slant. Under the name of Invergy, the company has an initial budget of 500,000 euros and is part of HUBBIK, the services platform to foster the entrepreneurship and innovation of the UOC community, comprised of students, graduates, professors and researchers.

Through Invergy, the UOC is committed to projects in the ICT sector linked to the university’s spheres of knowledge, and to projects in the education sector from the whole innovation ecosystem.

“The creation of Invergy provides a response to one of the UOC’s missions”, explains Antoni Cahner, general manager of the UOC, “which is to foster the economic development of society through fostering innovative companies that strengthen the ties between business, knowledge and society”.

“Preferably, start-ups with an established team that covers the critical business areas, that are incorporated in Spain, with a clear international projection, that have a viable minimum product and with a maximum pre-money valuation of one million euros”, explains Mireia Riera, director of the UOC Knowledge Transfer and Research Support Office (OSRT).

Its model will be based on a capital investment, a participatory loan or a joint investment with a ceiling of 100,000 euros.

eQuàliment: its first investment

Invergy has made its first investment in eQuàliment: 40,000 euros with a participatory loan. It is a digital platform that enables the management and monitoring of the distribution of food donations to families experiencing financial hardship. eQuàliment provides an optimum monitoring of the logistics involved in this distribution: requests for parcels, organizing deliveries, managing stocks, generating proof of delivery, incident management and drafting statistics. eQuàliment began working in Catalonia and will shortly be operating in the rest of Spain. It is aimed at social services, social welfare managers and food distributors like the food bank Banc dels Aliments, the Red Cross, Càritas and local NGOs.

One of its managers is José Antonio Lavado, course instructor at the UOC, who presented eQuàliment at last year’s Spin UOC, the University’s annual entrepreneurship conference. Spin UOC is an initiative that is part of HUBBIK, which is celebrating its fifth edition this year. Over these years, 44 projects have been presented, over a hundred interviews have been conducted with possible stakeholders and over a thousand participants have attended.

The new HUBBIK undertaking

Invergy is the new company of the HUBBIK services platform at the UOC. The platform was created in 2015 and is located in the University’s Castelldefels centre, in the Parc Mediterrani de la Tecnologia.

The aim of HUBBIK is to foster the talent of the more than 100,000 people in the UOC community to promote initiatives capable of meeting the challenges of society and making them available to the public.