The Poblenou Founder Betting Barcelona's Tech Future on Circular Manufacturing

Marta Solà registered Loopcraft SL at Barcelona's Registro Mercantil on 14 January 2025 with €80,000 in seed capital and a single, blunt premise: that European manufacturers were throwing away the raw ingredients of the next generation of high-performance materials. Eighteen months later, her Poblenou workshop has a Series A term sheet on the table, a pilot contract with a Granollers-based automotive supplier, and a waiting list of corporate clients longer than she expected to see before 2028.

The timing matters. Barcelona's 22@ Innovation District is pushing through a second-wave regeneration plan that runs through 2030, with the city's economic development agency, Barcelona Activa, allocating €45 million toward deep-tech and advanced manufacturing startups over the next four years. That money needs companies to absorb it. Loopcraft, which converts agri-industrial byproducts — specifically almond shells from Lleida-region cooperatives and spent cork from the Penedès wine industry — into biodegradable composite panels, sits precisely at the intersection the city wants to fund.

Solà, a materials engineer who completed her doctorate at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in 2019, spent three years inside a large chemical group before walking away to set up in a rented ground-floor unit on Carrer de Pallars, two blocks from the Rambla del Poblenou. The neighbourhood has absorbed dozens of similarly early-stage ventures since the 22@ plan first broke ground in 2000, but the latest cohort is notably different: heavier on hardware, shorter on pure software plays, and far more interested in the physical supply chains that digital-first startups largely ignored.

A model built on Barcelona's industrial geography

Loopcraft's competitive edge is partly logistical. Catalonia produces roughly 45,000 tonnes of almond shell waste annually, much of it currently burned for low-grade energy or sent to landfill at cost to the cooperatives. Solà's process, which she licensed selectively from a patent filed jointly with the UPC's INTEXTER textile-and-materials institute in Terrassa, bonds that cellulose fibre with a bio-resin binder under controlled pressure. The resulting panels pass EN 310 flexural strength tests and undercut conventional medium-density fibreboard on price by approximately 12 percent at projected production volumes of 500 tonnes per year.

The Hub d'Innovació Barcelona, the co-working and incubation complex on Carrer de Sancho de Ávila, gave Loopcraft lab space and mentoring access during its first nine months under the Porta22 Tech accelerator programme run by Barcelona Activa. That access to shared equipment — electron microscopy, tensile testing rigs — cut Solà's early capital requirements significantly and let her reach prototype stage without a full facilities build-out.

Barcelona's startup ecosystem recorded €1.2 billion in total venture investment during 2025, according to figures published by Startup Genome in March 2026, placing the city seventh in Europe by capital deployed. The number is respectable but masks a persistent gap: deep-tech and hardware companies still attract a disproportionately small share of that total, with software and fintech absorbing roughly 60 percent. Loopcraft is one of a cluster of material-science startups — including the cellulose-battery venture Cellvolt, based on Carrer de la Llacuna, and the agri-waste textiles firm Hempanya, operating out of the Zona Franca industrial estate — trying to shift that balance.

What comes next for Loopcraft and 22@

Solà expects to close her Series A — targeting €3.2 million — before the end of September 2026, with at least two Barcelona-based family offices among the likely participants alongside a German industrial-materials fund. If the round closes on schedule, she plans to move into a larger production unit in the Parc Tecnològic de Barcelona, the city-managed science park adjacent to the Diagonal-Besòs campus, before the end of the year.

For founders watching from elsewhere in the 22@ corridor, the Loopcraft trajectory offers a replicable template: exploit Catalonia's specific agricultural and industrial waste streams, use the UPC and Barcelona Activa infrastructure to cut early costs, and build toward the EU's Circular Economy Action Plan procurement requirements, which from 2027 will oblige public construction contracts above €500,000 to specify a minimum recycled-material content. The policy window, in other words, is open. The question for Barcelona's wider ecosystem is how many companies are positioned to walk through it.