Countries
Spain and Uruguay
Industry
Technology
Acceleration services
Results
Uruguay is home to about 3.4 million people.
Nicolás Galmarini, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nanogrow, a biotech startup, sees it this way: if you want to sell something that matters, you have to sell it abroad.
However, going abroad brings another problem…
According to Nicolás, clients and investors in Europe and the United States often still doubt that a Latin American startup can deliver.
Meaning that without a local partner abroad, even strong science struggles to reach patients or investors.
Nanogrow develops therapies for immune disorders based on nanobodies, small antibodies derived from camels.
It joined the EU-LAC Digital Accelerator with its Spanish partner Nucaps, a company that encapsulates active ingredients.
In the first episode of the EU-LAC Digital Accelerator podcast, Nicolás talked to two mentors of the acceleration programme:
- Miguel Rodríguez, from Octantis,
- Xènia Colomer, from the European Business Angel Network.
So, put simply, what did the acceleration change?
1. A joint offer to take to pharmaceutical companies
Before the programme, Nanogrow already had laboratory results for its antibodies in gastric conditions.
With Nucaps, the team combined Nucaps’ encapsulation technology with computational artificial intelligence methods.
Together, they built a proof of concept for encapsulated antibodies (that can yield far better results for people with gastrointestinal conditions, as the antibody is not digested before it reaches the pain point).
The work has since moved on to tests in animal models.
“It was probably something we would not have done without [the EU-LAC Digital Accelerator],” says Nicolás.
Nanogrow and Nucaps now offer pharmaceutical companies a (tested) single package: Nanogrow’s antibodies, packaged in Nucaps’ capsules, designed to reach the lesion directly.
2. Funding to test and growbut getting paid can take weeks
Through the programme, Nicolás took part in events organised by the European Business Angel Network.
There, he could present Nanogrow in person to European investors he would have struggled to reach from Uruguay.
He also learnt how the European investment ecosystem works and what investors there expect from a startup.
Investors, he explains, need hard science translated into milestones they can value.
“Today, investors are coming into the company because I met them at those events,” he says.
Those introductions fed into a €4.3 million funding round, about US$5 million.
Among the investors is GridX, the Latin American biotech venture builder that helped create Nanogrow.
The money has a precise job: to move Nanogrow’s therapies for humans through the regulatory and preclinical stages that precede clinical trials.
Nanogrow has also secured over €320,000 in public research and development funding and hired 10 new team members.
The team now counts 25 people, most of them in Pamplona, Spain, plus a laboratory in Uruguay, a chief financial officer in Argentina and a business developer in the United States.
Many factors drive results like these, and the acceleration is only one of them.
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Many factors drive results like these, and the acceleration is only one of them.
Nicolás’s advice to Latin American founders is short: “You cannot stay behind your desk, because that is not where things happen.“
