A venture builder that takes the risk first
We build startups in series: complete companies, from R&D to marketing, and we only win if they win. The definition is in what a venture builder is; the areas we cover, in the model.
Trust · The house
Who we are
Thirty years of innovation behind the founders; since 2023, in the service of a project of their own.
10 min read
For thirty years, long before Volcano was incorporated in 2023, we have built innovation for multinationals, industrial groups and SMEs. On specific projects, our proposal was the one chosen over far larger competitors: not because of size, but because it was a suit made to measure around the client's exact need, something a large company does not tailor. Today we put that capability at the service of an international network of entrepreneurs, companies, research centres and universities, coordinated from the Canary Islands.
In brief
Volcano, at a glance.
Empowering Innovation
Innovation that gives power to people, with four commitments that are not negotiable: the full manifesto lives in Why we exist.
A network of independent companies
Every startup is born with its own capital, its own team and its own governance. Volcano coordinates and guarantees the network, without taking controlling stakes: the principle is in the model.
Made to measure, like a tailor
We identify a specific market need and answer it with a suit made to measure, along the thirteen-phase path: the method is in The model.
The founders
Thirty years building tailored innovation before founding Volcano in 2023: their profiles, in The team.
The introduction
We are neither an incubator nor a fund.
Volcano is a network of independent companies sharing one same manifesto, coordinated legally and operationally from the Canary Islands. It contributes its founders' track record, thirty years developing innovation for large organisations and SMEs, and it coordinates an international network of entrepreneurs, specialist companies, research centres and universities. It is neither an incubator nor a fund: it builds companies, and shares in the value they create. The full story of why we exist and how we are organised lives in the manifesto, and where the word Volcano comes from, in the name.
The way of building
The method
It applies to our way of building too: like volcanoes, the best ideas are born of the friction between subterranean forces. It is the principle by which we set different capabilities, capitals and visions against each other until the solution emerges.
The proof
The track record
The team has already competed at the highest level, often with a fraction of the resources, against names that need no introduction. When the client chose us, it was not because of size: it was because the solution was a suit made to measure around their exact need, something the large firms do not tailor. That same tailor's logic (identifying a specific market need and answering it precisely) is the force with which we build startups today:
Banca Mediolanum
The bank's complete software platform, from beginning to end.
JC Decaux
We won the real-time vehicle tracking tender with the insight of manufacturing a hardware device of our own.
A year before Google Maps
GIS with multi-resolution satellite imagery served over the web to agricultural and mining multinationals.
Field GIS
Light and precise data capture, adopted by large Brazilian industrial groups such as Fibria and Samarco.
Brazilian military police
Onboard computers linking vehicles in real time: maps, positions, video and audio shared between units.
Buying food, the other way round
A concept that rethinks from the root the way people obtain their food.
The documentation supporting these projects is available to investors on request: write to Contact form WhatsApp. This technical capability is still available today, as a direct service for already established companies with problems that do not fit into a startup.
After almost thirty years building innovation for others, Volcano's founders made a decision: to stop limiting themselves to executing what multinationals commissioned, and to put that same capacity at the service of a more disruptive innovation, with a more positive impact on the planet and on those who live on it. The only way to do that at the necessary scale was to build a venture builder: a machine that adds up the strengths of many different actors and directs them towards good and fair innovation. Doing so requires capital, and capital does not move out of goodwill: profit attracts it. That is why every Volcano project is structured from the start to be financially very attractive, not just positive. It is the only way for good and fair innovation to reach the scale that really matters. Before Volcano, the founders came to invest up to a million euros a year of their own money in innovation: a figure that limited how many projects could move forward in parallel.
The decision
Why we stopped working for others.
For thirty years we built innovation for large organisations and for SMEs, and much of what is higher up this page was made that way. We did it well and it paid well. Volcano is born of deciding to stop doing it and move towards projects of our own, for three reasons, and none of the three is a reproach to anyone.
- Freedom to choose what to develop, and how
A multinational cannot always accept disruptive innovation: it would put at risk the products it already has on the market, and that is a rational decision on its part. An SME, for its part, does not always distinguish what really innovates from what does not; and when it does, it often would not know how to manage it inside its own structure. In fact, the reaction of the most clear-sighted is exactly that: proposing that we found a startup together, to take part in the innovation without touching the company they already have. That move is the one we turned into a model.
- The economic reason: once against always
Consultancy is paid once. The system is delivered, the invoice is issued and there it ends, however well paid it is. A product on the market is paid for every year, for as long as the market wants it. It is not that one figure is bigger than the other: it is that one stops and the other does not.
We learned it with a case of our own. In 2017 the group built a traced sanitisation system and invoiced 450.000 € for it: the price of the work, paid once. The company that took that technology to market declared 8 million euros of profit in 2020 alone. We did the hard part and collected the fee; the recurring value stayed where the ownership was. Volcano exists so that next time it is on the other side.
It is one case, not an average, and we tell it as a case. What it demonstrates is not how much is made with a startup, but where the recurring value lives: in whoever has the ownership, not in whoever invoiced the construction. The bars below show it year by year, with the margin given up and the losses of the start included.
- The positioning reason
There are many companies providing consultancy. Companies able to manage all the complexity of launching a new venture, from problem to market and with the tax and corporate structure included, are very few. Competing where there is little competition is the same logic we apply when choosing projects.
Eight years: collecting the fee or keeping the stake
Fee: revenue
€500,000 a year, two years
Fee: profit
the margin on that work
Startup: result for the year
the same cost, without margin
Startup: cumulative
with the losses already deducted
The same cumulative, with support
with Tax Lease and public funds
It is exactly the same work, done twice in different ways. On the left we charge for it: €500,000 a year for the two years the development lasts, with its margin. On the right we do the same, but without charging ourselves the margin, because when the project is ours there is nobody to invoice: what in the commission was profit is here investment. That is why the first two grey bars are below zero.
For the first two years the commission gains and the startup loses. We do not hide it because it is the datum that makes the rest credible: whoever builds something new pays before being paid. In the third year the research still weighs more than the first sales. From the fourth it turns round, because R&D spending falls while sales rise, and those two things happen at once.
The orange bar is the one that answers. It is the cumulative with all the losses inside: it returns to zero in year five, overtakes the commission's total profit in year six and closes year eight at 2.65 million against 500,000. And year nine goes on adding, while the commission's bar has been at zero for six years.
And that is with no help at all. The bars assume the harshest case: Volcano paying for the whole development out of its own pocket, with no Tax Lease and no public funds. When both come in, which is the usual case, the hole of the first years is roughly halved: it is the dotted line. Break-even moves forward from year five to year four and the year-eight cumulative goes to 3.1 million. That is why the order matters so much: up to TRL2 we pay, and from TRL2 to TRL5 tax capital comes in. It is explained in how the research is paid for.
That is the trade, said without ornament. Giving up two years of margin in exchange for keeping what that work produces afterwards. It is a bet, and that is why we make it with our money before anyone else's: in the three projects that have already run the full cycle, 100% of the capital was put in by Volcano.
And the real case was very different. In 2017 we built a traced sanitisation system and collected the fee. The company that took it to market declared 8 million of profit in 2020 alone, the year of the pandemic: outside this scale and outside what is reasonable as an expectation. We tell it because it happened, not because it is what should be expected. The argument is in the bars, not in that year.
And that leaves the risk where it really is. A startup that works is one that reaches a product and knows how to take it to market. The first half, turning a problem into a product that exists and is protected, is what Volcano knows how to do and what the Tax Lease funds before private capital comes in. What remains is the industrial and commercial risk: manufacturing and selling. It is real and we do not disguise it, but it is one risk only, and we take it on with you. The six levers are in the risk.
And that is why we still provide some services. It is not a contradiction: we stopped selling hours starting from scratch. Today we only put to work the know-how we have already built and paid for, and that is in services.
The chronology
2023 → 2026, year by year
2023. Volcano is incorporated. The first year is devoted to building the financial and tax infrastructure that makes the whole model possible (the Tax Lease, the certification relationships, the ZEC framework), and the first seven projects of the portfolio are already opened.
2024. Twelve more projects: the portfolio grows at the same pace as the infrastructure matures.
2025. Eight additional projects.
2026. The pace clearly accelerates: twenty-seven new projects, more than half of those you see today in Projects, and the first tangible results: four startups of our own incorporated (Neklio, OndeAnda, BikeBase, Think Real) and two external clients already served.
The contact
Contact details
The legal and operational coordination of the network is carried out by UPLUS22CF S.L., Calle Emilio Calzadilla, Nº 6, 3º Derecha, 38002 Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain. Contact: Contact form. The full details of this coordinating entity are in the legal notice.
Now that you know us.
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
John F. Kennedy, 1962
John F. Kennedy, 1962