The Plenary Session of the National Forum for Emerging Companies, chaired by the Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, approved on Wednesday the analysis prepared over the past year by the three Working Groups of Law 28/2022. The main conclusion: almost four years after its approval, the ecosystem has grown, matured, and strengthened its talent base.
A significant quantitative leap
Spain has gone from 3,600 startups in 2024 to nearly 5,000 in 2025, an increase of 40% in twelve months. Employment in the sector has grown by 46% since 2022, and the average lifespan of companies has risen to 3.5 years, a sign of greater stability.
The turnover of technology startups has also advanced strongly: from €11.5 billion to €14.8 billion between 2024 and 2025. Investment, meanwhile, has stabilised above €3.1 billion, in a market environment that is more selective than in previous years.
The Startup Law: operational and gaining traction fiscally
The certification system for emerging companies, managed by ENISA, has already accumulated more than 2,100 certified companies, with average processing times of 45 days, below the legal maximum of three months. Tax incentives are also gaining importance: the number of companies applying the reduced Corporate Income Tax rate doubled between 2023 and 2024.
The technology ecosystem as a whole now exceeds 8,500 companies, a figure that includes startups and technology firms at different stages of development.
Spain as a destination for international talent
One of the most striking findings of the report concerns talent attraction. Residence permits granted under Law 14/2013 have grown by 286% between 2020 and 2024, rising from 23,608 to 91,170. The international remote worker category stands out as one of the most dynamic drivers.
In terms of equality, 42% of the emerging companies certified by ENISA already have at least one woman on their management team. The report acknowledges progress, but continues to identify female representation in the ecosystem as an unresolved structural challenge, with particular attention to rural entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship among people with disabilities.
The challenges that remain unchanged
Growth in scale does not conceal the challenges that the report itself clearly identifies. The transition from startup to scaleup remains the ecosystem’s main bottleneck: funding rounds in later stages are scarce, and the available capital tends to be concentrated either in the early stages or in large-scale transactions.
Added to this is the territorial concentration in Madrid and Barcelona, which the Government acknowledges as an imbalance that needs to be addressed, as well as the need to harmonise ecosystem measurement systems so that data are comparable and actionable. The adaptation of SMEs to digital regulatory frameworks such as the Data Act, the DMA, or the DSA also appears as an outstanding task, although the report notes that more than 74% of Spanish SMEs have already reached a basic level of digital intensity, above the European average.
Compass’ Insight: What Spain learned from startups, it now has an opportunity to apply to the rest
The Startup Law has demonstrated something that was not obvious when it was approved: that a well-designed regulatory framework can change the behaviour of an ecosystem in a short period of time. Agile certification, tax incentives with real traction, attraction of international talent, reduction of administrative delays. The experiment has worked. The question that now emerges is whether Spain has the ambition to apply that same logic to its productive fabric as a whole. Because the bottlenecks that hinder a startup in its transition to a scaleup—access to financing in later stages, bureaucracy, difficulties in scaling—are exactly the same ones that have been holding back innovative Spanish SMEs for decades. The entrepreneurial ecosystem has been the laboratory. The productive economy as a whole could be the next patient.
