The Catalan startup Mitiga has become one of the standout players in the Spanish entrepreneurial ecosystem after winning South Summit Madrid 2026. The Barcelona‑based company has earned recognition for , a platform that blends artificial intelligence, high‑performance computing, and climate models to help companies measure and reduce their exposure to physical climate risks.
The prize arrives at a moment when climate risk has ceased to be a sustainability issue and has turned into a business variable. Flooding, fires, heat waves, droughts, and extreme events can directly affect asset value, infrastructure, supply chains, insurance policies, or investment decisions. In that context, Mitiga aims to turn climate science into actionable information so that businesses, insurers, investors, or asset managers can anticipate and make better decisions.
The tool that convinced the South Summit 26 jury is EarthScan, a SaaS platform that enables analysis, reporting, and action on climate risk exposure. According to the company, EarthScan provides information based on different climate scenarios and time horizons, and it is already used in sectors such as manufacturing, retail, hospitality, real estate, and infrastructure investment.
From a scientific spin‑off to a global startup
Mitiga is not a startup born solely from software; it stems from scientific research. The company was founded in 2018 by Alejandro Martí and Mauricio Hanzich, and originated as a spin‑off of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, one of Europe’s leading hubs for supercomputing.
Alejandro Martí, CEO and cofounder, brings more than 15 years of international experience in technology, climate, and natural risk prevention. Before Mitiga, he worked with organizations and companies such as the U.S. Government, NASA, UK Met Office, and Repsol, and chairs the United Nations International Telecommunication Union’s working group on AI applied to natural risks.
Meanwhile, Mauricio Hanzich, CTO and cofounder, brings the most technological and HPC‑oriented profile. For more than a decade he led the software development group in the Barcelona Senior National Supercomputing Center’s scientific applications and engineering area, with expertise in HPC and complex software development.
The company is headquartered at 3 Julià Portet Street, Barcelona, and also has a presence in the United Kingdom.
A data‑driven business: AI and physical risk
Mitiga’s business sits in a fast‑growing category: climate intelligence applied to business decision making. Its proposition is to analyze the physical risk that climate change may pose to concrete assets, from a factory to a hotel, a real estate portfolio, an energy infrastructure, or a logistics network.
The company says it helps clients in 20 countries and runs on a technology stack that includes 500,000 lines of proprietary code, 100 TB of data, and 5,000,000,000 data points incorporated daily into its data lake.
The goal is for organizations to answer increasingly critical questions: What flood risk will a location have in the coming years? How will a heat wave affect an infrastructure? Which assets in a real estate portfolio are most exposed? How can a company’s climate exposure be justified to investors or regulators?
Microsoft, Kibo, Elaia and investor backing
The company’s growth is also explained by the backing of prominent investors. In 2023 it closed a €13.25 million Series A led by Kibo Ventures, with participation from Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, Nationwide Ventures, Faber Ventures and CREAS Impacto. Microsoft noted at the time that Mitiga was the first Spanish startup to receive investment from its Climate Innovation Fund.
In 2024, the company expanded its Series A with another €8 million in a round led by Elaia, alongside existing investors such as Kibo Ventures, CREAS Impacto and Faber. The round aimed to scale EarthScan in a context of growing demand for tools to analyze and report climate risks. (Mitiga Solutions)
Why this matters for businesses
Mitiga’s victory at South Summit 2026 reflects a fundamental trend: AI is moving to center stage when applied to real business problems. In this case, it’s not about automating text or generating images, but about calculating how climate can influence decisions on investment, expansion, insurance, business continuity, and infrastructure planning.
While their natural customers are large corporations, insurers, funds, real estate firms, or industrial companies, the impact of these solutions can also reach small and medium-sized enterprises that are part of demanding supply chains or that need to demonstrate resilience, operational continuity, and adaptability in the face of climate events.
With its South Summit 2026 win, Mitiga cements itself as one of Spain’s most interesting startups of the moment: a deep‑tech company born in Barcelona, grounded in science, supercomputing, and AI, that has found business in one of the major business concerns of the coming years: understanding how costly it is not to prepare for climate change.
