Nonconformist by nature. 15 years managing energy our way.​

I grew up in León, a small city in the north of Spain, far from any tech hub. Some of my earliest memories are of playing hide-and-seek with my brother through the factory my father directed, a place that made electricity meters.​

Energy was everywhere in my childhood, and my father made sure of it, forever taking us to see things connected with it. One has stayed with me ever since. I must have been ten, back in the 1980s, when an exhibition came through on a train, city by city, each carriage devoted to a different source — solar, wind, and hydro — with working models explaining how each one worked.​

Those meters were blunt instruments. They told you how much energy you had used, but never how, when, or where. Today that data can be broken apart to show exactly where it goes. But data has never been enough on its own. You have to know how to read it. That has been my mission for thirty years, and it is why I built Smarkia.​

I have never been much good at conforming, and that is ultimately what set my course. When my father's company was bought by a multinational, I was just starting university, and the two of us built one of our own, distributing measurement and control systems. That is where I lived the business world firsthand. From the inside, I saw the limits of the big multinationals in the sector — they simply did not innovate at the pace their customers were asking for. So after the 2008 crisis, as the cloud and SaaS emerged around 2011, I knew it was time to do things on my own terms.​