Can You Build a Startup Ecosystem in the Balearic Islands? Our Journey Since 2022

When Patrick Visser tells people he is building a tech ecosystem in Mallorca, he usually gets one of two reactions. The first is polite skepticism. The second is genuine curiosity from someone who has quietly wondered the same thing.

Mallorca is not short of wealth, talent, or ambition. What it has historically lacked is structure: a place where investors and founders can find each other, where early-stage capital is available without flying to Madrid or Amsterdam, and where the idea of building a technology company on an island feels like a rational choice rather than a romantic one. That gap is what Max Ventures set out to close.

Starting with a Space

Patrick left the Netherlands at seventeen with a straightforward goal: work, travel, and learn from as many people and cultures as possible. Over the following decades he lived and built businesses across more than a dozen countries, from the Canary Islands and Greece to Australia, Taiwan, Indonesia, India, Israel, and Panama, before eventually arriving in Mallorca. What he saw was what most residents see: exceptional quality of life, a wealthy international community, a booming tourism economy. What he also saw was an absence.

There was no real startup scene to speak of. Successful business people who might have invested locally had no structured way to connect with founders. Founders with promising ideas had nowhere to go for capital, mentorship, or a professional environment tailored to early-stage companies. The talent and the money existed on the same island. They just never met each other.

"Lots of wealthy people live here or have homes here," Patrick has said. "If we pool our resources and support young professionals with great ideas, we can attract brilliant minds, create jobs, and keep local talent from leaving."

In February 2022, Max Ventures opened a coworking space in El Terreno, Palma, not as a real estate play, but as a deliberate gathering point. Before you can build an ecosystem, you need people in the same room. You cannot engineer the serendipity that produces the best early-stage companies, but you can create the conditions for it.

Seed One: The First Real Bet

In 2023, Max Ventures launched Seed One, a €500,000 fund structured as an LLP in the UK, raised from Patrick and his network. The mandate was straightforward: invest in early-stage startups in the Balearics, prove that a disciplined seed strategy could generate real returns in a market most institutional investors had never considered, and learn enough to do it better at scale.

The portfolio delivered a 2.1x return on paper over two years. For a first fund in an emerging ecosystem, investing in companies most institutional players would have passed over simply because of geography, that number validated the model. It also revealed a problem.

Columat is a smart logistics platform focused on last-mile delivery for Mediterranean businesses. Since receiving investment, it has grown from 180,000 to €2.2 million in annual turnover in two years.

IberianTax automates tax compliance for foreign property owners in Spain and Portugal. In the two years following investment, it grew from processing around 800 tax returns per year to 8,000.

IKI Health is a digital health platform using AI-driven insights for personalized wellness and preventive care. It remains active and growing.

The Infrastructure Problem

Running Seed One made something clear. The process of evaluating startups, managing deal flow, and maintaining relationships with portfolio companies was fundamentally broken, and not just at Max Ventures. It was the default state of early-stage investment infrastructure everywhere.

Applications arrived in different formats. Scoring was inconsistent from one reviewer to the next. Startups that did not fit the current mandate were discarded with no record and no way to route them to another investor who might have been a better match. After programs ended, contact dropped off. The data that should have been getting smarter with every cohort just evaporated.

The team at Max Ventures, led by David Franzen as CEO of the platform division, set out to build something better.

Building the Layer That Was Missing

Out of that effort came two products now central to everything Max Ventures does.

Pynn is a white-label AI platform for innovation communities. Incubators, accelerators, angel networks, venture capital firms, and event organizers can each set up a branded instance, define their investment thesis, and start receiving AI-assessed startup applications the same day. No developer required. Ten minutes to configure, and live.

Every startup that applies receives a structured assessment covering team, product, market, and financials, scored automatically against the organization's defined thesis. The pipeline is managed in a built-in CRM. Events and investment committee votes are handled in-platform. And every Pynn client connects to the AngelHive marketplace, meaning deal flow can move across networks rather than dying in a single inbox.

Pynn launched commercially in April 2025 and has been adopted by more than 30 innovation communities globally, with over 3,000 startups assessed on the platform.

AngelHive is the marketplace layer connecting all of those Pynn communities. A startup applies once and gains visibility across the full network of connected investor communities. Rather than submitting the same materials to dozens of separate funds and waiting in silence, founders receive a structured AI assessment and reach investors who have already defined a thesis their company actually fits.

Balearic Business Angels: Organizing the Capital That Was Already Here

In 2025, Max Ventures launched the Balearic Business Angels (BBA), a community of active investors in the Balearic Islands focused on supporting early-stage startups with both capital and hands-on involvement. BBA members access deal flow through AngelHive, participate in investment committees, co-invest alongside the fund, and gather regularly for events that keep the community connected.

"We simply need more business angels and investors to step up," Patrick has said. "The opportunities are here, and the money is here too. They just do not seem to meet each other." The BBA is the mechanism built to change that.

Seed Two: Doing It at Scale

With Seed One validated, the platforms built, and the angel network active, Max Ventures is now raising Seed Two, a fund targeting pre-seed and seed stage technology startups with a strong preference for companies registered or operational in the Balearics. Every investment candidate is assessed through Pynn before reaching the investment committee, ensuring consistent, thesis-driven evaluation from the first look to the final decision.

The Argument We Are Making

What Max Ventures is really doing is making an argument: that Mallorca can be something other than a tourism economy. Not an argument against tourism, which the island's economy depends on, but a case for a fourth pillar alongside it.

A tech and innovation sector would create more diverse employment, give local graduates somewhere compelling to go, and attract international talent drawn by a quality of life few technology hubs can match. "Why not live your best life?" as Patrick has put it. "If the opportunity exists to follow your professional dreams whilst also enjoying an amazing lifestyle, world-class beaches and sunny weather, why wouldn't you take it?"

Three years in, the foundation is built. The question now is how far it can go.

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Interested in Seed Two, co-investment through the BBA, or learning more about what Max Ventures is building? Connect with the team at maxventures.eu.