The growth of Valencia’s tech ecosystem cannot be explained by investment or talent alone. It is also sustained by a less visible but decisive factor: the ability of teams to execute well from the very beginning, making sound decisions around product, operations and infrastructure when everything is still being built.
In this context, we welcome AXEBOW as a new supporter of Startup Valencia, a company focused on helping early-stage startups reduce operational friction, optimize resources and build a technology foundation ready to scale without letting infrastructure become a bottleneck.
On the occasion of their joining the community and the agreement reached with OVHcloud to offer a specific perk to startups in the innovation ecosystem, we spoke with Juan Mahíllo, CPO of AXEBOW, about the real challenges of seed and pre-seed stages, the most recurring mistakes when scaling, and the decisions that make a difference from day one.
For those who don’t know you yet, what is AXEBOW and what specific problem do you solve for early-stage startups?
The problem is simple: when you’re just starting out, every hour a developer spends wrestling with infrastructure is an hour not spent on product. And in a startup, those hours are the ones that determine whether you survive or not.
Companies in early stages need to focus on generating value quickly, while at the same time being ready to scale once they find their product-market fit.
AXEBOW allows companies to easily manage deployments and application operations without needing specialized infrastructure profiles. It is designed so that a developer can handle everything, without having to bring in a dedicated DevOps profile.
And as the company grows, AXEBOW allows it to scale its production, manage high availability or switch cloud providers directly, without rewriting anything.
In short: AXEBOW lets you focus on product development in the early stages, and grow and adapt as fast as the business requires.
How did the company come about and what market need made you see there was a clear opportunity to add value?
AXEBOW was born at the Universitat Politècnica de València, and rather than identifying an unmet need, the approach was that of a visionary leader: anticipating where technology and the market were heading.
Our founder and CTO, Dr. José Bernabeu, developed the core technology with his team before concepts like containers or microservices went mainstream. After a significant R&D investment within the university, the decision was made to create a company that would bring that technology into real-world environments, bringing in people with industry experience.
You are joining as new supporters of Startup Valencia. Why did you decide to bet on the Valencian tech ecosystem and what role do you want to play within the community?
Because AXEBOW is a Valencian company, built by Valencians. Our first client, EDICOM, is also Valencian, and that is no coincidence.
We want to become an enabler of local entrepreneurial talent: helping startups here grow more and faster without infrastructure becoming a bottleneck. Our ambition is to help Valencia establish itself as Spain’s third entrepreneurship hub, alongside Madrid and Barcelona.
From your experience, what is the biggest challenge for an early-stage startup that almost nobody anticipates and ends up being costly?
A startup is a machine for learning how to become a profitable company. The main challenge is staying focused and distinguishing signal from noise: concentrating on what matters and discarding what is dispensable.
However, it is very common that once that first phase is overcome, the company struggles to grow. That hyperfocus creates dependencies on people, processes and technologies that were not designed to scale.
When traction arrives, the stall usually follows. You have to rebuild parts of the core, hire people and start formalizing processes, losing momentum and sometimes the business itself.
We have seen companies that, because of this, were unable to turn a good MVP into a scalable product, losing traction and becoming service businesses instead.
One case that comes to mind is a monitoring company with an exceptional solution that ended up being acquired for far less than it was worth, simply because it could not scale its customer base efficiently as a SaaS.
If from the beginning you choose tools that allow you to grow without having to rebuild everything, the founding team stays in control and does not get sidelined when traction arrives.
Certain operational mistakes repeat themselves in seed or pre-seed stages and hold back growth. What are the most common ones and how can technology help avoid them from the start?
The mistakes we see most often are three: over-engineering the tech infrastructure too early, depending on a single cloud provider with no ability to migrate, and dedicating scarce talent to operations tasks instead of product.
Hyperfocus is not at odds with flexibility. In fact, that flexibility is what allows you to grow faster. Adding AXEBOW to the stack from day one gives you focus, keeps your team from being tied up managing infrastructure, and gives you the confidence of knowing you can switch cloud providers or scale whenever you need to, without disruption.
Since nobody builds a company to wake up at 4am managing a Kubernetes cluster, AXEBOW makes it all transparent.
Many startups face the dilemma of investing in tech infrastructure versus investing in product, especially when every euro counts. How do you recommend balancing that trade-off without mortgaging the future?
Without a present there is no future. You need to focus on building product. But having said that, you need to be ready for when the future becomes the present.
To put it plainly: invest in good developers, empower them to deploy and manage in any environment, and when the wave comes, be ready to ride it and grow.
You have reached an agreement with OVHcloud to offer a perk to ecosystem startups. What does it consist of exactly, who is it aimed at and how can it help them optimize resources from day one?
The long story short is that OVHcloud is going to put 25,000 € in cloud credits for early-stage startups and up to 100,000 € for scale-ups.
OVHcloud has perfectly understood the concept behind AXEBOW: allowing companies to learn at the start and grow as fast as possible.
OVHcloud is a European company that firmly believes in the talent of the continent’s startups. Those two reasons led them to partner with us and back the concept, not just with their positioning but with their money.
What do these investments mean for a startup? Fuel to learn and stay focused. If you build your product on AXEBOW, you can take it directly to OVHcloud without making any changes, take advantage of that investment and grow as much as your business requires. If you want to find out more, visit axebow.io/ovh and sign up. We will offer you two months of free service to build momentum.
To close, what advice would you give today to a founding team that is just starting out and feels like it has more open fronts than capacity to execute?
Focus on your customers, learn fast and be ready to grow. Everything else is noise. Good luck, we need more people like you.
