Dr. Patricia Puiggròs’ IKI Health earns a place at the Startup World Cup Grand Final in San Francisco, competing for $1M. Courtbrain claims 2nd at the Padel World Summit. Two wins. One portfolio.
BARCELONA / IBIZA / MALLORCA — Two Max Ventures portfolio companies have taken top positions at major European startup competitions, and one of them is now heading to San Francisco to compete on the world stage.
Dr. Patricia Puiggròs, founder and CEO of IKI Health, has won the prestigious Next Unicorn Startup Competition at the Ibiza Tech Forum, one of the Mediterranean’s most visible platforms for emerging technology ventures.
The win is more than a trophy. The Next Unicorn prize earns IKI Health a place at the Startup World Cup Grand Final in San Francisco, where she will compete against the best startups from over 60 countries for a $1,000,000 investment prize.
IKI Health is building what it calls a clinical operating system for preventive medicine , an AI-powered platform that enables health professionals to prescribe personalised lifestyle medicine at scale. Rather than waiting for disease to appear, IKI’s platform monitors, adapts, and anticipates: creating evidence-based lifestyle plans in under three seconds, tracking physical, emotional and metabolic evolution from a single interface, and flagging clinical alerts before it’s too late.
Dr. Puiggròs brings more than two decades of clinical experience to the company, from anaesthesiology and chronic pain management to sports medicine and women’s hormonal health. She founded IKI Health in 2022 from Palma de Mallorca with a single question: why isn’t there a tool that makes lifestyle medicine both real and scalable? Today, she leads the company with its sights set firmly on the US market.
Courtbrain secured second place in the Startup of the Year Pitch Competition at the Padel World Summit, a global gathering at the intersection of sports, technology and investment.
Courtbrain is the world’s first open marketplace for racket sports. The platform aggregates available court times for padel, tennis, badminton, pickleball and more — regardless of which booking system a club uses, into a single search. Players find courts in seconds. Clubs get discovered without changing their existing infrastructure. As padel continues its rapid global growth, Courtbrain is positioning itself as the connective layer the sport has been missing.
Both companies were identified and backed through Max Ventures’ proprietary investment process, one built around data, not instinct.
Max Ventures operates at the intersection of its fund and Balearic Business Angels, one of the Balearic Islands’ most active investor communities. To source and qualify investments, the firm uses two in-house tools:
“Patricia is exactly the kind of founder our process is designed to surface, deep clinical expertise, a clearly defined market problem, and the conviction to build the solution herself. IKI Health’s win at the Next Unicorn is well deserved, and we’re proud to be part of her journey to San Francisco. Courtbrain’s result is equally a reflection of a team solving a real problem in a fast-growing sport. Both companies were selected through the same data-driven methodology we apply to every investment, and the podiums speak for themselves.” — Max Ventures Leadership Team
Max Ventures (maxventures.eu) is a European early-stage venture fund using proprietary AI tooling to identify and back category-defining startups. The firm’s portfolio includes Pynn (pynn.ai) and AngelHive (angelhive.io), serving both its own fund and the Balearic Business Angels investor network.
Max Ventures | info@maxventures.eu | maxventures.eu
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