From Barcelona to Athens: three recognitions for Link3rs

Our list of awards holds fourteen recognitions. Today we focus on three that mark Link3rs’ path as a company: victory in Junior Achievement’s national competition, a place on the European podium at GEN‑E and the backing of Barcelona Activa.

JA StartUp Programme 2025, from Junior Achievement

The Startup Programme is the Junior Achievement Foundation’s university entrepreneurship programme in Spain. Teams turn an idea of their own into a business project and defend it in a national competition whose winner represents Spain at GEN‑E, the major European event.

At the 2025 final, held in May at the Centro Cultural Conde Duque in Madrid, Link3rs came out on top among fifteen finalist start-ups, representing the University of Barcelona, and won the Startup Programme category. The jury highlighted the innovative nature of the proposal, the team’s entrepreneurial spirit, and the viability and scalability of the project: an AI simultaneous translation platform that makes events more accessible.

That final also brought us a second award: the SAP® Business Agility Award 2025, from SAP Spain.

GEN‑E Top 3 Start Up of the Year, from JA Europe

GEN‑E is Europe’s largest youth entrepreneurship festival. Organised by JA Europe, it brings together teams from Junior Achievement programmes across the continent. Start Up of the Year is its competition for university start-ups.

The 2025 edition took place in Athens in July. Link3rs competed for Spain against Europe’s best teams and made the podium: third in Start Up of the Year. At the same edition, JA Europe also gave us the BNY Resilient Futures Award, which honours vision, resilience and the capacity to innovate.

In little over a month, Link3rs went from winning in Spain to ranking among the three best university start-ups in Europe.

PreIncubació programme, from Barcelona Activa

Barcelona Activa is Barcelona City Council’s engine for entrepreneurship, and its pre-incubation programme is the gateway for the city’s most innovative start-ups. Selection is demanding: it looks for early-stage projects with a strong innovative edge, in any sector, and puts them through an intensive bootcamp that ends in a Demoday. Each team defends its project before a jury, and only ten move on to the incubation phase at Glòries, with training, specialist mentoring and a direct line into Barcelona’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

For Link3rs, this recognition carries special weight: it comes from the city where the company was born.

What came next

These recognitions are part of our story. Today, the technology that won over those juries is at work in conferences, forums and ceremonies, where audiences follow every word in their own language: on their phone with Speech or on the room’s screens with Captions. We tell the story of some of those events in Impact.