Telefónica is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world, with a strong presence in nearly 40 countries and serving nearly 400 million customers. Headquartered in Madrid, the company operates a range of services through its main brands (Movistar, O2, and Vivo) covering fixed and mobile communications, Wi-Fi, TV, and business services, but also owns much of the infrastructure that supports modern connectivity such as fiber networks and mobile operations.
Founded in 1924, Telefónica has since evolved into a global telecoms group. With operations spanning Europe and Latin America, the company places its mission to “make our world more human by connecting lives” at the heart of everything it does. From building trust through responsible technology to helping societies progress through innovation, digitalization, and creating value for the communities it serves.
By investing in future-ready networks and services, it continues to shape how people and businesses communicate and grow in an increasingly digital world.
For Telefónica’s Business Innovation team, identifying and acting on emerging market opportunities is a core part of their role, but it’s also one of the most challenging. Susana Jurado is Head of Telefónica Venture Builder, and explains more: “One of the biggest challenges we face is that we have to constantly stay aware of market and business opportunities.
“As the Business Innovation unit, our role is to identify those opportunities and come up with new business ideas. That means not only looking for what's happening in the market, but also understanding what technologies, solutions, or internal capabilities we already have that could be used to address those opportunities.”
But with a small team, each opportunity they choose to explore often comes at the cost of another they can’t, making prioritization critical but difficult.
As a result, the opportunity cost was significant. Choosing the wrong company to pursue could mean days spent on an opportunity that ultimately goes nowhere, while the right one might have been overlooked entirely. “We had to make choices with very little information,” Susana explains.
What’s more, constraints on time and resources limit how many opportunities the team can fully explore. The filtering process alone, narrowing down hundreds of potential companies to a few worth pursuing, can take days.
While other platforms provided the team with access to company data, identifying the right leads was still difficult. The challenge wasn’t only in finding startups, but in understanding which ones matched Telefónica’s internal capabilities and strategic priorities.
For Susana and her team, the search for a better way to identify and evaluate emerging market opportunities led them to FounderNest. As Susana puts it, “We wanted something that would allow us to make better decisions.” Their existing tools gave them access to company data, but the process was slow, manual, and heavily reliant on picking the right keywords to search with.
FounderNest stood out for its use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to simplify that process. “When exploring emerging markets and opportunities, it’s important for us to look beyond startups and also see what competitors are doing. FounderNest offered a broader scope in terms of the companies it covers, which made it a better fit for our needs.”
Instead of spending days filtering through long lists or guessing search terms, the team could interact with the platform in natural language, quickly surfacing relevant companies and insights without trial-and-error.
Crucially, FounderNest also aligned with Telefónica’s internal push to use AI for productivity. The Business Innovation team had already been exploring how AI could support their venture builder workflow, and market opportunity research was one of the areas most in need of support. “We were looking at how we could introduce AI to make ourselves more productive. There were a lot of areas where we thought AI could help simplify our work and make our lives easier. One of these was using AI in the market opportunity research that we were doing.”
Another important factor was flexibility. With a small budget and team, Telefónica needed a tool that could meet their needs without locking them into costly multi-seat licenses. “One of the key things we needed was the flexibility to buy just a few seats for the people focused on market opportunity research, which FounderNest offered. Other alternatives were not only more expensive, but also required buying a minimum number of seats, which was prohibitive for us,” Susana adds.
One of the most immediate benefits has been time saved. The ability to use FounderNest’s Subspaces has been a game-changer for prioritization. This targeted filtering means they can spend more quality time evaluating each company, reducing the chance of errors and the risk of overlooking important opportunities due to time constraints.
“The Subspaces in FounderNest let us focus on specific areas and choose where to concentrate our efforts. We might start with 200 companies, but the Subspaces can narrow that down to around 100. If we had to process all 200, we wouldn’t be able to spend enough time on each one. This filtering means fewer mistakes and more time to properly evaluate each company. As a result, we can reduce the risk of missing something important just because we have to move super fast.”
FounderNest’s granularity in data filtering further supports this precision. The team can confidently focus on opportunities that truly match their strategic and innovation needs, avoiding distractions from less relevant companies. This focused approach gives the team confidence that they aren’t missing potential market opportunities that could be crucial to their innovation pipeline. Overall, FounderNest has made the research process smarter, faster, and more effective for the team at Telefónica.
“The granularity FounderNest offers helps us filter companies effectively so we don’t miss anything important. We can choose only those that are relevant and focus on the ones that make sense for us.”
Despite only using FounderNest for a little over a month, Susana’s team at Telefónica quickly realized several key advantages over their previous tools.
FounderNest’s powerful filtering capabilities, combined with the ability to work directly within the platform, made the research process more efficient and less reliant on time-consuming manual tasks.
“FounderNest’s filtering capabilities and the ability to work directly within the tool are very important to us. Having features beyond just filtering, especially the option to share information with others without relying on Excel, is a big advantage.”
Unlike previous tools that required exporting data into spreadsheets for further work, FounderNest allows the team to share information seamlessly with colleagues both inside and outside the Venture Building team, making collaboration across the business much smoother.
What’s more, Telefónica quickly found that FounderNest better suits their needs, offering a more intuitive and collaborative approach to market intelligence compared to alternatives. “What we realised with FounderNest is that it suits a team like ours better than other tools we have used for the kind of work we do,” Susana says.
Looking ahead, Telefónica’s Venture Building team is aiming to double the number of market opportunities they can explore using FounderNest compared to previous years. As Susana explains: “The more we can explore with FounderNest, the greater the probability we have of identifying opportunities that make sense to Telefónica. The more market opportunities we can assess to determine if they are a good fit for us, the more business ideas we can come up with,” she happily concludes.
“What we realised with FounderNest is that it suits a team like ours better than PitchBook for the kind of work we do.”
Susana Jurado (Head of Telefónica Venture Builder)
