Sisco Sapena, CEO, on Lleida.net history
“I still remember when our first bill from Telefónica landed. Looking at what we owed, I reckoned I could have bought two Ford Escorts with it,” says Sisco Sapena, CEO of Lleida.net.
Lleida.net history begins on a shoestring: a few second-hand computers, three founders convinced the internet was about to change everything, and a motorbike that had to be sold to keep the lights on. Three decades later, the company is a telecoms operator and certification authority specialising in electronic signature, registered notification and digital identity verification. It is listed on several European stock exchanges, holds more than 300 patents and serves clients in over 50 countries.
Here is the full Lleida.net history, chapter by chapter.
The origins of Lleida.net (1993–1995): three founders, second-hand kit and a motorbike
In the early 1990s, Sisco Sapena, Jordi Josep and Baldomero Capdevila shared one ambition: to bring the internet to Lleida. Easier said than done. Cities across Spain were racing to launch their first local internet service provider, much as Demon Internet and its rivals were doing in the UK, and finding anyone willing to fund such a venture was close to impossible.
One of Lleida.net’s servers from the IRC Hispano days.
The founders knocked on plenty of doors. One multinational listened politely to the pitch, then quietly copied the business model. Another offered to back the project, assuming Sapena stepped aside: he was, apparently, “too independent”. So Sapena took the pragmatic route. If he couldn’t sell the idea to investors, he would sell his motorbike instead.
Between the proceeds and the founders’ own contributions, the project got off the ground in 1993. The first servers were pieced together from hardware left over from their bulletin board (BBS) days, which was enough to get online and start serving customers. The company was formally incorporated on 30 January 1995 with share capital of one million pesetas, roughly €6,000 or a little over £5,000.
That same year, Lleida.net became the second internet node in Catalonia and one of the first in Spain, the first real milestone in Lleida.net history.
Table of contents
Price wars in the early years (1995–2000)
The early years of Lleida.net history were a relentless race to the bottom. Every time Lleida.net launched a service, a competitor would undercut it by around 40%:
- Its most popular service cost about 5,000 pesetas (around £25). A rival soon offered it for 3,000.
- The company moved into web hosting at around 50,000 pesetas (about £250). Before long, the same service was on sale for 30,000.
- Next came colocation, looking after customers’ own servers so they could run their own hosting, for 500,000 pesetas (about £2,500). The competition matched it at 300,000.
The dot-com crash (2001–2003): surviving by selling picks and shovels
When the tech bubble burst, the shockwaves hit the United States first, then the trade fairs of Barcelona and Madrid, where the American exhibitors simply vanished. In Spain, the crash hit home in 2001.
2002 and 2003 were the toughest chapter in Lleida.net history. In some months, the client base shrank by close to 10%. Customers weren’t defecting to competitors; they were going bust. Meanwhile, the banks had shut the door on internet companies, many of which had been burning through cash while waiting for a buyer who never turned up.
Lleida.net weathered the storm with a simple strategy. In the middle of the internet gold rush, rather than panning for gold, it sold the “picks and shovels”, as Sapena puts it. While others staked everything on web portals, Lleida.net supplied the hosting and colocation those portals ran on.
This period of Lleida.net history was also the golden age of chat rooms, long before social media, when IRC was where people met online. From 1999 to 2007, Sapena chaired IRC Hispano, Spain’s largest chat network, and Lleida.net hosted portals whose value lay in the communities they could gather. Many of them, however, had no real business model and disappeared with the downturn.
The leap to telecoms operator (2001–2005)
Around 2001, Lleida.net history took a new turn when the team spotted an opportunity in business SMS. With it came a conviction that would reshape the company: if Lleida.net was to have a future, it had to become a telecoms operator in its own right.
Sisco Sapena at the Lleida.net offices
The first hurdle was securing its own number range, a prerequisite for interconnection agreements with other operators. It was a long haul. This was the first generation of virtual operators, and the incumbents were in no hurry to help. As Sapena recalls, Lleida.net managed to interconnect with an operator in Saudi Arabia before it could do so with Movistar, the mobile arm of Telefónica, the Spanish group that went on to buy O2 in the UK.
In 2005, the Comisión del Mercado de las Telecomunicaciones (CMT), Spain’s equivalent of Ofcom at the time, authorised Lleida.net to provide fixed-line telephone services. It was a pivotal moment in Lleida.net history: the company went on to connect with every major operator, and the licence opened the door to the business lines at the heart of its catalogue today, including Registered email and Registered inbox
How Lleida.net’s services evolved (2002–2018)
Once it was an operator, Lleida.net built out its catalogue around one idea that runs through every chapter of Lleida.net history: registering electronic communications so they stand up as documentary evidence.
| 2002 | First SMS | Lleida.net sends its first text message, marking the start of its life as an operator. |
| 2007 | Registered SMS | Courts kept requesting technical communications records, so the company automated the process and created registered SMS. |
| 2011 | Registered email | The same principle was applied to email using a Registered email address. |
| 2012 | Registered SMS contract and Registered inbox | An exchange of registered text messages now works as a signed contract. The same year brought registered reception, which also registers incoming emails. |
| 2013 | Registered email contract | The email version of the Registered SMS contract. |
| 2014 | Connectaclick | Lleida.net brings all its solutions together in a single online contracting platform. |
| 2018 | Click & Sign and eKYC | Connectaclick has been relaunched as Click & Sign with new features, and the digital identity verification solutions have been brought together under the eKYC brand. |
Venture capital and a stock market listing (2007–2015)
Banesto Enisa Sepi Desarrollo comes on board
Once the funding drought had eased, a new chapter of Lleida.net history began as the company opened its doors to outside investors. In January 2007, the venture capital fund Banesto Enisa Sepi Desarrollo took a 30% stake. Its backers included Banesto, a Spanish bank later absorbed into Santander. It was a drawn-out process, and the company turned down the first offer, but the fund’s involvement proved crucial in professionalising management and laying the groundwork for what came next.
Debut on the MAB, now BME Growth
A listing on the Mercado Alternativo Bursátil (MAB), Spain’s growth market for smaller companies and broadly comparable to London’s AIM, was first considered in 2011. The fund said no, and Sapena didn’t feel ready to take it on.
The moment finally came in 2015, a landmark year in Lleida.net history. After a €5 million capital increase in September, placed by Beka Finance and GVC Gaesco Valores, Lleida.net floated on the MAB at €1.18 a share. The money went into accelerating international expansion, stepping up R&D and building the firepower to acquire complementary businesses.
Today, alongside BME Growth, Lleida.net is listed on Euronext Growth in Paris and on the Frankfurt and Stuttgart stock exchanges.
Innovation, patents and digital trust
More than 300 patents in over 60 countries
R&D has become one of the defining threads of Lleida.net history. The company has built a portfolio of more than 300 patents granted in over 60 countries, covering registered electronic communications, contracting and electronic signature.
eIDAS qualified trust service provider
Since 2018, a key year in Lleida.net history, the company has also been a qualified trust service provider under the EU’s eIDAS Regulation, with equivalent certifications in Latin America, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates.
Lleida.net history in 2026: three decades on
Thirty years in, the company is in the middle of a shift in business model, focused on growing its base of end customers such as law firms, chartered professionals and SMEs. At the end of June it had 12,545 active clients, the highest figure in its history.
In the third quarter, revenue rose 6% to €4.67 million and EBITDA by 10%. The growth was driven by registered electronic notification and other SaaS solutions, which posted their best third quarter since 2020. Full results are available on the Lleida.net investor website.
Lleida.net team at Mobile World Congress 2026
Today, Lleida.net has offices in Lleida, Madrid, Valencia, São Paulo, Bogotá, Santiago de Chile, Dubai, Santo Domingo and Lima.
More than thirty years after that motorbike was sold, the next chapter of Lleida.net history is being written around the same idea: anticipate what the market will need, and build the technology to deliver it.
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