Carlota Pi Amorós is not the kind of founder who stumbled into tech. She’s an industrial engineer with a Master’s in Mathematical Methods for Financial Markets from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, and an Executive MBA from IESE Business School. She has over 15 years of experience in the energy sector, having worked in Spain, the US, and Germany in both electricity and gas generation and commercialization. That foundation directly shaped what she built next.
In 2010, with the idea that the ultimate purpose of any company should be to make the world a better place, Pi co-founded Holaluz, an energy company that promotes the democratization of green energy. The founding moment was characteristically unplanned. Thirteen years ago, she was in a bar with her two co-founders, Oriol and Ferran, discussing what they could do to develop technology and make the world a little better. She reached into her backpack and pulled out a document that said on the front page, “Connect people to green energy.” That became the mission.
From Startup To Listed Company:
Holaluz is Spain’s first energy retailer to provide electricity from 100 percent renewable sources. The company went public on the BME Growth market in November 2019, making it one of the few Spanish cleantech companies to reach the public markets. It evolved from a startup in the green energy retailing space into a publicly listed scale-up with a broad range of services, from energy trading to decentralized power generation.
With revenues of more than €500 million in 2021, the company offered services from energy trading to decentralized energy generation. Under Carlota’s leadership, the company also built proprietary technology infrastructure. For the past several years, the team has been developing specific technology platforms to efficiently source green energy from hydro, wind, biogas, biomass, and solar energy, with the ability to view and manage energy volatility in a granular way and in real time, to match producers with the demand patterns of residential and business customers.
The Technology Angle:
What separates Holaluz from a traditional energy retailer is its technology layer. The company offers purchase and sale of energy at an international level, production and commercialization of energy and natural gas, batteries for solar panels, and electric car chargers, alongside energy and environment advisory services. Their Holaluz Cloud product allows surplus energy from customers’ solar panels to be deducted directly from electricity bills, a practical tool that makes distributed generation accessible at the household level.
Holaluz doesn’t define itself as a retailer or installer, but blends roles across the energy value chain to drive forward localized, distributed energy. That positioning is deliberate. It reflects Carlota’s broader view that the energy transition is a systems problem, not just a product problem. Holaluz currently maintains more than 400,000 energy contracts in Spain, with 95 percent from households.
Recognition Beyond Spain:
Carlota’s profile extends well beyond Barcelona. She was nominated to be a member of the advisory board at Bill Gates’s clean energy fund, Breakthrough Energy. That kind of recognition reflects her standing not just as a Spanish operator but as a credible voice in the global energy transition conversation.
She has been honored with recognition including the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Award by FEDEPE, the DonaTIC award by Tertulia Digital and SmartCAT, and the Innovation Award by FIDEM. She also participated in the Blackbox Connect program in 2017, Google’s scaling program for female co-founders. She has also served as a professor at the University of Barcelona, teaching in the areas of efficiency and renewable energy.
Building Internally Too:
Carlota is vocal about equity inside Holaluz, not just in the energy sector. Holaluz prides itself on being a 100 percent equal opportunity company and has made progress by equalizing the duration of maternity and paternity leave, offering a nursery service since 2015, and enabling quotas in some teams, including technology. These aren’t policies introduced as PR. They’re practices the company has been running for years.
The biggest lesson she credits from building Holaluz is choosing the right people: the only thing that matters is who you’re with, and why, where, how you go makes a big difference, and ultimately, what determines all of this is the people around you. That emphasis on people, alongside product and mission, shows up consistently in how she talks about the company publicly.
Real Impact, Real Execution:
Carlota Pi Amorós built something technically complex, publicly listed, and commercially real in one of Europe’s most regulated industries. She didn’t come from a software background but used engineering discipline and technology infrastructure to reshape how Spanish households access energy.
For founders and operators watching the energy transition unfold across Europe, Carlota’s work at Holaluz is a concrete example of how deep domain expertise, combined with a clear technology thesis, can produce a company that operates at scale. Carlota Pi Amorós is not a figurehead, she’s an operator who built the product, the team, and the platform from the ground up.
You can explore other profiles from women building in the European tech ecosystem in our Women in Tech section.
