The Southern European founder who picked London to scale

Adam Barbera was born and raised in Barcelona, but he’s now steering Dost’s UK push from London. That move fits the city’s current pull: the 2025 Startup Heatmap Europe Report put London at the top of the continent’s startup hubs, with 32.6% of founders choosing it.

Barbera’s route into startups ran through engineering, sales and strategy. He started as a telecom engineer, moved into project management at an IoT company, then joined SAP as an account executive. That gave him a close view of accounts payable from the finance team side, which seems to have done more for Dost than any pitch deck ever could.

Dost, which Barbera co-founded with Fernando Martín and Naqqash Abbassi in 2021, is built around a simple complaint: finance teams spend too much time typing invoice details, chasing approvals and fixing broken tools. The company says its software reads financial documents at line-item level, matches them to purchase orders and delivery notes, codes them to the right GL account, routes approvals when needed and posts them into the ERP. It’s meant to work without templates or configuration, which is the whole point; if a supplier changes the format, the system should not sulk.

Barbera draws a hard line between flashy AI and useful automation. He says many companies are using AI for productivity or search, but not to run finance workflows end to end. Dost’s pitch is that it can handle those workflows daily, deal with exceptions and get better as it processes more invoices. The company says it has processed more than five million transactions, with 95% extraction accuracy, 80% cost reduction and 90% time saved.

The London move is about more than prestige. Barbera says serious fintech firms need a presence there, and that US companies entering Europe and European companies heading to the US both route through the city. He also says the UK still lacks strong e-invoicing infrastructure, with invoicing still mostly PDF and paper-based, and that the mandate timeline trails Italy, Poland and France. The UK mandate is due in April 2029, and PDFs won’t count.

That’s why he thinks the real challenge is not the model but the paperwork around the model. Finance leaders may think they’re already using AI, he says, but usually they mean ChatGPT for personal productivity. The harder job is changing processes before the rules force everyone’s hand.