Four a.m. at a music festival. The bass is still pounding through the crowd. Somewhere inside the crush of bodies, a woman is not moving. Not dancing. Barely breathing.
Her body remembers something her mind is still trying to escape. Everyone around her is flying. She is frozen. And the worst part is not the crowd or the fear. It is this: she knows if she screamed right now, no one would hear her. The security guard twenty feet away is breaking up a fight. The network is dead. Her phone has no signal. Even if she could speak, there is no one to speak to.
This moment, this exact suffocation of helplessness, is the engine of Berta Briones’s entire company.
Meet Berta Briones
Berta Briones is the founder and CEO of Thalion Network, a Barcelona-based startup redesigning safety at live events through wearable technology. She is 28. She has a degree in International Relations, an MBA in Global Entertainment and Music Business from Berklee College of Music, and a lived experience of trauma that most founders keep hidden. She doesn’t. She talks about it directly, writes about it publicly, and has turned it into the most human business problem she could possibly solve. Her work has earned her a €30,000 innovation grant from the Spanish government, placement in a prestigious startup accelerator, and the kind of mentor relationships that only form when someone believes in you so completely they believe in the thing you’re building without question.
But the real measure of Berta is not what she has done. It is who she is in the doing. She is the kind of person who cries when her app works. The kind of founder who says things like, “I was terrified we’d be selling smoke” and means it with the weight of someone who has staked everything on belief.
The Path That Built Her
Berta was born in Barcelona to a family fluent in languages, comfortable in multiple worlds. Her father’s work in international business meant that home was not a fixed place. Her mother’s commitment to education meant that exposure to ideas was currency in their household. She learned Spanish, Catalan, English, and eventually French and Arabic. By the time she was finishing high school, she was not thinking about where she fit into one culture. She was thinking about how cultures fit together.
Her first degree was in International Relations from Universitat Ramon Llull. It was deliberate. She wanted to understand how systems interlock. How policy moves. How a decision made in one room ripples across borders and into the lives of people who never saw it coming.
That degree led her to ISGlobal, a research institute in Madrid that studies global health through a social and political lens. She was a junior analyst there for eight months, working on policy advocacy for the United Nations, for the Spanish government, for institutions trying to bend the arc of health systems toward equity. She learned that knowing the problem is not the same as solving it. She learned that every solution starts with someone being angry enough to ask, “Why does this have to be this way?”
In 2021, she moved to Canadian Solar in Madrid as head of the ESG department. ESG, environmental and social governance, is the language corporations use when they are starting to feel pressure to do something about the world they operate in. She was 23. She was building sustainability frameworks for a global company. On paper, it was a smart career move. In practice, she was learning that corporate sustainability is often very far from actual change. It is often an aesthetic. A story you tell. A checkbox.
This mattered. Because it made her hungry for something else. Something real.
In 2022, she enrolled in the Global Entertainment and Music Business program at Berklee College of Music in Valencia. This looks like a pivot. It is not. It is a woman who spent six years in the language of systems and governance finally deciding to speak the language of culture. Music festivals are not small things. They are temporary economies. They are trust systems. Millions of people put their bodies into spaces other people are designing and operating. What happens at a festival is governance, social policy, and safety architecture. She just needed a different permission structure to think about it.
And then, during that program, she had the idea.
It did not come as an epiphany. It came as a question that became a memory that became a responsibility that became a company. The question was simple: what would have helped me when I couldn’t help myself?
The System Designed for the Moment When You Can’t Ask
Today, Thalion Network manufactures a smart wearable that looks like a bracelet. Inside it is hardware that does something most security solutions cannot do. It maintains connectivity independent of the festival’s cellular infrastructure. When that wristband detects an emergency, it does not rely on the wearer being able to speak. It does not require them to unlock a phone. It does not need them to remember that help exists. They push a single button. And they are connected.
But this is only the beginning of what the bracelet does.
Berta thinks of Thalion as a three-part ecosystem: hardware, software, and people. The people are the one everyone forgets about. She has not.
“The first thing we understood,” Berta explains, “is that the system has to be designed around the fact that in moments of crisis, your cognitive capacity is limited. You cannot do complex things. You cannot navigate menus. You cannot wait. The SOS button needs to exist in the space where instinct lives, not where thought lives.”
This is why the wearable is a bracelet. It is always on your wrist. You cannot drop it in a pocket and forget it. You cannot leave it in a bathroom. You cannot take it off when you panic. It is part of your body the way a phone is not.
The technology is equally human. Thalion’s hardware-software integration, which she developed in collaboration with the i2CAT Research Centre, uses a multi-layered connectivity architecture. It combines BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy), mesh networking, and low-bandwidth protocols that work when the cellular network has completely collapsed under the weight of 100,000 people trying to text their friends at the same time. This means that if your phone has no signal, the wearable still does. If the network is saturated, the mesh network finds another route. The system was validated over a year of testing with i2CAT. It works.
But here is what separates Thalion from every other safety product in existence: Berta did not stop at crisis response.
The wearable also handles what she calls “the thousand uses beyond emergency.” A wearer can order a drink without losing their place in the crowd. They can locate their friends in real time. They can receive information about the festival in a way that works when the WiFi is dead. They can access a map that their phone cannot load. The device, in other words, is not a panic button that lives in the background of the festival experience. It is integrated into the festival experience. It makes the festival better for everyone.
“The moment someone feels safer,” Berta says, “they are more present. They spend more money. They have a better time. They come back next year. The festivals win. The attendees win. The vulnerable people win. It is not a tradeoff.”
She has also created something called the Anchor+Bit model, designed for people with functional diversity or intellectual disabilities. A guardian wears the “anchor” device. The people in their care wear “bits.” The system can be programmed with boundaries, distance thresholds, movement speeds that might indicate someone has gotten into a vehicle without permission. It is freedom and safety at the same time. A day center can take their people on a trip to the zoo knowing that if something goes wrong, they will know immediately. No searching. No panic. No false choices between autonomy and protection.
She developed this model in close collaboration with Aspasim, an organization supporting people with intellectual disabilities in Barcelona. She has volunteered there managing their social media and strategy for years. This is not a feature she added for market differentiation. This is a problem she cares about. The bracelet is proof.
The Thalion Playbook: 4 Lessons
Solve for the moment when thinking stops. Design your solution for the person in crisis, not the person reading your pitch deck. Remove every layer of cognitive requirement between need and help.
Validate obsessively with the people it matters for. A year of testing with i2CAT was not overkill. It was the difference between a concept and a reality. Work alongside researchers, institutions, and communities before you claim you have solved anything.
Make the safety feature inseparable from the joy. People do not want to wear panic buttons. They want to wear things that make them feel good. Build the emergency response into a tool that improves every moment of the experience, not just the worst ones.
Let your personal story be your north star, not your sales pitch. Berta did not start Thalion to become an entrepreneur. She started it because she survived something and decided that no one else should have to survive it alone. That clarity makes every decision harder and every decision better.
What a Moment Can Build
That woman at the festival, the one who cannot move and cannot speak, she is the person Berta keeps building for. Not as an abstraction. As the real human center of every choice.
In the four years since her MBA, Berta has raised capital, launched a product, validated it with research institutions, built a team, secured government backing, and positioned Thalion for scale into the global entertainment infrastructure. She has done interviews with founders and mentors who have called her “charismatic,” “unwavering,” and “someone people genuinely want to help succeed.”
But the moment that matters most is the one that came before all of that. The moment when she could not ask for help. Because that moment did not break her. It built her. And now she is building something that makes sure the next person in that moment does not have to be alone.
Berta Briones is the founder and CEO of Thalion Network, based in Barcelona, Spain. Thalion develops wearable technology designed to ensure safety and engagement at crowded live events. To connect with Berta or learn more about Thalion Network, visit thalionnetwork.com.
