Pub.cat is a holding company for English-language news brands: Barna.News, Catalan.News, RetroShell. Under the hood sits Cybertron, our proprietary content pipeline. It ingests, de-duplicates, verifies, rewrites, translates and publishes at the marginal cost of electricity.
Fully bootstrapped. On a direct path to profitability. Built by one operator with twenty years of scale behind him. Cybertron opens to other publishers as SaaS in 2026.
Thirteen modules. One API. Every capability a modern newsroom needs, stitched into a single autonomous pipeline that any independent publisher can switch on. Public beta opens to a small cohort of hand-picked titles in 2026. Waitlist on request.
RSS, APIs, sitemaps, social signals, public filings. Normalised, timestamped, credited.
Semantic clustering groups related items into story candidates. Hotness scoring surfaces the signal.
Source reliability tiers, named-source checks, and cross-reference against authoritative data before anything writes.
Related coverage, public records, prior context. Pulled and attributed before the draft is generated.
Routing across Claude, Gemini, Grok. Locale-tuned prompts. Brand voice enforced at prompt layer, not discretion.
English, Catalan, Spanish today. Any market tomorrow. One pipeline, one configuration file per locale.
Grammar, clarity, banned phrases, factual re-checks. Style guide enforced down to the Oxford comma.
Feature image selection, alt text, banner stripping, proper attribution. No copyright surprises.
Schema.org, sitemap, OG, canonical. Google News compliance. Cross-property internal linking for compounding authority.
Push to any Ghost or WordPress instance via API. Scheduling, categories, authors, tags, all handled.
X, Reddit, Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn. Each channel treated on its own terms, not copy-pasted.
Scheduled process and security audits. Critical findings halt publication until cleared. Not advisory.
Plausible plus Google Search Console, unified. Story-level attribution back to which source, which model, which channel.
Every module is swappable. Every stage is logged. Nothing is black-boxed. Built to run without us, engineered so another publisher can run it too.
Every property runs on the same Cybertron pipeline. Launching the next one is measured in hours of configuration, not months of hiring.
English · Barcelona
The English-language news daily for Barcelona's international residents. Politics, culture, transport, community. Fifteen to twenty-five stories every day, written by software and read by humans.
Visit Barna.News →The Catalan-language edition. Same pipeline, localised voice, indexed by Google News for catalanoparlants at home and abroad.
Visit Catalan.News →
English · Retro gaming
A retro-gaming publication with e-commerce attached. News, collectibles, exclusive merchandise. Vertical test for the "publication plus shop" pattern.
Visit RetroShell →Madrid. Málaga. A London vertical. Multi-language expansion across European cities. Each is a configuration file in Cybertron, not a hire.
Talk to us →
Head of EU Sales and Head of UK Key Accounts at eBay, B2B Merchant Development. Carried a $1.3 billion GMV target. Authored the Gold Standard Listings guide, adopted as a global best practice across the company. Built the Listing Optimiser tool in parallel.
Global Digital Business lead at Puig. Owned online sales across every brand in the group, direct and indirect. Grew the business from €30m to over €400m. Stood up a global digital community of 80+ people from zero.
Founded RetroShell. A passion product that started as the world's best collectable protectors and grew into the retro-gaming news site Cybertron now publishes. Founded Barcelona English Speakers and Bizcelona in 2021, now reaching over 5,000 people across WhatsApp and Meetup.
Enterprise revenue scars. Founder instincts. A community that ships. Exactly the operator profile AI-native media needs.
Owen Hughes, founder and sole director of RetroShell Ltd (UK), trading as Pub.cat from Barcelona. One human makes every decision. Everything else is software.
Cybertron is our proprietary content pipeline. Thirteen modules covering ingestion, de-duplication, verification, research, drafting, translation, editing, imagery, SEO, publishing, distribution, monitoring and analytics. Built for Pub.cat's own properties today, preparing for public beta as SaaS in 2026.
A small invite-only cohort in 2026, followed by broader beta access. If you are an independent publisher and want in, email us and we will get you on the list.
The orchestration, the source tiering, the editorial gates, the per-locale tuning, the publisher-side integrations, and years of compounding editorial calibration. Models are the commodity. The pipeline is the product.
Pub.cat is fully bootstrapped and on a path to profitability. We are not actively fundraising, but we listen to the right operators. Media-tech investors, CMS companies, and strategic partners who can accelerate Cybertron's SaaS rollout should reach out.
Selectively, and only on AI-native operating and one-person-company design. If you are a founder building with agents, or an established business transitioning a function to autonomous software, Owen will consider it. Email below.
One inbox reaches one human. Pick the door you came through and we will reply within 48 hours.
You run an independent publication and want the pipeline that runs ours. Invite-only cohort in 2026.
hi@pub.cat → 02 · InvestorsWe are bootstrapped and close to profitable. We talk to operators who understand media-tech. Roll-ups and strategics welcome.
hi@pub.cat → 03 · AcquisitionMedia-tech, CMS, or portfolio acquirers looking at the next generation of autonomous publishing should talk to us early.
hi@pub.cat → 04 · ConsultingFounders building with agents, or established businesses moving a function to autonomous software. Owen takes a handful a year.
hi@pub.cat →Barcelona · London · Replies within 48 hours · LinkedIn