Dealflow.es #508: Xoople's €130M "round". Wallbox rescue plan. Inditex VC activity.

A weekly summary of everything that happened in the Spanish startup and tech investing ecosystem.

Welcome to another edition of Dealflow. If you’ve been forwarded this email but you’re not a subscriber, please subscribe. And if you’re interested in sponsorship opportunities, send me an email at jaime@dealflow.es and I’ll share more details

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Aircall:

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Startup funding news 💸

The two largest “rounds” of the week:

Madrid-based Xoople announced a €130M Series B led by Nazca Capital. Xoople is building a satellite constellation to collect high-precision Earth observation data optimized for AI and deep learning models. Ecotechers published an interesting counterpoint to the TechCrunch piece. The key takeaways:

• The $130M “Series B” isn’t fresh capital — it’s been announced in at least four different tranches since May 2025 with inconsistent figures each time

• Over 40% of total funding is public money (CDTI, Next Tech/ICO)

• The company has zero revenue so far, no satellites built yet

• The only genuinely new element in this announcement is Nazca Capital’s entry through their defense/aerospace fund.

Elche-based PLD Space secured a €30M venture debt loan from the European Investment Bank to finalize development of its MIURA 5 rocket for small satellite deployment

€1M to €5M deals:

• Madrid-based alternative investments platform Crescenta raised €5M, led by us at Kfund (we were already investors in the company). Crescenta targets €1B in managed assets and 20,000 clients by 2027

• Alicante-based Golden Owl raised €1.4M in seed funding led by First Drop to advance its anticipatory intelligence operating system. More on Golden Owl here

• Centinel, a Spanish-Argentine AI accounting startup founded by ex-McKinsey and Amazon executives, raised €1.2M in pre-seed funding from Boost Capital Partners, Lanai VC, and Abac Capital

• Seville-based Arca Digital raised €1M in pre-seed funding co-led by DraperB1 and Robin Capital. Arca operates as an API-first infrastructure layer connecting pension fund managers with SMEs

• Madrid-based Sybol raised over €1M from SETT, Repsol, Grupo Synaptia, and others to develop corporate digital identity solutions. More info on Sybol here

Other funding news:

• Barcelona-based Sateliot is seeking a €100M Series C round to deploy 16 satellites completing its 5G constellation. The Barcelona-based startup expects 50% public co-financing and aims to close by summer. This follows a €70M Series B in March 2025

• MOVEMENTS, the new citizen movement platform startup from Paco Polo, closed its €390k pre-seed round.

• Electric motorcycle brand Velca added former NBA player José Manuel Calderón as a shareholder in its fifth funding round targeting up to €2.5M. The round also includes Hijos de Rivera CEO Ignacio Rivera

M&A news 🎉

• Keepler Data Tech, a Spanish cloud-native AI and data startup founded in 2018, has been acquired by Accenture. Keepler did €17M in sales in 2024 with €200k in EBITDA

• Amper made an acquisition offer for Spanish hyperloop startup Zeleros‘ productive unit after the Valencia-based company filed for bankruptcy proceedings. The offer is of less than €1M

Startup news 💡

• Wallbox signed a rescue plan to restructure over €180M in debt it couldn't repay. Key shareholders including Iberdrola, the Riberas family, and CEO Enric Asunción are putting in fresh cash alongside Catalonia's government. The plan needs court approval in Barcelona — expected to go through with 83% creditor backing despite HSBC's opposition. Seaya, once a key investor, is apparently not joining this round, effectively writing down the majority of its original €13.5M investment

• Andreas Blixt, former VP of Engineering of Framer and now based in Barcelona, launched Biscuit, an all-in-one platform that takes a business idea from prompt to live product with payments, emails, and hosting built in

• Jacinto Fleta shared a post-morten of Landing Bakery after shutting down the AI landing page tool. It had €1.5k in MRR after 400 days. The team has now pivoted to Baker, an AI-powered performance marketing agency

• Sifted published a couple of articles about Wallapop. An interview with CEO Rob Cassedy about the company’s new stage after being acquired by Naver, and a second one about startups that have been created by former employees of Wallapop

• Devtools company JetBrains announced it is now hiring in Spain, with Madrid as its starting point but offering remote positions across the country. JetBrains has more than 2,800 employees worldwide

• Marti Carmona of Humalike launched Jared on Product Hunt. Jared is “an AI employee that lives in Slack, connects to 10,000+ tools, and gets work done without being asked”. The launch ranked 4th in product of the day. Marti, who is also the brother of Dani Carmona (Supersonik), wrote about the PH launch here

• Delivery Hero and its subsidiary Glovo reached a €27.5M settlement with Chilean authorities over market-sharing agreements dating back to 2019, down from an initial €64.3M demand. The German group faces over €1B in potential legal costs globally, including ongoing investigations in Peru and Ecuador for similar antitrust violations, plus labor disputes across Latin America

• Payflow launched “The Hub,” a new feature that partners with benefits providers to create a unified platform for employee benefits. The startup, which serves 600k employees with 200k active users, positioned the feature as a new monetization channel

• End-to-end fashion brand Fabbric closed after 5 years, despite reaching €1M in annual sales and raising over €2M in funding. The startup, founded by Alba Roca Fort and Hugo Cuesta, pivoted from e-commerce to a software platform but faced financial pressure when a major client defaulted on payments

Tech investor news 🚀

• Inditex has deployed €18.6M through its €50M FutuRetail Fund (managed by Mundi Ventures) into 3 sustainable textile startups: €10M for 12.3% of Finland’s Infinited Fiber, €4.7M for ~5% of Boston’s Galy (lab-grown cotton), and €3.7M for 8.9% of London’s Epoch Biodesign. A 4th, smaller bet via convertible note went to Barcelona’s Theker Robotics. In all four cases, Inditex is also a customer.

• Creas Impacto closed its second impact investing fund at €65M, backed by Cofides, European Investment Fund, Axis, and family offices from Spain, France, and Germany. The fund has deployed 40% of capital across six investments including mental health startup Desconect@ and eldercare platforms Qida and Miresi.

Big company & policy news 🏦

• French tech consultancy Capgemini initiated an ERE in Spain, citing the impact of AI and an increasingly uncertain operating environment

• Sngular reported €117.9M revenue (+10%) and €14.23M EBITDA (+18.5%) for 2025, achieving 12.1% EBITDA margin. International business now represents 38% of revenue. The company proposed €0.04/share dividend and new share buyback program

• Revolut closed 2025 with 6.3M clients in Spain, adding 2M users last year. The neobank targets 15M Spanish clients by 2029

• LaLiga partnered with US tech company Fastly to develop AI-powered solutions that detect illegal sports streaming in real-time

• Spanish labor inspectors concluded their investigation into Uber Eats, demanding €110M in unpaid social security contributions after reclassifying 60,000 delivery workers as employees rather than freelancers for the 2022-2026 period

• Zoho, the Indian software giant, has expanded its Valencia operations significantly since establishing its European hub there in 2021 and plans to continue to hire locally

• Spanish online gambling operators continue to massively advertised their services online. Ad spending reached a record of €244M in 2025, up 19.4% despite advertising restrictions in place since 2021. A Supreme Court ruling in April 2024 annulled key restrictions, particularly for digital channels, enabling operators to redirect spending online

• S2 Grupo received legal and financial approval for SEPI’s entry into the Valencia-based cybersecurity company with a stake below 15%. The state entity valued the firm below €50M. Despite 53% revenue growth to €56.6M in 2025, the company posted losses in 2024 due to delayed government contract payments

Interesting reads 🤓

• Loïs Duhourcau, CEO at Novicap, wrote “5 Years at Novicap: From Investor to Operator”

• Ignacio Perez Pozuelo wrote about his time at Palantir. He left the company after almost 6 years. “Five Winters: On forward deployment, institutional seeing, and leaving the only place that felt like enough”

• Javier Valverde (Prosus) wrote “Not all SaaS has been affected equally“

• Mihura published “Te estás quedando atrás”. He (or she?) argues AI’s breakneck pace is a non-stationary environment: you must balance exploration (testing new tools) with exploitation (actually building)

Podcasts of the week 🎧

• Itnig interviewed Lucas Carne (011h)

• SeedRocket published “Por qué los tecnobros están invirtiendo en el campo”

• Marsbased interviewed Ilya Zayats (CTO of Factorial)

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Dealflow.es #507: Record month for Playtomic, Enginy. Harvey hiring spree.

A weekly summary of everything that happened in the Spanish startup and tech investing ecosystem.

Welcome to another edition of Dealflow. If you’ve been forwarded this email but you’re not a subscriber, please subscribe. And if you’re interested in sponsorship opportunities, send me an email at jaime@dealflow.es and I’ll share more details

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This week’s edition is a bit shorter due to the Semana Santa break, but I think I still managed to find some interesting stuff.

I also wanted to comment on a tweet that Guli Moreno (co-founder of Capchase and Exponential) shared a few weeks ago.

Guli Moreno@GuliMoreno

Esto es de un inversor Tier 1 de San Francisco. El cambio de los últimos 18-24 meses es real. España acelera🔥

10:57 AM · Mar 11, 2026 · 10.9K Views

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13 Replies · 7 Reposts · 125 Likes

I think his comment, and the observation from the tier-1 US investor, is spot on. At Kfund we’ve been investing in Spain for the past 10 years, and I believe the quantity of high-quality projects we’ve seen over the past two years has never been higher. When I talk to people in other European ecosystems they usually say the same about their home countries, but seeing it first-hand in Spain has been eye-opening and a truly welcome sign.

Obviously a lot of this has to do with AI, most founders we see are building AI companies, but we’re also seeing very interesting projects in hardware, bio, robotics, new materials and more. We’ve invested across all of those verticals over the past two years and will continue to do so.

Probably thanks to the opportunities that AI brings to the table, and the sense that it’s poised to become truly transformational, we’re currently seeing three types of founders going out to build new companies:

• Repeat founders who have built companies before (with more or less success) and are now doing it again. Examples: SLGN (sponsors this week), Cala, Zynap, Mito, Infinitewatch, Afori, Supersonik, Orbio, Maisa, Murphy

• Former operators, not necessarily C-level or VPs, who worked at fast-growing Spanish startups and decided now is a good time to build their first company. Examples: Omnia, Latitude, Traza, Quiver, Enginy, Pensero, Obsydianai, Biorce.

• And most interestingly, a new generation of young, highly technical, highly ambitious and highly sophisticated founders that we hadn’t seen as much before. Examples: Theker, Altan, Adscities and many more that are still unannounced.

The talent density and volume of interesting new companies is, in my opinion, higher than ever.

This doesn’t go unnoticed by international funds (see Guli’s tweet). Competition for early-stage deals in Spain is fierce, with lots of foreign funds deploying capital here, sometimes for the first time. And I’m not just talking about mega-platforms like a16z, Lightspeed or General Catalyst, all of which have invested in Spain for the first time very recently, but also other European and US funds that are investing earlier than before, often writing the first check at pre-seed. This has consequences for local seed investors, but I plan to write about that topic in the near future.

At Kfund we’re trying to keep up with this fast pace of company creation. In 2025 alone we made 30 new investments (not counting follow-ons), and so far this year we’ve closed 6 with a handful more in closing stages.

As always, if you see something interesting out there or are building something yourself, reply to this email. This newsletter has always been a two-way street, and the best deals often come from you, the readers.

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by SLNG:

Barcelona-based SLNG runs your voice stack globally: leading speech models deployed across 11 regions, plus low-latency, real-time calling agents at the edge—built for quality, scale, and cost efficiency.

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Startup funding news 💸

• In March 2026, Spanish startup funding reached €248M across 25 deals, driven heavily by PLD Space‘s €180M round led by Mitsubishi Electric. Q1 2026 totaled €707M in 69 operations, down 40% from 2025 but up 24% from 2023, showing higher average tickets in a more selective market

• Fibtray, a Valencia-based sustainable food packaging startup, closed a €250k funding round with REDITVentures

Startup news 💡

• Enginy achieved 3 company records in March: best sales month ever with €540k new ARR, best single day with €156k revenue, and largest customer deal worth €70k ACV 🚀

• Playtomic surpassed €50M in gross transaction volume last month

• Hirint, a skills assessment platform, doubled its revenue to over €1M in 2025, reaching 400+ enterprise clients and 3M talent evaluations since launch

• readywhen AI, is a new product from Sançar Sahin, Huw Slater and the Oli (formerly Oliva Health) crew. It’s an AI platform that automatically tracks commitments from meetings and tools, with the aim of driving them to completion. I briefly talked to Sançar and he explained that this is a new product from the same holding company as Oli. He also said that they’re offering a free seat to one exec (C-Level, VP, etc) per company to start things off. More info in the LinkedIn post

• A couple of interesting articles were published about Harvey’s hiring push in Spain. The company recently hired Jorge Bestard as VP of EMEA Sales, and has been actively poaching lawyers from other well-known Spanish firms. It recently hired Omar Puertas as global legal innovation partner, who had spent 25 years at Cuatrecasas. More details about its hiring plans in this other article

• Profile of Macadam, a Barcelona-based app that pays users for walking, reached €5M in revenue last year, doubling from the previous year. The company was co-founded by three French founders, is profitable (monetizes via ads) and it has 15M registered users across Europe

• Profile of HeyDiga, the AI voice agent startup founded by David Zafra and Sergio Espeja. The company recently secured partnerships with Audi, Seat, Toyota, Triumph, and Harley-Davidson. HeyDiga reached 100 clients in its first year across automotive, healthcare, and hospitality sectors

• Several Spanish-founded startups are thriving in Cambridge’s ecosystem. Barocal raised €5M for eco-friendly cooling materials, Xampla secured £25.8M for plastic alternatives, and Nu Quantum closed a $60M Series A for distributed quantum computing—the UK’s largest in the sector. All founded by Spaniards

Tech investor news 🚀

• Ysios Capital launched InceptionBio, a €100M fund targeting early-stage biotech companies. The fund will focus on technology transfer projects

Big company & policy news 🏦

• Interview with Joseph Santamaría of AWS about AWS’s plans in Spain. The company says that it has invested €33.7B in Spain, focusing on Aragón for data centers and renewable energy projects.

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La Directiva Europea 2023/970 obliga a las empresas de más de 50 empleados a ser transparentes con los sueldos. En España, la fecha límite es el 7 de junio de 2026. Transforma la transparencia en tu mejor estrategia de retención aquí.

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Interesting reads 🤓

• Cybersecurity startup Zynap explained in a blog post how they’ve built NINA AI, a multi-agent cybersecurity assistant that orchestrates specialist AI agents for threat detection and incident response

• JC (COO at Perk) on whether companies are really launching AI SDR at scale and for the whole value chain. Interesting discussion in the comments

• Cool initiative from Marcos Valera, who works in the ElevenLabs GTM team. Bringing together 20 builders for a week in a hacker house in Valencia

• Iñigo Laucirica (Samaipata) published “Is AI shooting down contrarian ideas”

Dealflow.es #506: Lace Litography raised €40M. Securitize Nasdaq plans. Founder secondaries.

A weekly summary of everything that happened in the Spanish startup and tech investing ecosystem.

Welcome to another edition of Dealflow. If you’ve been forwarded this email but you’re not a subscriber, please subscribe. And if you’re interested in sponsorship opportunities, send me an email at jaime@dealflow.es and I’ll share more details

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Crescenta:

Steve Jobs decía que la calidad es la cantidad de veces que dices que «no». En el mundo de la inversión, decir sí a todo es la forma más rápida de perder dinero.

En Crescenta, no solo damos acceso al Private Equity, damos selección.

Nuestro equipo analiza cientos de fondos de capital privado al año, pero le dicen que no al 97%.

Solo nos quedamos con el top 3% y construimos una cartera diversificada a la que puedes acceder con una sola inversión.

Desde 10.000 euros hasta millones, desde minoristas hasta inversores profesionales.

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Startup funding news 💸

€10M+ rounds:

• Barcelona and Norway-based Lace Litography raised €40M led by Atomico to ‌further develop a technology that could enable significant advances in semiconductor design and manufacturing. Spanish investment fund SETT also participated in the round. The company expects a pilot by 2029. More from its co-founder and CTO Adrià Salvador here

• Valencia-based Arkadia Space secured €14.5M from the European Innovation Council Accelerator for its green propulsion technology. The funding includes €2.5M grant, €6M equity from EIC Fund, and €6M private investment. Arkadia Space develops hydrogen peroxide-based propulsion systems to replace toxic hydrazine fuels

€2M to €10M rounds:

• Elche-based PLD Space complemented its recent €180M round with an additional €10M in from private investors through equity crowdfunding platform Sego Venture

• Certuma is Martin Varsavsky’s new startup. It launched out of stealth with $10M round led by 8VC to build the first FDA-approved AI doctor. It has employees in the US, Spain and Argentina

• Barcelona-based Galtea raised $3.2M in seed funding led by 42CAP, with participation from Mozilla Ventures and existing investors. Galtea is an AI evaluation infrastructure provider that addresses testing bottlenecks to deploy agents in the enterprise

€1M to €2M rounds:

• Madrid-based TuringDream, developers of a world model ecosystem, secured €2M from SETT

• Madrid-based Airflows raised €2M in a round led by Adara Ventures with participation from Armilar Venture Partners. Airflows converts AI into deterministic, auditable software systems for the enterprise environments

• IONLY, a Valencia-based lithium battery startup, closed a €1.2M funding round led by Angels

Other rounds of funding:

• Cocopool, the Barcelona-based platform for hourly private pool rentals, raised €435k in funding

• Valladolid-based 53Biologics closed a round led by European PE firm Ren Life Sciences, with participation from existing investors including Spanish fund Inveready. 54Biologics specializes in developing and manufacturing biological drugs

M&A news 🚀

Floating on the Nasdaq is still the plan. Securitize, the asset tokenization startup founded by former Telefónica executive Carlos Domingo, plans to go public on Nasdaq between April and May through a SPAC merger valuing the company at $1.25B. Also last week, the company teamed up with the NYSE to develop a tokenized securities platform, marking a significant step toward blockchain-based trading infrastructure. Carlos Domingo wrote about it here

Carlos Domingo@carlosdomingo

We have just announced a major partnership with @NYSE to support the development of tokenized securities markets, with Securitize named as the first digital transfer agent eligible to mint blockchain-native securities for corporate or ETF issuers on the upcoming NYSE-affiliated

12:05 PM · Mar 24, 2026 · 210K Views

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105 Replies · 218 Reposts · 1.32K Likes

Amazing story, which was first disclosed last week. Indian gaming giant Nazara acquired 50% of Barcelona-based BlueTile Games for $100M, with an option for the remaining 50% by 2028. The bootstrapped studio, founded by Raymond Albaladejo and Marc Schüetze, generated $153M in revenue and $27.7M EBITDA in 2024 without VC backing. With potential earn-outs, the total deal could reach $300M, making it one of Spain’s largest gaming exits alongside Social Point

British job search platform Adzuna acquired the jobs divisions of Trovit and Mitula from Lifull Connect. The deal strengthens Adzuna’s presence in over 50 countries, including key markets like Spain and Italy. Lifull Connect was formed in 2019 as the unification of Trovit (then owned by Next Co., later LIFULL Co. LTD) and Mitula Group, in a deal valued at €118M. With this acquisition, Adzuna cherry-picks the jobs verticals while the fate of the remaining classifieds brands remains unclear

Profile of Visma, the Norwegian private equity-backed company that acquired Holded in 2021, has become a key buyer of Spanish software companies with five acquisitions in four years (Holded, Declarando, Woffu, Quaderno, TuGesto). The publications says that sources indicate a new operation is in preparation

German tech investor Maguar Capital acquired a significant stake in GlobalSuite Solutions, marking its first investment in Spain. GlobalSuite spcealices in GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) software solutions. More info here

Kaze Technologies, a Madrid-based tech consultancy firm, said that it will like to go public by late 2028. It expects to have €150M+ in sales by then, through organic growth and strategic M&A

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

Spanish investors active abroad:

• At Kfund we co-led a €9.5M Series A round in Brazilian healthtech Bliss. The startup automates health insurance sales for SMEs. We wrote about the investment here

• BrainGrid raised €1M in pre-seed funding led by Menlo Ventures, with the participation from Spanish investor Next Tier Ventures

Ysios Capital launched InceptionBio, a €100M fund targeting early-stage biotech company creation in Spain

SeedRocket announced its 17th Campus for Business Angels program, scheduled for April 20-22 and 24 in hybrid format

Startup news 💡

Startup financials

Kai Brandt, CEO and co-founder of Enginy (Genesy), disclosed that the startup reached €3M in ARR last year and that it hit an MRR record in February. He explains how they’re aiming to get to €10M in ARR this year. Kfund is an investor in Enginy

Indexa Capital tripled its net profit to €2.37M in 2025, with consolidated revenues growing 43% to €9.44M. The BME Growth-listed robo-advisor increased assets under management 45% to €4.41B, receiving over €1B in net contributions

Fintech startup Gibobs boosted revenue 120% last year, managing over €1.8B in mortgage transactions—nine times more than two years ago. Since launch, Gibobs has raised nearly €7M from investors including Global PayTech Ventures and IDC Ventures

British fintech Revolut posted record €1.5B net profit in 2025, up 65%, as revenues climbed 46% to €5.3B. Spain became its third-largest market with 6.3M users (+45%), where it plans to hire 800 employees by 2030

New startups and product launches

Flanks launched its AI Financial Advisor, a tool that enables wealth managers to analyze portfolios using natural language queries

Omnia has evolved from an AI visibility monitoring tool into an agent framework that automates the entire marketing process. Co-founder Daniel Espejo shared insights on product evolution. Kfund is an investor in Omnia

Renaiss AI launched RenLayer, a governance platform enabling large enterprises to deploy autonomous AI agents with full control over identity, cost, security and compliance

Other news

Glovo recognized €100M in extra costs from transitioning to employed riders in Spain. Payments to the Seguridad Social and fines now exceed €520M, with a worst-case estimate of €860M. At the same time and as explained last week, Glovo’s parent company Delivery Hero remains under pressure from its second-largest shareholder to accelerate divestitures, now flags Italy as an at-risk market after judicial intervention. More about the struggles of delivery platform to turn profitable in this article

Bloom, a startup from YC’s Summer ‘25 batch co-founded by Spaniard David Oort, published a series of tweets and videos about Apple’s fight against vibe coded apps. They say “Apple is blocking apps that let you build software from your phone. We’re one of them” and that “Apple is banning vibecoding apps”

French fintech Qonto appointed Lorenzo Pireddu as general manager for Southern Europe, overseeing operations in Spain, Italy and Portugal

Sifted put together a list of 11 Spanish AI startups to watch, according to investors from Adara, Kibo and Kfund (represented by yours truly)

Big company & policy news 🏦

Bizum established Madrid as headquarters for the new European payments conglomerate, uniting national payment systems across 12 EU countries plus Norway. The initiative connects Spain’s Bizum (31M users), Italy’s Bancomat Pay, Portugal’s SIBS, and Nordic platforms to create a unified infrastructure reducing dependence on Visa and Mastercard, with P2P payments launching first

Airbnb faces a €64M fine after Madrid’s Superior Court of Justice denied its request to suspend the penalty imposed by Spain’s Ministry of Consumer Affairs. The fine stems from 65,122 listings that violated regulations by advertising unlicensed properties and misleading practices. The platform must now pay the full amount or provide bank guarantees while appealing the decision.

The Generalitat confirmed Sirt and Huawei as winners of a €130M contract to deploy fiber optic infrastructure across Catalonia’s public network

Merlin raised €767M through a capital increase to finance phase III of Merlin’s data center expansion plan, requiring €4.47B over six years and 412MW capacity, as part of a total €7.84B investment across all phases

Interesting reads 🤓

Alejandro Artacho, co-founder and former CEO of Spotahome, published a post on the importance of founder secondaries to be able to think long term: “In 2018, my co-founders took life changing secondaries. I didn’t. Big mistake.”

Javier Garcia (Sintetia, El Confidencial) published an analysis of Wallbox’s roller coaster trajectory: “Wallbox: de prometer 1.500 millones a negociar con sus acreedores”

Neil de la Fuente (ETH Zurich) published “Losing Tickets in Neural Representations”

Guillermo Flor published “How money flows”

David Bonilla (Petalo) wrote “Utilizando la IA en diferentes contextos”

Simon Muñoz (Voicemod) published “El software es el peor sector de 2026”

Dealflow.es #505: Bluetile gaming studio acquired for $100M+. Freepik's journey.

A weekly summary of everything that happened in the Spanish startup and tech investing ecosystem.

Welcome to another edition of Dealflow. If you’ve been forwarded this email but you’re not a subscriber, please subscribe. And if you’re interested in sponsorship opportunities, send me an email at jaime@dealflow.es and I’ll share more details

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Google Cloud:

What links giants like Freepik, Wallapop and Luzia?

Do you know what Freepik, Wallapop and Luzia have in common? They are all using Google Cloud AI to solve complex challenges at incredible speeds.

From revolutionizing retail to structuring medical data, discover 7 “Made in Spain” success stories that are leading the way.

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Startup funding news 💸

Eranovum secured €16M across three financing rounds in Spain, Belgium, and France to expand its electric vehicle charging infrastructure. The financing appears to be a mix of equity and project finance

Home services startup Webel closed a €4.3M round led by Trind Ventures

Health Lean Analytics, a Barcelona-based AI-powered hospital operations platform, raised over €2.1M. The round included strategic partner Novanta, plus €1.4M from family offices and an ENISA

Bcount, an Alicante-based fiscal advisory digitization platform for SMEs and freelancers, raised €1M in seed funding led by Archipélago Next. Bcount automates tax, accounting, and labor obligations

LUDA Partners closed a €750k funding round for its digital pharmacy network. Over 60% of investors are pharmacy professionals

Stuveo raised a pre-seed round led by Abac Nest to transform academic guidance for students

Olimpro, the Seville-based artisanal protein ice cream brand, closed a €300k funding round

M&A news 🚀

Indian gaming company Nazara Technologies acquired a 50% stake in Barcelona-based gaming company Bluetile Bestplay for $100M. Bluetile is known for social casino and puzzle games across multiple platforms. The company was founded in 2019 and, according to his CEO Raymond A. Stauffer, “has grown into a top worldwide studio with over 350M+ lifetime installs and 150M+ yearly revenue”. You can find Raymond’s post about the exit here

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

Resilient Infratech Ventures launched a €70M fund targeting digital infrastructure startups across Spain, France, Italy and Portugal. The Barcelona-based fund, formed by GVC Gaesco Alternative Investments and GNE Ventures, plans 30-35 investments

The Universidad Pontificia Comillas launched Fondo Comillas, a university-led investment fund in Spain that will invest €5k-€25k per project in early-stage startups founded by students, alumni, and staff

CDTI Innvierte closed 8 co-investment operations in February totaling €12.6M, plus €8.7M in a strategic investment in Payload Aerospace, an Alicante-based small satellite launch technology developer. Since January 2026, CDTI Innovación’s investment arm committed €20.3M across 15 companies and €61M in 2 investment vehicles, with an additional €37.5M committed to another fund in February

Ecotechers interviewed Atomico partner Luca Eisenstecken. Atomico has been quite active over the years in Spain, and currently counts with Factorial, TravelPerk and Jobandtalent as portfolio companies

COFIDES committed up to €15M through its Social Impact Fund (FIS) to French firm Partech Partners’ €300M impact vehicle

Spanish investors active abroad:

• GridBeyond, a company backed by Alantra’s Energy Transition Fund, closed a €12M funding round with Samsung Ventures joining as a new investor

Startup news 💡

Startup profiles

Jordi Noguera and Ivan Landabaso (both of JME) published a profile of Freepik and how it’s grown from 32M to 150M+ monthly users by pivoting to AI after gen AI threatened its stock illustration business. elDiario also published an interview with CEO Joaquin Cuenca

Profile of how Pompeii transformed its business model after struggling to expand beyond Spain’s upper-class market. The playbook was gradual: first fix the product, then use online marketing to identify the right customer, and finally scale through wholesale agents, trade fairs and selective partnerships. Today, 85% of Pompeii’s wholesale sales and 60% of its online sales come from outside Spain

Profile of fintech startup Íkualo, which recently launched digital remittance services from Europe to Venezuela and Cuba. The company projects channeling over €50M in remesas by 2026

New startups and product launches

Data centre cooling company Submer announced a €1B investment to build its own 100MW data center in Catalonia, marking a pivot from liquid cooling systems to full data center operations. Submer will fund the project 80% through project financing and plans to launch a €300M+ funding round in H1 2025 for international expansion and a second US factory

Factorial launched its AI Acceleration Fund, allocating €10M to help under-digitized companies adopt AI-powered HR and business management services. The program offers €5M in direct cost reductions and €5M in AI platform credits to companies with 20-1,000 employees signing annual contracts. More info here

Multiverse Computing launched a self-serve API portal giving developers direct access to its compressed AI models that can run locally on devices

Startup financials

Barcelona-based invisible orthodontics startup Impress generated €103M revenue in 2025, up 30% annually. The company also reached positive EBITDA

Event ticketing platform Hellotickets generated €120M in sales for 2025, establishing Spain as its second-largest European market after France. Hellotickets was founded in 2017 by Jorge Diaz Largo, former VP of Marketing and Product of Ticketbis

Other news

Delivery Hero‘s second-largest shareholder Aspex Management threatened to replace management unless the company sells major assets. Could this impact Glovo?

Also about Glovo… the company faces legal action from union CCOO, which filed a complaint with Spain’s National Court alleging the food delivery company executed a “disguised ERE” through massive layoffs exceeding 30 dismissals in 90 days

Tax filing startup TaxDown expects 2.5M users and 400k tax filings in Spain this year, 2x YoY. The company says it was profitable last year. It also operates in Mexico and plans further LatAm expansion

Criptan obtained MiCA authorization from Spain’s CNMV, becoming the 8 company to receive crypto operating licenses. Criptan can now offer regulated crypto services across all 27 EU member states

HelloFresh ceased operations in Spain after just over three years. The meal-kit company struggled against Spain’s growing prepared food market, posting €9M losses over two years despite 62% revenue growth to €9M in 2024

Teya, the €7.75B-valued British fintech, launched operations in Spain targeting small and medium retailers with payment terminals and credit services

Big company & policy news 🏦

Catalan pool equipment company Fluidra opened a new global R&D center in Shenzhen, China, joining its existing innovation hubs in Carlsbad (US) and Polinyà (Barcelona)

Starlink restructured its pricing in Spain with three new residential tiers: €29/month for 100 Mbps (Residential 100), €39/month for 200 Mbps (Residential 200), and €59/month for 400+ Mbps with traffic priority (Residential Max)

Microsoft Ibérica expects 13% revenue growth in 2026 to reach €2.3B, driven by cloud computing, AI, and security solutions. The company’s 2025 revenue increased 20% to €2B thanks to Microsoft Azure improvements, with cloud services generating €1.75B (+25%). Operating profit rose 25% to €65M

Interesting reads 🤓

Carlos Arboleya published “Europe’s AI Champions. And the GTM playbook behind their growth”

Samuel Gil (JME) published “Un ingeniero, un perro y el futuro de la medicina”

Podcasts of the week 🔊

Itnig interviewed Ramiro Iglesias of Crescenta

SeedRocket interviewed Arvin Abarca, founder of GrandVoyage

Outliers interviewed Biel Seuma, general manager of Factorial’s IT initiative

NoBullshitTalks interviewed Francesc Font, co-founder of Incapto Coffee

Dealflow.es #504: Fundraising rumours. Samaipata's new fund. Wallbox pre-bankruptcy proceedings.

A weekly summary of everything that happened in the Spanish startup and tech investing ecosystem.

Welcome to another edition of Dealflow. If you’ve been forwarded this email but you’re not a subscriber, please subscribe. And if you’re interested in sponsorship opportunities, send me an email at jaime@dealflow.es and I’ll share more details

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Startup funding news 💸

According to Bloomberg, Factorial is in fundraising talks to “raise as much as $200M” at $2B. In their latest podcast, both Jordi and Bernat said this is not true and talked about market conditions, what they could use the money for, how the General Catalyst’s Customer Value fund has allowed them to still have all of the last round’s cash in the bank, and other details

According to Ecotechers, Embat is negotiating a funding round of around €40M. Embat received an initial €30M commitment, reportedly from Cathay Innovation leading the round

Barcelona-based Delfos Energy raised €3M in a seed extension round led by Vox Capital/COPEL. Delfos builds AI “virtual engineer” technology for energy operations, bringing total funding to €10M

Logixs, an AI boutique specializing in generative AI solutions, closed a €2M funding round with strategic investors including former Banco Santander CEO José Antonio Álvarez

Asturias and Galicia-based DEXTools launched PerpTools, an on-chain perpetual futures trading platform, following a €3M seed round led by DEXForce and Orderly

Madrid-based Sybolid Identity secured €500k from SETT. Sybol develops digital identity solutions for corporate environments using verifiable credentials technology

Naturr, a marketplace for artisanal foods from small rural producers, raised a second funding round led by Alfonso Tomás, CEO of PC Componentes. The startup multiplied sales 6x in 2025 and seeks €300k to accelerate growth and EU expansion

Sherpa closed a €150k funding round to develop its peer-to-peer logistics platform that connects travelers with people needing package deliveries

M&A news 🚀

Ebury is considering selling a 25-30% stake to investment firm Centerbridge, as an alternative to its planned IPO. Banco Santander, which owns 67% of the fintech, had initially targeted a £2.5B (€2.9B) IPO valuation, but the potential Centerbridge deal values the company at £1.4B (€1.6B)

Telefónica in negotiations to acquire a majority stake in Spanish SAP consulting firm Altim Tecnologías de la Información. The company operates in 15 countries with 300+ active clients and generated €14.3M in 2024 revenue

Findasense’s 2022 sale to Majorel may reach €30M including earn-outs. Ecotechers reports the deal included an upfront €11M payment to founders, plus €5M in executive commissions, with up to €14M more tied to revenue growth and EBITDA targets through 2026. Founded in 2007, Findasense was a bootstrapped digital marketing agency with 350+ employees, 12 offices, and €22M in revenue at the time of the acquisition

Sipay acquired the remaining 48% of Sipos, gaining full control of the hospitality point-of-sale software company

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

Samaipata launched its third fund worth €110M to invest in early-stage AI startups across Europe. The fund has already raised €70M with backing from SETT, German fund KfW, and Spanish family offices. Samaipata will target 25-30 European companies focusing on B2B AI applications, investing up to €10M per company

Mundi Ventures launched its LatAm Fund I targeting $100M to back early-growth fintech, insurtech, and healthtech startups across Latin America and the Caribbean. The fund completed its first close with backing from BID Invest, Cofides, and regional insurers

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Axiomatic AI raised $18M in seed funding led by Engine Ventures, with participation from Spanish VC Big Sur Ventures

• Porto-based Sybilion raised a $4.2M seed round. GoHub Ventures participated in the round

Elaia closed its third DeepTech Seed fund (DTS3) at €134M, doubling the size of previous funds. The Paris-based VC firm has been one of the most active international VC firms in Spain

Startup news 💡

This is great. In a study published by a16z, Freepik was featured as one of the top 50 gen AI web products, by unique monthly visits

Joaquín Cuenca Abela@cuenca

Humbled by the continuous support that we get from our users. We are the first company in that list that is European, and maybe correlated, bootstrapped. Proud of representing Spain.

Freepik @freepik

Freepik is now the #11 most-used Gen AI Product Worldwide We got here by reinvesting and staying focused on what matters to us: building the best creative platform for professionals worldwide Thanks to every creator, team, and enterprise that trusts us We keep building

11:39 PM · Mar 9, 2026 · 20.2K Views

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30 Replies · 40 Reposts · 314 Likes

Startup profiles

Profile of Multiverse Computing, who competes globally with Google DeepMind and Mistral for top AI talent from its San Sebastián headquarters. The language model optimization company expects to end the year with 300 employees. Salaries range from €45k for junior roles to €150k for LLM specialists

New startups and product launches

Fika relaunched “as a publishing platform built for human writing”. Pau Ramon said that the focus is on “helping writers grow their audience and making it possible to earn a living from their work”

Two Spanish startups launched ChatGPT apps last week:

• The Hotels Network launched an app for direct hotel bookings

• idealista launched its app, allowing users can now search idealista’s property listings

Tinybird did its Launch Week, presenting several new products and features: CLI 4.0, a redesigned UI, unified logs explorer, and more

Gaston Ivan Roldan (formerly of Vidext) announced Fluxi, an operational intelligence platform designed to solve real-time business process issues

Startup financials

Wallbox was in the news last week:

• The company entered pre-bankruptcy proceedings in December to shield itself from creditors while restructuring €170M in debt owed to major Spanish banks. The Barcelona-based EV charger manufacturer has until June to negotiate a restructuring plan or face full bankruptcy proceedings

• It expects to finalize a restructuring agreement with creditors by end-March, with 85% of debt holders supporting the plan. Wallbox reported €145M revenue in 2025, down 11%, but cut net losses 32% to €103M. It has a market cap of around €40M

Clikalia launched its own real estate investment management firm, Carnelion REIM, to focus on residential investments. In 2025, Clikalia reported €279M revenue with €5.5M

Bytetravel plans to list on BME Growth between May-June and pursue a dual listing on Euronext Paris by year-end. The Barcelona-based travel tech startup grew its revenues by 73% to €19.4M in 2025

Other news

Glovo announced plans for a workforce reduction affecting up to 750 delivery workers across 60 Spanish cities, especially affecting small and medium cities

Silicon Valley-based customer support platform Sierra announced the opening of a Madrid office to expand its conversational AI platform in Spain

The Catalan Parliament activated proceedings for a new taxi law that could eliminate 85% of VTC licenses in Barcelona. Cabify warned that only 15% of 4,000 current VTC authorizations would survive the restrictive regulations

Bit2Me formed an alliance with savings app Goin to integrate cryptocurrency investment into everyday financial experiences for retail users

Big company & policy news 🏦

Legálitas launched Álex, an AI legal assistant specialized in Spanish law. Since its beta launch, the free tool has reached 600k users and handles 14k daily queries. Unlike other legal AI startups targeting lawyers, Álex focuses on end users

Inditex reported record profits of €6.22B in 2025, up 6% and breaking the €6B barrier for the first time. The Zara owner’s revenue reached €39.86B (+3.2%), just shy of €40B milestone. Online sales grew 4.8% to €10.66B, representing 26.7% of business

Spain’s Appeals Court doubled prison sentences for Arbistar founders Santiago Fuentes and Diego Felipe Fernández to 16.5 and 11.5 years respectively for defrauding 32,000 investors of €200M+ between 2019-2020. The crypto platform promised high returns through automated arbitrage but operated as a Ponzi scheme

Interesting reads 🤓

Ecotechers wrote about the fact that Spanish AI startups are increasingly incorporating directly in Delaware rather than starting in Spain. Interesting take about the topic from David Miranda (Osborne Clarke). This is something that’s been hapenning for several years. A significant number of our portfolio companies at Kfund use this kind of structure: main company in the US and then a Spanish subsidiary. Besides the points mentioned by David, I think it’s a good system that makes attracting US capital easier and doesn’t hurt the company from, for example, having access to public money in Spain (ENISA grants, SETT, CDTI, etc)

Bernardo Quintero (VirusTotal) published “Lo humanamente posible”

LifeX Ventures co-founder Iñaki Berenguer spoke at Forinvest about AI’s positive impact on longevity

Bondo Advisors published “Valoraciones y consolidación en IT consulting”. Valuations normalized to ~1x revenue and 10x EBITDA for small consultancies under €10M enterprise value