Friendly reminder that we now have Dealflow Data, where all of 2026’s funding rounds and exits are visible and searchable.

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Startup funding news 💸

€10M+ rounds:

• Helicon, a US-based startup co-founded by Spaiard Edmundo Sanz-Gadea, raised €14M in a round led by AlleyCorp. The company will build a Los Angeles factory that uses AI and robotics to automate production of materials for drones

€1M to €10M rounds:

• Incapto, the Barcelona-based speciality-coffee platform, secured €5.5M from McWin Capital Partners (they own around 20%). Incapto did €15M in 2025 revenue and targets €26M this year

• Cofrai, a Madrid-based company which develops vertical software for fire-protection companies, raised €2.6M led by DFF Ventures, with Swanlaab participating

• Autentic AI raised €1.5M in pre-seed funding from Baobab Ventures (Carles Reina), Lanai Ventures, Acurio Ventures and Masia VC. The Barcelona-based uses AI for market research

• SafeLoc Systems, a Basque startup that tracks workers and vehicles in factories to prevent accidents, raised €1.45M in a round led by Kutxa Fundazioa, with BeAble Capital and Basque Tek Ventures

• Mothium, a Seville-based manufacturer of commercial EVs, closed a €1M round backed by Impacto Andalucía Innovación y Desarrollo, managed by Arcano Partners, and Fundalogy

Other rounds of funding:

• Kompanion, a Barcelona-based platform for accounting, tax, payroll and insurance management, raised €800k, led by JME, and with participation from Acurio and BStartup

• Alter5, an AI-powered platform for corporate and project finance, secured an investment from Mutua Ventures, which acquired a 10% stake for an undisclosed amount

M&A news 🎊

Bcas, edtech fintech, acquired German company Lendorse. Bcas expects to finance more than 11,000 students and deploy €40M in 2026.

Maite AI, a Barcelona-based startup developing an AI assistant for lawyers, was acquired by France’s Doctrine 2 years after launching and without raising external funding. Sources valued the transaction in the tens of millions. Ecotechers has the details Maite AI has more than 3,000 clients and estimated ARR of around €4.5M.

Startup news 💡

Startup financials:

• Multiverse Computing kept its €500M Series C open almost three months after announcing it. Investor materials cited €125M in annualised recurring revenue to June, while audited 2025 accounts reported €11M in revenue. Ecotechers has the details

• Jobandtalent financials in Spain: losses increased to nearly €120M from €92.3M, while revenue slipped around 1% to €1.8B. The company extended its €350M BlackRock loan to October 2028, added a €25.75M liquidity line and reduced average headcount by roughly 400

• Holded targets 40% growth in 2026, aiming for €42M in revenue, more than €50M in ARR and €2M in EBITDA

• Twenix, the Almería-based business-English platform, reached profitability in 2025 and expects €14M in 2026 sales while doubling EBITDA. B2B accounts for 98% of sales and serves 1,500 companies

• Sngular published its audited first-half 2026 results, highlighting revenue growth, a stronger cash position, low debt and reduced dependence on its largest clients

New startups and product launches:

• Securitize launched tokenised shares of 12 US companies, including Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, SpaceX and Palantir. They’re issued on Solana and settled in USDC

• Speridlabs released Iris-3B, an open-source AI model that generates images directly, pixel by pixel

• Magnific launched Magnific One. More info here

• Urbanitae and wealth manager Abante launched Real Estate Debt Strategies, a €50M-target hedge fund investing in a diversified portfolio of property loans

• Factorial relaunched its assistant One as a personal AI agent for businesses through a partnership with Microsoft

Other news:

• Veridas surpassed 100M identity checks in Mexico and now covers 75% of the country’s telecom market

• Mundimoto appointed former COO Albert Vergés as CEO, while founder Pepe Talavera became executive chairman. The change follows a €4M capital increase and €40M debt refinancing

• Pangea Propulsion plans to invest €20M–€30M to expand its rocket-engine testing facility at Lleida-Alguaire Airport by 2028

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Investor news 🤑

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Nauta participated in the €89M Series A of UK Universal Quantum, a Brighton-based developer of modular quantum computers

• Seaya Andromeda led a €35M round in French company Wiremind, a SaaS company providing AI-powered revenue for transport and entertainment businesses

• Enzo participated in the $4M round of AI clinical trials company Cori Clinical

Bastion Capital Partners One launched a Spanish fund targeting €300M–€500M for defence, security, aerospace and dual-use technologies

Inveready and Blaumar Capital acquired a controlling stake in Blinker, an Alicante-based supplier of specialist components to the automotive, construction, metal and marine sectors. The company generates €67M in annual revenue

True from Marek Fodor

Big company & policy news 🏢

Inditex launched an open-source hub for engineering tools developed by Inditex Tech

Spain’s competition watchdog, the CNMC, warned of growing dependence on Starlink and other US satellite operators

El Corte Inglés delayed its 2026–2030 strategic plan after the board requested a deeper review. The setback coincided with the departure of its head of Data, Analytics and AI, adding to a series of exits from its tech division.

The Spanish government aims to approve a new data-centre decree before the November election and has committed to Brussels to pass it as part of negotiations to unlock €25.8B in EU recovery funds

Aena launched a €2.9M tender for a controllable AI system to manage climate control and reduce energy use at Madrid-Barajas Airport

A survey of Spain’s 25 largest law firms found that 80% already use AI for work traditionally assigned to junior lawyers

Bizum now reaches 32.5M users on its 10th anniversary

Spain delayed the Verifactu billing system again, until October 2028

Microsoft confirmed 64 layoffs in Spain after agreeing the terms of an ERE

Meta paid Talavera de la Reina’s council €1.09M for development rights linked to its planned data-centre campus

Interesting reads 🤓

Chals Arboleya (zernio) published “My First Six Months as a Go-to-Market Partner for Startups”.

Sergio Paniego (Huggin Face) published “The Ultimate Guide to Multi-Harness RL”.

Borja Perez (Helmcode) wrote “No vuelvas a hacer un PowerPoint en tu vida. PPTs como software“

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This week’s newsletter is brought to you by Google Cloud:

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Startup funding news 💸

Very few funding announcements last week:

• Tenoro, an Argentinian and Spanish AI operating system for retail, raised a €1.7M seed round led by Plus Partners, with Bynd, Soldiers Field. The company has surpassed €1M in ARR in Mexico

M&A news 🎊

Indra acquired a 30% stake in Spanish cybersecurity company TRC, with an option to purchase the remainder within two years. TRC employs more than 400 people and generated over €120M in 2025 revenue. The transaction is subject to CNMC approval.

Barcelona-based Adsmurai acquired Italian marketing agency Ciaodino, adding 30 employees and clients

OfiPro, an A Coruña-based invoicing and accounting software company, was acquired by French company

M&A in cybersecurity: Aiuken Cybersecurity acquired 4Elitech, a specialist in industrial cybersecurity, critical infrastructure and IoT. Sources valued the deal at around €20M

Startup news 💡

Company and product launches:

• Submer launched Corenix, a subsidiary providing custom modular infrastructure for AI data centres. Corenix website here

• Omnia launched Omnia Agent on Product Hunt, an AI agent that automates generative-engine optimisation

• Philippe Gelis, co-founder of Kantox (acquired by BNP) is now building Kronopoly. “Invest like the ultra wealthy in a passive way”. Philippe published “2.680 new millionaires every day!”

• Lucas García de Viedma, an Exponential fellow, launched Mailtag, a privacy-focused tool that automatically organises email using categories described in natural language

• Alinia AI introduced Seny, a compliance-focused base model that supervises AI agents in regulated industries. More info here

• Researchers from IDIBELL, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and ISGlobal developed ChromAgeNet, an AI model that detects ageing in blood stem cells

Startup financials:

• Bytetravel, the Barcelona travel-tech company, doubled first-half revenue to €14.8M, while adjusted EBITDA quadrupled to €1.8M. Growth was driven by its eSIM business

• Didit, an identity-verification startup from Y Combinator’s Winter 2026 batch, grew revenue 64x in 15 months while remaining profitable

• Wetaca partnered with BM Supermercados to sell prepared meals in 70 stores around Madrid. Wetaca did €21.5M in revenue last year

Other news:

• Interview with Pablo Palafox, co-founder of HappyRobot, and Alberto Granados, president of growth and expansion. The company currently has around 100 employees in Spain

• French fintech Qonto opened its first Madrid office, complementing its office in Barcelona hub with around 300 employees. Spain is one of its 4 largest markets

• ObsessionDB joined Y Combinator’s Fall 2026 batch. Co-founded by Spaniard Andres Monteoliva, they’ve built a real-time data warehouse for AI agents

• Indexa Capital appointed GVC Gaesco to find institutional buyers for 6.06% of its capital. The sale is intended to lift free float above the 10% threshold needed to move to Spain’s continuous market before the end of 2026

• Canadian legaltech group Clio turned vLex’s Barcelona headquarters into its global hub for legal AI after acquiring the Catalan company last year for more than €850M

Investor news 🤑

Barlon Capital, led by Javier Rubió and Dídac Lee, launched a new €100M fund, 2x the size of its previous vehicle. The fund will target mainly Spanish consumer startups

Plus Partners, the pre-seed fund launched by Enrique Linares and Oriol Juncosa, increased its fund to €50M from an initial €40M target

Ecotechers published an analysis of SETT and CDTI’s growing role in Spain’s startup ecosystem. The two public institutions committed more than €1.5B to VC funds in 2025

Ecotechers also published an analysis of Atresmedia’s decade-long investment in Fever. It invested almost €29M and generated approximately €295M in proceeds, an average return of around 10x

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Kembara (Mundi) did the 2nd investment out of its €1B fund: Reverion, a German developer of reversible solid-oxide fuel-cell power plants. Kembara led a $175M Series B led by Kembara

• Masia invested in Hop Aero, as part of an $11M seed round led by Initialized Capital. The company is building an autonomous hypersonic cargo rocket

• Complaion, an Italian startup compliance startup backed at pre-seed by us at Kfund as well as Enzo, raised a €13.5M round led by Eurazeo and Italian Founders Fund

Big company & policy news 🏢

Mercadona increased average revenue per store by almost 50% since 2020. Physical-store sales reached €40.8B and online revenue rose by 6x to €1.7B

LaLiga asked the European Commission to add services including NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark and Proton to the EU’s Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List

Spain’s Congress rejected the decree that included the Cuenta Financia Europa, a proposed investment account that would have allowed up to €150k to be invested in EU stocks, funds and ETFs with tax incentives

Tesla’s Model 3 became Spain’s best-selling car in September, the 1st time ever tha an EV has achieved the milestone

Bizum, Italy’s Bancomat, Portugal’s MB Way, Vipps MobilePay and Wero agreed to create the Madrid-based European Network of Payments

Interesting reads 🤓

Joshua Novick (Bondo Advisors) published “Ni tú vendes a €32M, ni yo compro a €40M”.

Luigi Mallardo published “Before You Scale, Know What You’re Scaling”.

Julio Ribes (founder of Holaglow and previously Swipcar) published “Dejo de ser CEO de Holaglow: lo que he aprendido construyendo un negocio de retail”

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This week’s newsletter is brought to you by Crescenta:

Hay noticias que cambian el mercado y noticias que cambian tu cartera.

Todos hemos usado ChatGPT. Pocos pueden decir que han invertido en la compañía que lo creó. Esta semana, Crescenta ha comunicado a sus inversores de Growth I una nueva distribución: uno de sus fondos subyacentes ha vendido parte de su participación en OpenAI.

Dos años después de su lanzamiento, Growth I ya ha distribuido más de 2,8M€ a sus inversores. Las dos primeras ediciones de Growth están cerradas, pero la tercera, Growth III, con la misma filosofía y calidad de selección, está disponible desde 10.000 € (a desembolsar gradualmente).

Invertir en capital privado conlleva riesgos, entre los que destaca la iliquidez. La rentabilidad pasada no es un indicador fiable de resultados futuros.

Invierte con Crescenta

Startup funding news 💸

€10M+ rounds:

• Trebellar, a SF-based AI for real-estate platform co-founded by Spaniards Diego Ferreiro and David García, raised an $18M Series A led by Blossom Capital. Trebellar has significant team presence in Spain. We at Kfund participated in Trebellar’s pre-seed round in 2023. Diego wrote about the investment here and here

€1M to €5M rounds:

• Tucuvi, the Madrid-based voice AI startup for healthcare, raised €5M from AXIS and Fond-ICO

• Mirai RiskTech, a Madrid-based startup for treasury and risk teams, raised €5M from Inveready

• Pekata, a Barcelona-based corporate-gifting platform, closed a €1.9M financing from Bewater Funds and others

• InspectRail, a Basque deeptech spin-off from technology centre CEIT, raised €1.5M in equity and debt

• Aloja, an AI-powered dynamic-pricing platform for tours, attractions and activities, raised €1.2M in a round co-led by Archipélago Next and Lanai Partners, with Decelera Ventures participating. Founded in 2025, it integrates with booking systems including Bókun and Ventrata and already serves customers in 12 countries

Sub €1M rounds:

• Aniwa, an Ecuador and Spain-based insurtech, raised more than €500k in public and private funding

• Digital Anatomics, a Madrid medtech developing AI surgical planning, raised €420k from BStartup Banco Sabadell, Coben and private investors

• Reply Next, Madrid-based AI retail, raised €400k in a pre-seed round led by 4Founders Capital, with angels Juanjo Mostazo and David Alcobero participating

International startups with Spanish relevance:

• Chift, a Belgian financial-connectivity API, raised a €10.5M Series A led by BlackFin Capital Partners. Chift launched in Spain last year and is one of the priority markets for the new capital

M&A news 🎊

Spanish ESG-data firm Clarity AI merged with US proxy adviser Glass Lewis in an all-share deal through a new holding company. According to Ecotechers, the deal follows an unsuccessful fundraising process (including a proposed €15M investment from SETT) and consideration of a sale amid pressure on the ESG software market. Clarity was valued near €300M in its 2024 Series D, but Seaya’s latest portfolio marks implied a valuation of roughly €74M. The company ended 2025 with €18.6M in ARR and an EBITDA loss exceeding €27M

EYSA acquired Joinup, the B2B corporate-mobility platform. Financial terms were undisclosed.

Telefónica acquired a 10% stake in OGA.ai, a Seville-based AI and industrial-optimisation company behind qosITconsulting. OGA closed 2024 with €1.68M in revenue

US returns-management company ReturnPro acquired Spanish startup iF Returns, combining its US recommerce operation with the European platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Kfund is an investor in iF Returns

Startup news 💡

New products and companies:

• Trackingplan launched a new positioning as an always-on digital analytics agent that monitors data quality across more than 80 analytics and advertising platforms

• Infra voice AI startup SLNG launched UNMUTE through the Agentic AI Foundation, an open-source declarative standard for voice agents

• Rosario AI launched an AI voice receptionist for medical centres after building the first version in 48 hours at HackSpain26

• Pretty cool. nothiring.me launched a community connecting talent with startups in Spain. Applicants join through AI agents but must personally explain their strongest project and why they stand out

Startup profiles and interviews:

• Interview with Raúl Verdú, co-founder of PLD Space. The company is preparing the first flight of Miura 5 from the European spaceport in French Guiana

• Profile of Kanguro, a Barcelona-based last-mile logistics startup. It has raised €4.5M across several rounds. It uses AI agents to build a network of 5,000 collection points in local shops across Spain, France, Portugal and Germany

• Profile of Substrate AI, a company out of Talavera de la Reina developing AI models tailored to European languages and regulation. It employs around 200 people and generated €18M in revenue in 2025. It has raised €39M

Startup financials:

• Indexa Capital Group now manages more than €6B from customers. It also reported H1 2026 net profit of €1.94M, up 109% YoY

• Civitatis revealed that LatAm already generates 40% of revenue. Mexico is its second-largest source market with more than 2M users

Other news:

• Escooter company Lime halted its expansion in Catalonia after Barcelona decided not to renew private bike-sharing licences from 2027

• Glovo co-founder and CEO Oscar Pierre will stand trial over allegations that the company continued treating its couriers as self-employed workers despite court rulings

• Sierra, the AI customer-service giant, recently entered Spain and claims to already work with roughly a 25% of Ibex 35 companies, including Santander

• iPronics signed a 2-year strategic partnership with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center to develop programmable optical networks for GPU and HPC-based AI infra

• The seven-year legal dispute between Auro and Cabify over a 2018 exclusivity clause reached the EU Court of Justice. A decision is due on January 14

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Investor news 🤑

Columbus Venture Partners launched Columbus Innvierte Deeptech, a €100M fund authorised by Spain’s CNMV. It will back pre-seed and seed-stage technology-transfer companies in life sciences and healthcare

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Suma Capital invested $10M in Hydrosat through its SC Net Zero Ventures fund

• Prevision Medicine, a Zurich-based precision-oncology startup, raised $5.4M in a seed round, including the participation GoHub Ventures

Atresmedia shares rose 10.4% after the group a new dividend equivalent to roughly €187M. The extraordinary distribution follows the sale of its remaining 5.2% stake in Fever. Fully agree with my colleague Arrola on this:

Big company & policy news 🏢

Spain’s data-centre buildout continues to reshape investment, employment and energy policy:

• Job searches for data-centre roles in Spain tripled in two years while vacancies rose around 70%, according to Indeed

• Maria Blanco of ElEspañol published “Centros de datos: Sánchez lastra el futuro de la industria española”

Spain’s government unveiled Plan IA360, a 12-month roadmap for AI adoption. Nothing relevant to be honest, and a missed opportunity to do something useful

BBVA launched BBVA Bilbao AI Transformation, its first regional innovation hub, bringing together more than 150 data, analytics and AI professionals

Interesting reads 🤓

Two great reads this week:

• Guli Moreno (Exponential, Capchase) published “Manifiesto Exponential”.

• Miguel Carranza (RevenueCat) published “El verdadero problema de las startups en España”.

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This week’s newsletter is brought to you by zenital:

Has invertido en Claude y aún no ves el retorno.

Muchas organizaciones han destinado ya recursos significativos a herramientas de IA y, tras las primeras semanas, ven que la adopción se ralentiza o se estanca. “Comprar” IA, sin adopción, es invertir sin obtener retorno.

De ahí surge AI Adoption & Productivity Program, desarrollado por expertos en datos e IA:

• Impulsa el uso continuado de Claude en toda la organización

• Ayuda a los usuarios a obtener mejores resultados

• Detecta nuevas oportunidades y casos de uso reales con potencial

Los equipos que trabajan (de verdad) con Claude ya cuentan con una mayor ventaja competitiva. Que el tuyo no se quede atrás.

Startup funding news 💸

Biggest deal of the week was Fever’s. If I’m not mistaken, Fever is now Spain’s most valuable tech company, at €4.5B:

• Primary round: Fever raised $250M in a round led by EQT, with Point72 Private Investments, Baillie Gifford and existing investors.

• Vitruvian secondary: Vitruvian Partners acquired Atresmedia’s remaining 5% stake for €227M, valuing Fever at more than €4.5B.

• Atresmedia’s return: Including partial exits in 2023 and 2024, Atresmedia generated €296M in proceeds and approximately €264M in after-tax gains from an investment that began through media-for-equity in 2015, delivering a MOIC above 10x.

• Fever has more than tripled revenue over the past three years while remaining EBITDA-positive

€10M+ rounds:

• 011h Sustainable Construction, the Barcelona-based proptech, secured up to €12M from Axis, ICO’s VC arm

€5M to €10M rounds:

• BATTIA, a Gipuzkoa-based deeptech spin-off, raised €7.8M from the IDAE’s RENOCICLA program. BATTIA recycles EV batteries using AI and robotics

€1M to €5M rounds:

• Health Force, a Barcelona-based startup developing AI agents for hospital operations, raised €4.2M in a seed round led by LUMO Labs, with Next Tier Ventures, Step Venture, Target Global, and Calm/Storm participating

• Quartz, a London and Barcelona-based fintech for personal finance and wealth management, raised €3.2M in a pre-seed round led by Daphni, with Outward VC, Kfund

• OkCargo, a Madrid-based logistics startupm closed a €2M growth debt round with CaixaBank’s debt fund

• Cubicup, a Valencia-based proptech specializing in sustainable full-home renovations, raised €2M in a round led by Suma Capital, with participation from Fondo Bolsa Social

• Nearby Computing, a Barcelona-based spin-off of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), raised €1.4M, with €680k from Spain’s SETT. The startup develops software to orchestrate and automate distributed cloud, edge, and AI infra

International companies with relevant presence in Spain:

• Open Cosmos, the London and Barcelona-based satellite infra company, raised €300M in a round led by Lightrock, with ETF Partners, the Institut Català de Finances, Entrepreneurs First and Phoenix Court among the backers. Reports put contracts signed over the past 4 years at €320M to more than €370M

M&A news 🎊

a3Satel, a company specialized in software and services for firms, advisories, and professional offices, has acquired Agrisoft, a provider of payroll and labor management software

Startup news 💡

Holded closed 2025 with €35.5M in ARR. Holded was acquired by Visma in 2021 for over €190M, when it reported €6.8M in revenues

Revolut surpassed 7M clients in Spain, becoming the country’s 4th-largest bank by users

Housers is facing complaints from investors who say they cannot recover funds from projects. According to laSexta, around €66M of the €150M invested through the real estate equity crowdfunding platform remains unpaid

According to El Periodico Glovo cofounders Oscar Pierre and Sacha Michaud studied a management buyout to regain control of the following markets: Spain, Portugal, Poland, Romania y Moldavia

Perk (TravelPerk), launched Perk Spend in the US following its European debut last November. The US accounts for 30% of Perk’s new global business

Anthropic landed in Spain with a new Madrid office. It will be led locally by Cristina Pitarch, former Google Cloud Security director for EMEA

Quiver launched Arrow 2, its most significant update yet for AI-powered vector design. Quiver is a Kfund and JME portfolio company, based in the US but co-founded by Spaniard Joan Rodriguez

Olesym, a new deeptech company launched by Zubi Group’s venture builder, develops European-made ingredients for detergents and cosmetics without palm oil or petroleum

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Investor news 🤑

CDTI invested €11.3M across 9 coinvestment deals in July and August. Since January 2026, Innvierte has committed €85.9M across 38 companies and €650.1M in 10 investment vehicles.

Antai hired three new team members, including former Inveready and Wallbox professionals, to strengthen its operations, investment, and legal divisions. The moves come as the firm raises between €40M and €75M for The Extension Fund II, a debt vehicle backing Spanish startups in AI, digital services, and software.

Big company & policy news 🏢

Spain’s data-centre debate intensified this week:

• Government position: PM Pedro Sánchez published an op-ed in Bloomberg titled “How to Stop Data Centers From Grabbing Too Much Power”

• Paul Meaney, head of AWS data centres for Europe, asked the government to adhere to existing EU regulations for data centres

• Industrial backlash: Spain’s heavy industry filed objections through the Alianza por la Competitividad de la Industria Española, demanding priority over AI infrastructure

The DGT has urged caution on the rollout of robotaxi trials in Spain, which last week was said that could begin in Q4 2026. The EU noted that European homologation rules won’t take effect until January 2027

On the topic of self-driving technology, Tesla announced it has completed two years of FSD supervised testing across Spain, covering 460,000 kms

Spain’s Ministry of Trabajo thinking of proposing a law that would bar the reuse of artists’ voices or images in AI

The ERE of over 2,000 content moderators for Meta‘s platforms in Barcelona reached Catalonia’s High Court

Interesting reads 🤓

If true, this is terrible. I h Spain’s Intellectual Property Commission blocked several domains of Archive.today. The restriction was imposed without a court ruling, with apparently some Spanish ISPs now redirecting users to a government page. At least with my ISP, I can still access Archive through various domains

Alex Bryszkowski (VP B2B & Partnerships at Holafly) published “La convergencia silenciosa: Cómo las APIs están transformando el viaje corporativo”

Inditex Tech published “Engineering Zero-Downtime Deployments for Large-Scale Industrial Automation”

Javi Santana (Tinybird) published “Forward Deployed Engineer a pie de calle”. Here also in English

• Strong op-ed in El Confidencial: “Centros de datos: cómo destrozar una ventaja competitiva”

• Amazon, which has committed €33.7B in Aragón through 2035, warn that retroactive requirements could put already-permitted projects at risk.

• Three international investors say €9B of projects could move abroad, while Quetta Data Centers argues that building matching renewables within 18 months is unrealistic.

• After hundreds of objections, the government has signalled it may soften the rules, though it remains focused on limiting pressure on electricity bills.

• The uncertainty also affects Spain’s proposed €5B AI gigafactory

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This week’s newsletter is brought to you by Crescenta:

5.000€.

Es lo que necesitas hoy para entrar en nuestra selección de fondos de Private Equity. Antes eran 10.000€ de compromiso y 100.000€ de patrimonio.

No ha cambiado nada más. Seguimos escogiendo cada fondo con el mismo cuidado de siempre, como si fuera una pieza de artesanía, no un producto en serie. Lo que cambia es la puerta de entrada. Ahora es un poco más ancha, gracias a un nuevo ELTIF: un vehículo que nos permite ofrecer condiciones de acceso más flexibles:

• Inversión mínima de 5.000 €

• Siempre que tengas ingresos brutos anuales de +50.000€

Misma selección, más acceso. Empieza a invertir en crescenta.com

Invertir en capital privado conlleva riesgos, entre ellos de iliquidez. Ni la inversión, ni la rentabilidad objetivo están garantizadas. Más info en crescenta.com/condiciones

Startup funding news 💸

👉 Friendly reminder that we now have Dealflow Data, where all of 2026’s funding rounds and exits are visible and searchable.

€20M+ rounds:

• HVR Energy, a Madrid-based operator specialized in hydrogen refueling infrastructure, raised a €20M Series A at a €120M post-money valuation. Sandton led with €15M

€10 to €15M rounds:

• Deneb Medical, a San Sebastián-based company specializing in robotics for healthcare, raised €14.7M in a public-private capital increase, including €7.2M from Spain’s SETT

• Vaxdyn, a Seville-based biotech, raised €11M in a Series A led by Portugal’s Biovance Capital (€4M), with Arcano Partners (€3.6M) also participating

€1M to €10M rounds:

• BizAway, the Italian and Spanish corporate travel startup, secured €10M in financing from BBVA to fund its acquisition of Dutch firm Uniglobe Alliance Travel

• HeyDiga, a Madrid and Barcelona-based startup providing service businesses with AI agents that handle calls and customer interactions, raised raised €5.5M in a round led by 6 Degrees Capital (their reason why here), joined by us at Kfund and Italian Founders Fund. We led HeyDiga’s prior pre-seed round 12 months ago

Other rounds of funding:

• Dimenso, a company based in the US but with Spanish founders, raised €600k in a round led by Draper B1, with Next Tier Ventures. Dimenso builds AI tools for scientific laboratories

M&A news 🎊

New filings reveal the scale of Asana’s acquisition of US/Spanish startup StackAI. On top of the initial cash payment, Asana granted StackAI’s roughly 80 employees 7.5M shares tied to retention and performance, plus up to $20M in further performance-based stock after one year. The package could be worth $73M–$82M

Green Eagle Solutions raised a majority investment from Copilot Capital. Green Eagle automates renewable energy operations and had raised €6M from Kibo and others

Inveready merged Sercomgas and Easyner to create Grupo Sercom, a provider of high-value technology services for the electricity and gas markets

Startup news 💡

Startup profiles:

• Profile of Akaio, a Boston- and Madrid-based startup that uses AI to generate viable business ideas

• Profile of Valencia-based iPronics, the UPV spin-off that announced last week a $125M round with participation from Nvidia (Nvidia’s first investment in Spain)

• Profile of FuVeX, a Navarra-based company that designs, manufactures, and operates long-range unmanned aircraft for critical infrastructure inspection. They’ve raised over €13M since its founding

• Profile of Paratech, the space-tech startup that develops high-precision recovery systems for space cargo

Product and startup launches:

• World models startup Sperid Labs unveiled ENEAS, a text-promptable method for instance tracking and semantic discovery

• Clio launched its platform in Spain, a year after acquiring Spanish and US legal database vLex from Oakley Capital in a deal valuing it above $1B

• PLD Space unveiled the Miura 9, a fully reusable two-stage rocket to be completed before 2028

Financials:

• Multiverse Computing lost nearly €24M in 2025 with sales of €11.1M

• Wallbox will cease production at its Arlington, Texas factory and relocate its remaining US manufacturing to Barcelona

Personnel changes and new openings:

• idealista launched operations in France, its 4th market

• HappyRobot appointed Alberto Granados as Non-Executive Chairman of Growth and Expansion. Granados spent most of his career at Microsoft, serving as President of Microsoft Spain until 2025

• French shift management startup Skello, recently raised €200M and announced plans to double its Barcelona team to nearly 250 by 2027

• British-origin biotech Tolemy Bio is establishing operations in Barcelona. The company raised €1.4M in a pre-seed round led by Norrsken Evolve last year

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Investor news 🤑

Nazca Capital appointed Carme Artigas as Operating Partner

Lanzadera announced 124 new startups in its newest batch

Bewater Funds exited its stake in Spanish cosmetics brand LiCO Cosmetics after three years on the cap table

Samaipata promoted Íñigo Laucirica to Partner. He had joined in 2021 from Barclays

Big company & policy news 🏢

Madrid announced it will become the first European region to launch a self-driving car and taxi pilot, starting in Q4 2026

BBVA named Joseph Saab as its new global head of software development. He was previously at BCG

El Corte Inglés launched an automated logistics platform in Madrid district to boost online grocery sales

Interesting reads 🤓

Joaquin Mencia published “Growth Is a Search Problem: Why Companies Keep Planning Their Way Into Markets That Don’t Exist”

Two Spanish mathematicians, Diego Córdoba (ICMAT-CSIC) and Luis Martínez-Zoroa (CUNEF), have emerged as central figures after OpenAI claimed to solve the Navier-Stokes equations

Jordi Villar published “Every Millisecond Counts: On improving ClickHouse query performance to the millisecond”

Simon Muñoz (Voicemod) published “Zombiecornios: Los muertos vivientes del ecosistema startup”

Samuel Gil (JME) published “El fin de los systems of record, que te paguen por ser tú, la odisea de la vida, y el problema de vivir más”

At Kfund we have been writing 1st cheques in Spain since 2016. Across 4 funds and 136 investments, we went back and priced every one of them the same way: what did 1% of the company cost on the day we invested? This is our own portfolio rather than the market, but 10 years and 136 companies is a decent sample of how the local ecosystem has moved.

Since 2016, valuations of Spanish startups have roughly increased by 3.5 and the median round we entered grew from €820k to €3.3M.

One way to feel the shift: a €1M cheque bought 23% of a company in 2016, and buys about 7% today. Prices tripled, round sizes quadrupled, and the funds that stayed in the game have responded by writing bigger cheques rather than accepting smaller positions, which also has an impact on fund size.

I’ll continue to bring more data points as I continue to analyze all of the data that we have.

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Startup funding news 💸

👉 Friendly reminder that we now have Dealflow Data, where all of 2026’s funding rounds and exits are visible and searchable.

iPronics, a Valencia-based photonics startup building optical switches to connect GPUs in AI data centers, raised €107M ($125M). The round marked Nvidia’s first major investment in Spanish tech, alongside Criteria, Maverick Silicon and Light Street. Iñaki Berenguer served for 6 years as president and board member and is now stepping down from both roles. He wrote about his involvement here. More about iPronics here and here

Barcelona-based fintech ID Finance secured a €21M debt facility from German asset manager nordIX to expand its consumer lending business in Spain. In H1, it originated more than €190M in loans and reported around €100M in revenue

Valencia-based Ipremom, which commercializes prenatal diagnostics, raised €15M in a round led by Spain’s Asabys and UK-based Amadeus

MOA Foodtech, a Navarra-based biotech company, raised €3.3M from the EIC Fund, Swanlaab Innvierte Agri Food Tech, and CDTI-Innvierte. The company uses AI to turn agri-food byproducts into functional ingredients

M&A news 🎊

Factorial acquired German startup Empion, a Berlin-based specialist in AI-powered candidate and employee assessments. The deal strengthens Factorial’s push into Germany, its first market outside Spain. More from Jordi Romero here

British fund Everfield acquired Playoff, a Sabadell-based platform for managing sports clubs, federations, academies and associations. Playoff closed 2025 with €1.6M in revenue

Eurofirms Group, the Catalan HR company, acquired Avanza Externalización de Servicios, the outsourcing division previously owned by unicorn Jobandtalent, which had paid €9.36M for it in 2021. Avanza billed €72M last year

Startup news 💡

Startup financials:

• Idealista‘s parent compay posted €345.7M in revenue and €155.4M EBITDA in 2025

• Perk (TravelPerk) said that it has no immediate plans to go public. The company is nearing $400M in annual revenue while growing 50% YoY and without burning cash. The choppy debut of rival Navan on the stock market has reinforced its patience

• Wallapop closed 2025 with €116M in revenue, up 15% YoY, though losses widened 12% to €28M due to a €84M incentive plan tied to Naver’s full acquisition. Wallapop Envíos drove €85M in sales, while subscriptions and visibility services added €27M. The company expects to reach profitability next year.

• Cooltra turned 20. Profitable since 2021, the firm reached gross sales of roughly €63M in 2025 and expects €68M this year. Bikes now make up 10% of its fleet, targeting 30–40% within a few years.

Product launches and new companies:

• Multiverse Computing launched Quasar 438B, a reasoning model for enterprise-scale agents and coding. There was a ton of backlash on X about the launch, since the company was not fully transparent about the fact that it’s a compressed GLM 5.2. Both tweets about the launch now have community notes, here and here

• Toni Perez (Bloobirds/Harmonix) announced his new company OpenDome

• Trade Republic incorporated funds from Spanish star managers Cobas, Azvalor and Magallanes, plus Groupama, letting clients buy from just €1

• MyInvestor partnered with VIVLA, a company specializing in co-owned second homes, to offer its clients access to premium properties in top Spanish destinations

Map of Spain’s startups deploying drones, AI, thermal sensors and LiDAR to prevent and fight fires. The list includes Aeromedia UAV, Cazallamas, Deliciouspack, Dendron, Forest Bank, Ignite Siniestros, IMS Drones, Tecnobosque, Vallfirest and Skyboria

Odilo rebranded as Letmino, closing a turbulent chapter marked by the exit of its founder, internal fraud accusations and an ERE

Qamarero, the Seville-based SaaS platform for hospitality management, said that it has been adding around 200 clients monthly and reached ARR of roughly €2.6M last year

Profile of XRF, the dual-use tech startup led by Gustavo Medina, which has developed “visual intelligence” tools that recreate armed conflicts and natural disasters in real-time 3D

Holaluz returned to BME Growth after it faced a government procedure to disqualify it over unpaid debts to electricity distributors. Holaluz said the invoices are fully settled. Before suspension, it was valued at €27.15M

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Investor news 🤑

Profile of Mission, the VC firm managed by Jorge Dobon and born from Demium’s pivot to pure early-stage investing. It’s raising a new €35M fund

Marina de Empresas, the Valencia entrepreneurship hub backed by Mercadona by Juan Roig, opened a 3rd building after a €25M investment. Juan Roig’s personal contribution to the hub now exceeds €70M

SeedRocket has put together the 18th edition of its Campus for Business Angels, which will take place in mid October

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Sorare, the fantasy sports NFT platform, closed a new funding round backed by longtime investors Benchmark, Accel, Partech and Kibo Ventures

Big company & policy news 🏢

Spain’s videogame studios are rolling back remote work. Unions claim return-to-office mandates aim to force voluntary exits and dodge severance. Ubisoft Barcelona Mobile workers began a strike over

eDreams reported an 80% drop in adjusted net profit to €4.7M in Q2 of fiscal 2026, citing a deliberate investment phase tied to its November 2025 strategy shift

More info and debate about Spain’s Ministerio de Transición Ecológica proposal for stricter energy rules for data centers. SpainDC estimates the sector could mobilize €67B by 2030, though Amazon, Meta, and Merlin Properties warn the plan threatens their investments.

Interesting reads 🤓

Miguel Carranza on being a founder in Spain and building new companies from here. He’s right

And… I’m back! Hope you all had a great summer.

During August I worked on this: Dealflow data.

I’ve been meaning to build it for a while but could never find the time. It’s basically a simple database of every round, exit and new fund closed or raised in Spain since the beginning of 2026 (around 330 deals so far). For now it’s fairly basic and probably has some mistakes in the data, but I’ve been using it to track certain companies, help a few of our portfolio companies find potential customers, and other small things.

A few things to note:

• I’m treating “Spain” the way we do at Kfund: Spanish companies and Spanish founders abroad. I’m not trying to build the single source of truth for the Spanish tech ecosystem, just something that’s useful to me (and hopefully to some of you).

• I update it every week, right after the newsletter goes out, so it stays current.

• I only include confirmed deals (closed rounds and announced exits, no rumours), and I try to remove duplicates when the same deal gets reported across several issues.

• All the charts on the site are clickable and will filter the entries below them. For example, if you click “€1-5M” in the Rounds by size chart, you’ll only see rounds of that size. I’m planning to make it possible to combine several charts so the results stack (e.g. €1-5M rounds in Barcelona), but that’s not ready yet.

• You can use the search bar for simple queries like “rounds over €10M with Kfund”. It works most of the time, but not always, and for now it doesn’t support every type of query.

• There are only two external links per entry: the company/fund’s website and the Dealflow newsletter issue where the round or deal first appeared.

• At some point I’ll perhaps add data going back several years, but not yet

• The site isn’t integrated into Dealflow.es yet, because I’m changing a few other things and also migrating the site to another provider, but it will be (hopefully soon).

• That’s it! If you have suggestions, feedback, etc., let me know.

  ---

Startup funding news 💸

€100M+ rounds:

• HappyRobot raised $150M in a Series C round led by Prysm Capital and co-led by Eurazeo, at a $1.2B post-money valuation. We (Kfund) invested in HappyRobot a few months ago, which is now being disclosed. HappyRobot is headquarterd in San Francisco but has a significant and growing presence in Spain, with offices in Madrid and Barcelona

• Volta, London-based company founded by Spaniards Ricard Boada and Sofia Gumuzio, came out of stealth to finance AI infrastructure at scale. The company announced a Seed and Series A valuing it at $2.4B, backed by Azora, a16z, Altimeter, NVIDIA and others. Volta also accouned a $10B partnership with a leading AI lab for a European AI Factory

€10M+ rounds:

• Job&Talent raised around €22M from existing shareholders in a tranched Series G, according to Ecotechers. The new shares carry a 1.5x liquidation preference

€1M to €10M rounds:

• PuntoPost, the Mexican last-mile logistics startup founded by Spaniards, raised $4.8M

• Fuvex, the Navarre-based startup specializing in long-range drones for power grid inspection, security, and defense, raised €3M in an oversubscribed round backed by Sodena, SEGO Venture, Izertis Ventures, and several family offices

• Nomade Nation, a Terrasa company specializing in premium camper design, raised €1.8M in a round led by Prodinco

• Reental, a Madrid-based fintech specializing in tokenized real estate investment, raised $1.7M led by Akka

Other funding news:

• Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech, the Barcelona-based quantum computing startup, is raising €55M, with €20M already secured and the rest expected after summer

• Incapto, the Barcelona-based specialty coffee startup offering connected machines and recurring subscriptions, is working with Abante on a fund to atract more investment. Incapto posted €14.85M in revenue last year

• Eholo, the Barcelona-based SaaS for mental health practices, raised an undisclosed round from GCO Ventures and CRB Health Tech

M&A news 🎊

Exits with disclosed amounts:

• Marosa, the Vigo-based VAT compliance and e-invoicing startup, was acquired by Wolters Kluwer for €112M in cash. Marosa did €10M in revenue in 2025. CEO and founder Pedro Pestana appeared on the itnig podcast a few months ago. He published a post about the deal here. I’ve heard that Pedro had a 60% stake in the company, so huge deal for him and the company. Massive congrats. Marosa had done a €12M round with a PE firm in 2024

• Virtualware, the Bilbao-based VR firm, signed an agreement to acquire UK-based Virtalis. The deal combines a fixed €5M payment with a variable component tied to 2026–2027 results. The combined group projects €10M revenue and €2.5M EBITDA

Other exits:

• Alantra acquired a 75% majority stake in Deudafix, a debt-management fintech. Deudafix had raised funding from Axon Partners and does around €40M in annual sales with 250 employees

• Cluber, the Coruña-based sports management software platform, acquired Kaantera, a training planning and analytics platform applying AI to sports clubss

• Taptap Digital, a Spanish adtech company, acquired Manchester-based audience design platform Skyrise

• Mapfre acquired a 38.9% stake in digital insurer Tuio for an undisclosed amount

Startup news 💡

Early stage startups growing fast:

• Zernio, a fully bootstrapped startup building social and messaging infra for AI agents and devs, crossed $3M in ARR just 13 months after launch. It only has 8 employees

• Media startup LongStories crossed $1M in annualised revenue run rate, scaling from nearly zero to $90k/month in just seven months

Startup profiles:

• Profile of Salvador Mas and his most recent startup, GPTadvisor, in the wealthtech space. We’re investors. He said that company has €3M in ARR

• Profile of Heydiga, the Barcelona-based voice AI startup for SMBs. It aims to close 2026 with €1.5M in revenue

Fintech news:

• MyInvestor surpassed 1M clients

• Trade Republic reached 2M users in Spain, its second-largest market, where it says it is already profitable

• Profile of Diego Bestard and Urbanitae. The company has channeled over €670M across 290 projects and has returned €210M to investors

• Deale, the M&A platform for Spanish SMEs, facilitated 18 deals worth €52M in H1 2026

Startups touching the physical world:

• PLD Space was selected by the European Space Agency, securing a €169M contract to strengthen Europe’s sovereign access to space

• Theker partnered with Mango to deploy its robots at the textile group’s logistics center in Lliçà d’Amunt

• Data centre cooling company Submer committed to invest $2B in Madhya Pradesh’s semiconductor sector, in India

Wordsmith AI, a Scottish legal-AI startup co-founded by ex-Perk executives, landed in Barcelona with an office and plans for a second in Madrid. Yellow is an investor in the firm

Holaluz avoided losing its electricity supplier license after Spain’s Energy Ministry archived proceedings that could have transferred its ~140,000 clients to Iberdrola, Endesa, Repsol, and Naturgy

Investor news 🤑

Carles Reina, first investor in ElevenLabs and also Head of GTM, announced his departure from the company after 3.5 years. Carles said that he will now focus on new problems while continuing to invest through his fund Baobab Ventures

Iberian Ventures, a firm founded by Luis Reyes (ex-McKinsey and Google) alongside two former Santander executives, launched a venture fund targeting up to €100M to back Spanish SMEs in fire-protection services

Fund-of-funds activity:

• Altamar launched Galdana Ventures 2027, a new €100M fund-of-funds targeting leading VC firms in the US and Europe

• Creand Asset Management launched a fund-of-funds targeting €25M, advised by Blue Opal and focused on the US market

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Iris Ventures acquired a minority stake in Krème, a French organic dermocosmetics startup

Big company & policy news 🏢

This is super relevant. Spain has opened consultation on a decree that could reset the economics of every data centre in the country. Anything above 1 MW would need 80% renewable power matched hour by hour, backed by new generation built in the previous 18 months, plus an EU based operator and data kept in the bloc. The pitch is bubble prevention, with over 12 GW of grid rights granted since 2021 against a 4 GW target, while Moncloa now holds the veto over projects the regions already blessed.

Salesforce promoted Spaniard Miguel Milano to COO under CEO Marc Benioff

BBVA reorganized its top management with 10 major changes, including 7 promotions and 9 executive departures. Carlos Torres promoted a younger generation of internal executives to tackle AI transformation

Stripe reshuffled its Spanish leadership after the departure of Mattia Gamberoni, head of Iberia and Italy for nearly five years. Existing employees Roldan Pérez and Jeff Niuman will jointly steer the firm

Telefónica sold Zeleris, its parcel and device logistics subsidiary, to OnTime Transporte y Logística for nearly €100M

Could Waymo soon be available in Spain soon?

Interesting reads 🤓

Miguel Carranza of RevenueCat released data indexing the App Store to settle a familiar debate: is it worth selling apps to Spanish users, or are Spaniards reluctant to pay for software?

SLNG tpublished: “It’s the amnesia, stupid: Voice AI’s missing cache layer.”

Christian Palou of TheirStack shared a presentation titled: “De desarrollador a Product Engineer”

It’s a sad state of affairs for Spanish education

See you soon and if you do take a break, enjoy your holidays!

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Startup funding news 💸

€50M+ rounds:

• Revel, a Madrid-based car renting company, is reportedly negotiating an investment of over €75M from Banco Santander, valuing the firm at €300M. Revel closed 2025 with €27M in revenue and 200 employees

• Arrakis, a seven-month-old London- and Paris-based startup building an AI “operating system” for industrial companies, emerged from stealth with $38M in funding from Blossom, Accel and others. The company is founded by Spaniard Rafa Quintanilla, who was previously at Accel

€5M to €10M rounds:

• Kaleidos, the Madrid-based company behind open-source Figma alternative Penpot, raised €6.9M, including a €1.92M public investment from SETT

€1M to €5M rounds:

• Coverwatch, a SF-based startup co-founded by Spaniard Miquel Llobet, raised $4.5M in pre-seed funding led by CoFound and Restive Ventures, with participation from us at Kfund. The startup is building an AI-native commercial insurance brokerage

• CoCircular, a Valencia-based startup specializing in circular waste management, raised €1.9M in a round led by Seven Seas Capital

• PageMind, a Barcelona-based startup that helps create personalized ecommerce experiences, raised €1.2M in a round led by 4Founders Capital, with participation from Tradeinn CEO David Martín

Other rounds of funding:

• Mentelem, a Valencia-based healthtech specializing in corporate mental health, raised €600k

• ART Technologies, a Valencia-based startup specialized in advanced quality control in the food industry, raised €200k

M&A news 🎉

InfoJobs acquired viterbit, a Spanish Hiring OS platform. According to Ecotechers, the deal valued viterbit at €20M and the company was doing around €3M in ARR

Coruña-based tech consulting firm Altia acquired 100% of Ednon, a Santiago de Compostela-based tech consultancy, for up to €12.6M. Ednon closed 2025 with €18.2M in revenue and €1.8M EBITDA

Italian AI firm Contents acquired financial educational company Balio. Balio is also behind the popular podcast Nudismo Financiero, which I quite like

Italian startup CommerceClarity acquired Barcelona-based Katalogo.ai, which builds AI agents for e-commerce catalogs

Aggity, a Spanish tech group specialized in data, AI, and Industry 4.0, acquired Bluenest from Globalvia, marking its entry into the dual defense/AI market

FlexMyRoom, the Spanish startup offering cancellation insurance for hotel bookings, has been fully acquired by Atlántigo

VC news 🚀

Atresmedia raised the value of its investment in Fever by 54%, to €197M, implying a total valuation near €3.94B. Atresmedia entered Fever in 2015 via Media for Equity and previously sold a 2.7% stake for €59M. Atresmedia still has a 5% position in Fever

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Arq, a quantum technology startup, raised €1.2M from Big Sur Ventures, among others

• Hilo, a blood-pressure monitoring company developed by Switzerland’s Aktiia, raised a $19M Series B extension. We had previously backed Hilo and we doubled down in this round, which was led by the family office of Dell founder Michael Dell

Startup news 💡

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More details of the Holaluz situation: the company faces the possible loss of its commercial license after Spain’s government opened disqualification proceedings over unpaid grid tolls and charges of roughly €6M, including €4M to Endesa and €1M each to Iberdrola and Naturgy. The company’s shares were suspended on BME Growth, where it was a market cap of €27M. Holaluz will appeal

zernio, a bootstrapped start offering a unified API for social media and messaging across 15 platforms, launched an open-source dashboard that consolidates ad spend across Meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn, and X into a single screen. The company also announced that it did $188k in MRR in June

Magnific (Freepik) closed the collective layoff with 100 voluntary exits, down from the 111 initially proposed

Filmin closed 2025 with over €2M in net profit for the second consecutive year, on record revenue of €30.6M (+12%). EBITDA rose to €5.8M

Musky, the pet insurance startup launched by GCO Ventures (Grupo Catalana Occidente), launched a new insurance product tailored for indoor cats

Profile of Flipflow, the Valencia-based retail intelligence startup. It raised €3M in June

UARX Space unveiled Ossie, Spain’s first orbital transfer vehicle, developed entirely in Nigrán, Pontevedra

Catalyxx, a Seville-based renewable chemicals company, announced a €120M investment to build its first commercial plant in Sines, Portugal

Big company news 🏢

Santander poached AI executives from rival BBVA, hiring Jon Ander Beracoeche and Álvaro Martín to join Ricardo Martín, its Data & AI Officer poached from BBVA a year ago

Amadeus formalized the acquisition of French group Idemia Public Security (IPS), a biometrics and identity services firm, for €1.2B, plus €150M in earn-outs

CaixaBank placed AI at the core of its 2025-2027 strategy through Cosmos, a €5B tech plan to simplify processes and improve customer experience

Common sense! LaLiga‘s anti-piracy strategy faced a setback after the EU Court of Justice ruled that offering a VPN doesn’t automatically make providers liable for how customers use it

Amazon launched its first Distribution Center in Spain, ZAZ8, in La Muela (Zaragoza). It marks Amazon’s fourth facility in Zaragoza, where it already employs over 1,000 people across 40 sites nationwide.

Aena launched a €66M tender to build the “digital brain” of its 46 Spanish airports

Interesting reads 🤓

We at Kfund unveiled our healthcare investment thesis, moving from opportunistic bets to a deliberate focus after 10+ health investments over five years: “Inside Our Healthcare Investment Thesis”

ElPais looked at the unprofitability of the food delivery sector: “El reparto a domicilio no encuentra la puerta de la rentabilidad y acelera su concentración”

Uber made a cash offer of €13B for 100% of Delivery Hero, or €41.50 per share. The price is still well below the €98 exchange price at which Glovo was sold to DH in 2021. Closing is expected in H2 2027.

SSW Partners, which will be the new owner of Glovo, openly says it will hold the assets and then find them “the best homes.”

In essence, Glovo gets split in two: Uber keeps Italy, Eastern Europe and Africa; SSW gets Iberia and Eastern EU markets.

The impact of the deal on the Spanish tech ecosystem has different angles:

• According to Ecotechers, Seaya, which backed Glovo very early on, still held ~412,000 DH shares and would cash out around €17M in this transaction, taking total Glovo proceeds above €40M, roughly a 2.6x multiple on its investment. I believe that the Seaya fund that backed Glovo was a €100M fund

• Employees: Glovo has 1.8k full time employees in Spain and thousands of riders, who will now depend on SSW. Hopefully employees will be able to cash out in this transaction. SSW also inherits Glovo’s rider-reclassification liabilities, which amount to millions of euros

• Founding team and key execs: I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an exodus of key employees (even the Glovo founders?) in the very near future. I’m sure many of those will go on to create new startups or join existing ones, which is good news for the overall ecosystem

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Startup funding news 💸

€10M+ rounds:

• Wenea, the Madrid-based EV charging infra company, raised €10M from Impact Bridge and Fundeen. Wenea operates over 4k chargers in Spain and the UK

• Kintai, a Barcelona-based fintech specializing in working-capital financing for SMEs, raised a €10M Series A led by Barlon Capital, with participation from Prosegur, TQ Eurocredit, ICF and other investors. Kintai has financed over €150M for around 1,000 companies and targets €10M+ revenue in 2026. More info here

€1M to €5M rounds:

• Inventia Kinetics, a Madrid and Sevilla-based startup in the aerospace and defense sectors, raised €5M in venture debt from Inveready

• Time is Brain, a Barcelona-based medtech, raised €3M. Their tech enables continuous neurological monitoring

• Arq Quantum Technologies, a Barcelona-based quantum company, raised a $1.4M pre-seed round led by Ground State Ventures, with participation from Big Sur Ventures

• Sensesbit, a Lugo-based SaaS to analyse industrial processes, raised €1M from Clave Capital, Eoniq Fund, WindOne Consultores, and Paraíso Natural Ventures (Central Lechera Asturiana). More info here

Other rounds of funding:

• Wayra invested in MITO AI

• EZTEN, the €50M fund created by the Basque government, invested in Walter Pack, a Bizkaia-based manufacturer of decorative and functional plastic parts

M&A news 🎉

ACS is in advanced talks to become the lead shareholder of Openchip, the Catalan chip startup valued at ~€700M. ACS would take a 40–45% stake, joining Spain’s SETT (€115M, ~16%) and the Generalitat (5%)

Veridas (Spain) and Fourthline (Netherlands) merged to build a European giant fighting digital identity fraud. The deal was backed by Finch Capital and Rabo Investments. Veridas was born in 2017 as a joint venture participated by BBVA, which will retain its stake in the merged company

Profile of TeamSystem, an Italian company that sells software to SMEs and that has been quite active in Spain in the past few years. It has acquired nine Spanish companies since 2021, including Billin, Quipu, Acumbamail and Software Delsol

Barcelona-based Badi merged with Caterina to create a flexible-housing platform managing a portfolio of over €250M

Startup news 💡

Submer announced it will invest over €1B to develop a large-scale data center in Flix (Tarragona)

Cala launched Cala for Finance, a verified data layer built for banks, funds, fintechs and brokers deploying AI agents. More info here

Bit2Me expanded beyond crypto, adding nearly 3,000 traditional assets: stocks, funds and ETFs

The government just started pulling Holaluz’s license to sell electricity after months of unpaid market charges. Its ~300k customers could get handed over to the big guys, Iberdrola, Endesa & co

Civitatis expanded its alliance with Disney to sell tickets and activities at Walt Disney World Orlando. Vitruvian Partners has invested €150M in the company since 2022

Maisa opened a new office in Barcelona as part of an expansion plan spanning several Spanish and US cities

Substrate AI reported H1 revenue of €9.39M, down 14.9% YoY, though net turnover rose 5.2% to €8.5M. Substrate recently closed a €39.2M round, including €19.2M from the government via SETT

N26 appointed Nathalie Picquot as its new Chief Growth and Marketing Officer. She previously led Twitter in Iberia and spent 5 years at Santander

Indexa Capital reported its H1 2026 returns, with the average portfolio returning 12.2%

Profile of Wonderful and Gonzalo Torres, the country manager of the AI automation unicorn. The startup has raised €300M to date and plans to expand its Spain and Portugal team from around 20 people to 100 by the end of the year

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VC news 🚀

New funds:

• Acurio Ventures closed its secondaries fund at €115M. Smart move from Acurio, since liquidity and DPI is a common need among European (and global) VC firms. More info here

• Caixa Capital Risc rebranded as Criteria Capital Risc and plans to invest €300M through 2030 in tech and biotech startups, focusing on Spain and Portugal

• Eoniq Venture Capital plans a new €50M vehicle targeting early-stage tech startups in robotics, AI, software, foodtech, and energy transition. Its first fund was €15.8M

Activity from public entities:

• 2025 accounts of ICO's Next Tech fund show a portfolio split in two. Its fund-of-funds positions hold value, but direct investments fared worse

• CDTI Innovación, through Innvierte, closed 7 coinvestment deals in June totaling €20.8M

Spanish investors active abroad:

• We (Kfund) participated in the €3.2M seed round of Pollen, a Lisbon-based startup building a universal battery-swapping network for electric mopeds and motorcycles

• Telefónica sold part of its stake in AI startup Perplexity, booking a €3.5M gain

Carmen Alfonso-Rico, a Spanish investor based in London who founded VC firm Cocoa Ventures, announced she is joining portfolio company Fractile full time

Big company news 🏢

Sponsor: Migrate to AWS: answer 10 questions, upload your IaC and get a personalized plan in minutes.

AI impact:

• Konecta, Spain’s biggest call center, is feeling the impact of AI: 11,000 layoffs, 10,000 more planned, €1B in debt. Hacienda, one of its customers, is insourcing its phone service after 25 years without absorbing the 1,000 Konecta workers running it, which is creating tension with the unions

• How Inditex uses AI

• Santander partnered with US startup Sierra to deploy AI across its operations

Uber Eats continues to operate with self-employed couriers six months after pledging to abandon the model. Spain’s Labour Ministry warned it could revive criminal action against executives

Spanish banking association Ceca, which groups banks including CaixaBank, Unicaja, Abanca, Ibercaja and Kutxabank, developed a shared diagnostic tool to counter Mythos, Anthropic’s AI model capable of detecting software vulnerabilities

Ubisoft launched a mass layoff at its Barcelona studio, cutting 51 workers who helped build Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced

Interesting reads 🤓

Analysis of the Valencian startup ecosystem

Latitude published “I made 5 frontier models run 410 coding tasks. Coding ability is not what separates them.”

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Aircall:

Opera desde una sola plataforma. Gestiona llamadas, datos y workflows con información sincronizada en tiempo real. Descubre cómo aplicar comunicaciones impulsadas por IA en tu empresa con Aircall.

Startup funding news 💸

Sherpa.ai, the Basque AI startup, closed a $18M (€15.75M) round led by new investor Forgepoint Capital, with participation from Mundi Ventures, Ekarpen, Allegra Holdings and SETT. Sherpa has been around for a long long time (founded in 2012) and has gone through many iterations. Sherpa currently sells a privacy-focused AI platform

8Layers, a Madrid-based cybersecurity company, raised an additional €1M in its pre-seed round, bringing total funding to €2.5M, from Criteria and Bankinter

Qida, the Barcelona home-care tech startup, secured up to €15M from Axis/ICO. Qida raised a €37M Series C in November 2025, led by Quadrille

InsectBiotech, a Jaen-based biotech that converts agricultural waste into sustainable proteins, raised €7.2M, led by Arcano Partners

Other fundraising news:

• Spin-offs from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) have raised over €100M in private investment across the past decade

M&A news 🎉

MITO, the AI video creation platform co-founded by Danny Saltaren, Arantxa Barcia and Iñaki Berenguer, acquired Kluster.ai, a two-year old startup operating in the same field. Three of Kluster founding members will now become CTO, Head of Sales and Head of AI at Mito

Startup news 💡

According to Ecotechers, Biorce, the Barcelona-based AI for clinical trials startup, is negotiating a new nine-figure round at a unicorn valuation

Startup financials:

• Cabify financials. Implied valuation of €581M or around 1x revenues. €40M in net losses last year, down 25%, on net revenues of $675M (+11.8%), boosted by Latam. Positive EBITDA of $31M, but negative equity widened to €115M

• Urbanitae returned €20.1M to investors in June, its highest monthly figure ever, with a 10% average IRR across projects closed during the semester. Urbanitae has returned €68.1M year-to-date and over €250M since 2019, at a near-12% average IRR

• Valencia-based wealthtech GPTadvisor expanded internationally with new offices in New York and Hong Kong opening in September. GPTadvisor was founded by Salvador Mas (Finametrix). It reached €3M in ARR and profitable

• Kinnevik kept its valuation of Perk at €1.75B, slightly above Q1, when it reluctantly marked the Barcelona unicorn down 41% to match listed comparable Navan. On a potential IPO, CFO Samuel Sjöström told analysts that public markets are no longer an impediment, “but there is no rush”

Startup profiles:

• Profile of HappyRobot and Carlos Becker, Enterprise Lead. Despite being HQ’ed in San Francisco, HappyRobot has significant presence in Spain, with offices in Madrid and Barcelona and 100 employees

• Another profile, this time of Optiak, the platform to deploy, govern, and optimize enterprise AI across models. It was in the news last month when it announced a €4M pre-seed round

• And one more profile, of Kapia. The company was previously known as Pleiful and has pivoted away from AI voice agents into an operational brain for traditional companies

• And and and, one more profile: Walter, a new IT management startup founded a few months ago. The company has already surpassed €250k in monthly revenue in just 4 months

The three founders of RatedPower, Andrea Barber, Miguel Ángel Torrero and Juan Romero, announced their departure from the startup after nearly 10 years. RatedPower was acquired by US-based Enverus in 2022

Crossmint, the stablecoin infra company co-founded by Spaniards, obtained authorization from the Bank of Spain as a payment institution

Verónica Pascual, founder of ASTI Technologies, featured on the cover of Revista Emprendedores España, reflected on her 20-year path building and scaling ASTI

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VC news 🚀

Cathay Innovation named Beth Faus as Vice President, reinforcing its presence in Spain. Beth was previously at Notion in London and at Seaya. Cathay has been quite active in Spain lately, with investments such as Tucuvi, Abacum, Embat or Theker

Barcelona-based Galdana Ventures has delivered an 18x multiple to its investors via AltamarCAM's fund-of-funds, with ~$456M of exposure built since 2017. Kudos!

CDTI to invest €70M inf Columbus Venture Partners new fund, with has a target size of €200M

The Junta de Andalucía launched a new €9.8M venture capital fund targeting Andalusian startups with investments of up to €400k per company

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Iris Ventures led a $22M Series A round in UK-based functional food and drink brand Reformed

Big company news 🏢

Sponsor: Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases: give your company and AI brain.

BBVA is preparing a plan to industrialize AI agent creation and extend it across the entire bank, with the goal of having 200 agents before the end of the year

Mutua Madrileña acquired a 10% stake in Muppy, the digital platform for residential real estate investment and asset management, via its startup vehicle Mutua Ventures

Chinese giant Sungrow will build Spain's largest battery storage hub in La Vall d'Uixó (Castellón)

Netflix's main Spanish subsidiary grew net profit 30.2% to €15.9M in 2025, with revenue up 18% to €928M driven by subscriptions

Telefónica partnered with France’s Thales to launch a corporate eSIM solution for IoT connectivity

Interesting reads 🤓

Miguel Carranza (RevenueCat) published “The Dopamine Problem Every New Manager Faces”

Borja Perez (previously at Manfred, now at Helmcode) published “Creando un sistema de diseño sin tocar Figma. Diseñando con Claude Code”

Alex Saiz (Monei) wrote “Por qué seguimos hablando de lo que nos falta”

El Mundo published a long read on how Spanish universities are struggling to adapt to generative AI

Spain's videogame industry grew revenue 2.7% to €1.4B in 2024 with 10,508 direct jobs (+2.4%), its weakest growth in a decade, according to DEV's annual Libro Blanco. You can find the whole report here

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Crescenta:

Hay noticias que cambian el mercado, y noticias que cambian carteras.
Hace unos meses, la prensa abría con la mayor adquisición de la historia de Google: $32.000 millones por Wiz. Un titular de esos que parece que ocurren muy lejos. Pero el Private Equity va exactamente de eso: de estar sentado en la mesa antes de que se escriba la noticia.

El fondo de PE GSquared tenía a Wiz en cartera. Y en Crescenta, tenían a GSquared. Esta semana, Crescenta ha cerrado el círculo. Han comunicado a sus inversores que una parte de ese titular de $32.000 millones ya tiene nombre y apellidos, y sus inversores acaban de recibir el aviso de las que serán sus primeras distribuciones del fondo Crescenta Growth I.

Así funciona el capital privado cuando la selección es experta y el acceso, por fin, es real. Únete en crescenta.com, su tercera edición de Growth está disponible.

Startup funding news 💸

According to data from El Referente, June 2026 became the strongest investment month on record for Spain’s startup ecosystem, with €894.44M across 43 deals, thanks to big deals from Perk, Twinco Capital, Factorial and others

The Spanish government authorized a €115.77M investment in Catalan semiconductor firm Openchip. The investment valued Openchip at €700M. The firm has received more than €260M in public funds in the past few years

Substrate AI, a Madrid- and Talavera de la Reina-based agentic software and GPU infrastructure company, closed a €39M capital increase, including a €19.1M ifrom SETT

€1M to €5M rounds:

• Balance, a Madrid-based health company to fight obesity, raised a €3M seed round led by Shilling VC and JME, with Atresmedia Capital and business angels

• Flyboard, a Barcelona-based startup building AI voice agents for sales and operations, raised €1.9M in a pre-seed round led by b2venture, with Kfund and Yellow

• Tokenized Green, the a Burgos-based impact-investment company, raised €1.1M in a round led by Luxembourg’s Wolver Ventures

Other rounds of funding:

• Baker, a Barcelona-based performance marketing agency operated by AI agents, raised a €525k round led by Draper B1, with participation from Angels, Itnig, and AIAIAI Ventures. The company is founded by ex-Factorial employees Jacinto Fleta and David Alarcón

• Agrikola AI, a Barcelona-based agritech startup, raised a pre-seed round from Zubi Capital, Norrsken VC, Masia VC, and Ona Capital

M&A news 🎉

Securitize, the tokenization firm led by founder and CEO Carlos Domingo, debuted on the New York Stock Exchange with a $1.25B valuation. In 2025 it posted $62.1M in revenue, up 240%. Massive congrats to Carlos and the rest of the team!

Paack got acquired by French shipping and logistics giant CMA CGM. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Paack had raised ~€350M and peaked above €800M after SoftBank's 2022 round. The company went into a full restructure a few years ago, and according to news, current revenues were around €150M+

ByteTravel landed on BME Growth, moving up from BME Scaleup and opening its shareholding to French fund Eiffel Investments

CommerceClarity, an AI agent platform for ecommerce catalogue ops, acquired Barcelona-based startup Katalogo.ai

Startup news 💡

Product launches:

• Civitatis launched Civitatis Pro, a new brand unifying its B2B offering for travel agencies, tour operators, etc, to complement its main B2C business

• Luzia launched LuziClaw, its move into agentic AI, that can be used both on Whatsapp and Luzia’s own app. A couple of weeks ago it also announced new features aimed at making sense of your Whatsapp content

• Quibim, the Valencian medical-imaging AI company, launched QP-Breast across, the first AI tool to detect breast cancer via MRI

• I had missed the launch of Farao from the guys behind Openfort. Farao is a self-custodial mobile app to trade stocks, crypto and pre-IPO markets with leverage, 24/7. Their most recent launch here

Startup financials:

• Waynabox, the Barcelona-based surprise-travel platform, reached €12M in revenue in 2025 and targets €15M this year

• Crescenta distributed a first return to investors, two years after launch. The payout equals roughly 10% of committed capital, driven by GSquared’s exit from cybersecurity firm Wiz, sold to Google for $32B. Crescenta is a Kfund portfolio company

Other announcements, especially in the fintech space:

• Iqana, a Barcelona-based crypto asset manager for family offices and other financial institutions, obtained Europe’s MiCA license, the only one granted to a Spanish crypto-native firm. We (Kfund) recently invested in Iqana

• Bit2Me secured Bank of Spain authorization to provide payment services, becoming the first Spanish crypto exchange to win this clearance

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VC news 🚀

Easo Ventures launched its 3rd fund with €50M to back startups with a focus on deep tech, AI, cybersecurity and energy transition

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Elewit (Redeia) led a €4M round in Danish startup Oktogrid

Big company news 🏢

Sponsor: Amazon Bedrock Agents: autonomous AI that reasons, plans & executes multi-step tasks — calling APIs, updating CRMs, processing ordersx

Waymo registered a new entity in Spain, which means that the company could soon expand to Spain and potentially Portugal as well. No timing disclosed

More details about OpenAI’s plans for its Madrid office. The company is hiring for FDEs. Here’s one job offer

Amazon registered gross revenue of over €9B in Spain in 2025, up 12.5% YoY, with pre-tax profit of €290M. Amazon now employs 30,000 permanent staf in Spain. Also, Amazon Data Services Spain, received a €2.5B capital injection from its parent in 2025 to continue with its data centre expansion. AWS revenue rose to €457.8M from, while headcount doubled to 266

Spain and Portugal launched a public-private consortium to bid for one of the EU’s five AI gigafactories. Participants include Telefonica, ACS, Santander and Multiverse

The Spanish government vetoed Palantir Technologies from new contracts with public and SEPI-controlled firms (Telefonica, Indra)

Interesting reads 🤓

ICEX published a sponsored post in Sifted: “How Spain has emerged as one of Europe’s most dynamic tech ecosystems”

Interesting post from Carles Reina about how he negotiated his equity compensation when he joined ElevenLabs as head of GTM

Anonymous Twitter account Mihura published an interesting post about his experience with REFUGIO, a two-day hackathon that recently took place in Madrid

Javier Escribano (Punto AI) published “5 comportamientos que definen a un Product Engineer”

Interview with Xavier Pladellorens (Deporvillage): “Con 30 millones te compras una de las diez mejores empresas de Manresa, no una startup en pérdidas”

David Bonilla published “Yo no firmaría eso”. A post about the topic brought up by David Alvarez, co-founder and CEO of Banktrack

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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 hasta millones, desde minoristas hasta inversores profesionales.

👉 Invierte como imaginas en Crescenta.com

Startup funding news 💸

€100M+ rounds:

• Multiverse Computing, the Donostia-based quantum and AI firm, is closing a new funding round of up to €500M. It’s now been confirmed that the SETT committed €107M in the current round

€10M to €50M rounds:

• H2Site, the Bilbao-based hydrogen company, secured €42M in a Series B round featuring the European Innovation Council, alongside Hy24, Enagás Emprende, and Calderion

• Prosper AI, the NYC and Barcelona-based digital health startup, raised a $30M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Base10, Emergence Capital, Y Combinator, Masia Ventures, and Clara Ventures participating. Prosper builds AI agents that manage hospital admin tasks and scheduling. It will invest €10M to expand its Barcelona engineering hub to 100 staff by 2027. More from the founders here

• Attypics Photonics, a Valencian photonic chip startup spun out of UPV, secured €24.5M in public investment from SETT under the PERTE Chip program

€1M to €10M rounds:

• FOSSA, the Madrid-based space company, raised €9.25M in a round led by Kibo Ventures, with SETT, Space Frontiers Fund II, Indico Capital, and WISeSAT. Founded in 2020, FOSSA has launched 25 satellites and surpassed 50 employees across Spain and Portugal

• Kalipso, a Barcelona-based platform to help organizations operationalize regulatory changes, raised €2.82M from Varsity, Lanai, Plug and Play, Kima Ventures, and Vento

Other rounds of funding:

• Citring, the Barcelona-based startup designing and manufacturing small home appliances, raised €920k in a round led by Faraday Venture Partners and Angels Capital

• Naturr, a marketplace for artisanal foods from small rural producers, closed a €620k round

• WAIIS, the Barcelona-based smart shared-mobility startup, raised €1M. WAIIS closed 2025 with €2M in revenue and targets €5M in 2026

• SegurosIA.com, a Malaga-based insurtech, raised €150k from Eoniq.fund

• Xcalibur Smart Mapping, a Madrid-based aerial geophysics company, closed a capital increase with MCH Private Equity's Oman fund (SOPEF) and Moira Capital Partners

• Javi Lopez, founder of Erasmusu and Magnific, said in a tweet that he’s invested in Rebolt

M&A news 🎉

BlueWalker Capital acquired The Mathematical Company, an agentic trading systems startup. TMC is a natural fit for BlueWalker, the Barcelona-based quant hedge fund specializing in systematic trading strategies native to prediction markets

Swiss company SITA acquired Big Blue Analytics, a Barcelona-based startup that helps airlines optimize their operations

Acciona is set to sell Silence, its electric mobility brand, to a Chinese operator

Startup news 💡

Startup financials and corporate stuff:

• Indexa Capital prepares to move from BME Growth to Spain’s main stock exchange (Mercado Continuo) after surpassing the required 10% free float threshold. Indexa manages €5.6B in AUM and trades at a €195M market cap

• Housfy projected revenues near €55M for this year, a +70% YoY, alongside EBITDA above €7M

• Zernio, a Spain-based, bootstrapped startup offering a unified API for social media and messaging across 15 platforms, reached $2M ARR, 2,000+ paying users, in just 11 months and with only 7 employees

• Bit2Me proposed a collective layoff affecting 25 employees, around 20% of its workforce, citing uncertainty in the crypto sector

• Bloobirds, the Barcelona-based sales and marketing stasrtup, entered voluntary insolvency proceedings. We’re investors in Bloobirds

Product launches:

• Latitude launched its new positiotning as an open-source observability and agent monitoring platform. Product Hunt launch here. I’m obviously biased because we’re investors in Latitude, but we think this approach makes a lot of sense. Most observability tools focus on LLM-level tracing. Latitude goes one layer up: it understands what conversations were about, clusters failure patterns automatically, and surfaces qualitative signals like frustration, escalation, and churn. Check it out

• Endor, Daniel Lope’z new company, launched HolaClaw, a Mac app that makes running OpenClaw easier

• Krea released Krea 2, a 12B-parameter diffusion transformer image generation model, as open weights in two versions: Raw and Turbo

Other news:

• Overview of the Spanish semiconductor startup scene, featuring Openchip (AI accelerator chips), Lace Lithography (helium-beam lithography to rival ASML), Quside (quantum cryptography chips), Sensia (infrared nanotechnology sensors), iPronics (programmable photonic processor), and Ideaded (beyond-silicon materials)

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VC news 🚀

Miguel Arias, my colleague and GP at Kfund, announced that he’s leaving the firm to go back to building companies: “I deeply miss building, and this generational AI wave is not one I want to watch from the sidelines”. It was a real pleasure and honor to share with Miguel 5+ years at Kfund. As a result of the transaction, Angel Asin (founder of EsPublico, €500M+ exit) will become a shareholder of Kfund’s management company

Decelera said that it has invested €1.5M across the first four startups from its program: HeyDiga, FlipFlop, Matthew, and Ruit

201 Ventures, the solo GP fund led by Madrid-based former CIA officer Eric Slesinger, is raising its econd defence fund just a year after closing $22M in his 1st fund

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Nina Capital led a $7M seed round in Ladder Health, a pediatric developmental care company

Big company news 🏢

Sponsor: Amazon Q Developer: AI assistant that understands your full codebase. Generates code, reviews PRs, scans for security, migrates legacy apps

This is quite cool! Santander open-sourced 11 AI governance repositories under, making its AI control layer public for anyone to fork. They claim that the mission is to “advance responsible AI in financial services”. Also last week, Santander rolled out AI tools to all 185,000 group employees

Madrid is one of only five cities worldwide chosen by Airbnb to pilot its hotel offering as the platform expands beyond vacation rentals

Telefónica completed the deployment of 17 edge computing nodes across Spain

Interesting reads 🤓

Ivor Padilla built Mercadona CLI, an open-source tool that turns Mercadona's API into a command-line interface

Dougan Milne of Borealis Partners published Ciberia.xyz, a market intelligence report and database on the Iberian cybersecurity ecosystem

Miguel Carranza (RevenueCat) published “AI shouldn’t shrink headcount. It should shrink teams”

David Bonilla (Manfred) wrote “IA sin miedo”

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by zenital:

¿Y si el problema con la IA no es la herramienta, sino la falta de foco?

Muchas empresas ya la están usando, pero pocas están viendo resultados. Y no es un problema técnico. Sin procesos ni casos de uso claros, sin priorización ni marco de trabajo, la IA se queda en pilotos aislados.

Si quieres que tenga impacto en tu negocio, hace falta integrarla de verdad en la operación: identificar dónde aporta valor, automatizar tareas concretas y escalar lo que funciona. En zenital acompañamos ese proceso con un programa de consultoría: en pocas semanas, pasas de la experimentación a procesos definidos y automatizaciones en marcha.

Reserva una llamada breve con nuestro equipo y vemos qué tiene sentido en tu caso.

Startup funding news 💸

€20M+ rounds:

• Orbio AI, the Barcelona and Madrid-based HR startup, raised $21M led by Dawn Capital, with participation from existing investors Visionaries VC, Plus Partners and Enzo Ventures. The company uses AI agents to help businesses hire, onboard, and manage frontline workers. More info here

• NeuralTrust, a Barcelona-based platform for securing AI agents, raised a $20M seed round led by Alstin Capital, with Seaya, Kibo Ventures, Banc Sabadell (among others) as investors

€5M to €10M rounds:

• Causa Prima, a Madrid and Munich-based startup, raised $10M in a pre-seed round led by Creandum, with participation from us at Kfund, as well as Rodrigo Martinez’s HelloWorld. The company aims to fix B2B payments thru an agent-to-agent network where AI agents on the buyer and supplier sides handle disputes, negotiate payment timing, and capture early-pay discounts automatically. More from the team here

• Range, a startup co-founded by Spaniard Andres Monteoliva, raised an $8.3M Series A to help companies worldwide adopt stablecoins and digital assets safely and at scale. Backers included TX Ventures, SixThirty, Maven 11 Capital, and Onigiri Capital. More info here

• Gate2Brain, a Barcelona-based biotech spin off, raised €7M from Shilpa Biocare. The funds will advance the development a therapeutic candidate for aggressive paediatric and adult brain tumours

€1M to €5M rounds:

• Optiak, a Madrid-based platform to deploy, govern, and optimize enterprise AI across models, raised a €4M pre-seed round led by Market One Capital, with Next Tier Ventures, Plug and Play, Mission, and other investors. Co-founder and CTO Borja Balle previously worked at Google DeepMind and Amazon

• Trak, the Basque and Valencia-born startup specializing in AI-powered physical rehabilitation, raised €3.7M in a round led by CRB Health Tech

• Floox, the Barcelona-based maker of fast chargers for electric vehicles, raised €2M in a round led by Inclimo Climate Tech Fund. After reaching €1.2M in revenues last year, it targets €3.6M in 2026

• Bihar Batteries, a San Sebastián startup developing proprietary sodium-ion cells and storage systems for commercial and industrial use, raised €2M from international investors. The round adds to €10M secured across two Spanish PERTE grants.

• Node.ai, a Swiss and Madrid-based fintech startup, closed a €1.5M round. The startup specializes in AI solutions for asset and wealth management

• SMART Fusion Energy, a spin-off from the University of Seville in the nuclear fusion space, raised €1.5M from BeAble Capital

M&A news 🎉

American Express announced its intention to acquire European restaurant reservation platform TheFork for $700 million. TheFork, although headquartered in Paris, has more employees in Spain than in France, according to LinkedIn. Marcos Alves co-founded the business, previously called ElTenedor in Spain

Filmin agreed to acquire the distribution business of Valencian producer Elastica, marking the first time a Spanish streaming service takes control of a film distributor

Portobello Capital has delayed the sale of its 76% stake in Spanish legal-tech firm Legálitas amid concerns that AI could disrupt the sector. Portobello acquired the stake in 2021 in a deal valuing Legálitas at around €120M. Legalitas did €50M in revenue in 2020, but I couldn’t find more recent figures

Startup news 💡

Magnific (formerly Freepik) is negotiating an ERE that would cut 111 jobs, around a third of its ~340-person Spanish workforce (250 in Málaga). When Freepik pivoted to generative AI three years ago, it kept the legacy stock business running in parallel rather than killing it. With AI revenue having overtaken stock in 2024 (~$230M ARR now), the cuts are expected to fall mainly on the stock-side roles (designers, editors, SEO). Majority-owned by EQT since 2020, the company frames it as organizational, not economic. Union CCOO is demanding the ERE be withdrawn.

There were a bunch of comments last week sort of attacking CEO Joaquin Cuenca and Magnific about the layoffs, saying that how could a company making so much money make such drastic changes. Layoffs suck, especially for the people affected. I think this tweet from Javi Santana sums it up well: this is part of the ‘game’ of building companies and doing so aggressively, even more so in the middle of a seismic change like AI

Startup financials:

• Exoticca hit ~€400M in sales (up from ~€300M) and turned profitable in Q4 2025. The company says that thanks to AI back-office automation it was able to double productivity to €1M revenue per employee

• Profile of Rever, the Barcelona-based reverse logistics startup. It claims to do €10M in annual sales

• Criptan, the Valencia-based crypto company, launched its fifth funding round, aiming to raise €7M

New companies and product launches:

• José María Álvarez-Pallete, former chairman of Telefónica, is back to business, according to ABC. He registered two companies in April, Themis Future and its subsidiary Themis Data Group, to process data and AI workloads using existing telecom infrastructure closer to users

• ShowMe launched AI Sales Reps for teams selling inbound

• AI startup Luzia launched Spilo, an AI-powered personal memory that organizes scattered WhatsApp information. Luzia started off a sort of “ChatGPT on Whatsapp” play, but has since pivoted as the core business has become more of a commodity

Tuvalum, the Valencian platform for buying and selling second-hand bicycles founded in 2015, entered liquidation just months after filing for voluntary insolvency. The company reported €4.26M in revenue in 2024 but closed with losses of €573k

Crescenta launched an SCR vehicle aimed at corporate and high-net-worth institutional investors (insurers, foundations, family offices), a segment now nearing 1,000 clients

Revolut launched a savings account in Spain paying 3.51% APR for new clients

Anzi Finance, a Spanish fintech building infrastructure for credit risk mitigation, launched a $25M (€21M) five-year financing plan backed by Spanish fund Tritemius Fund I. The blockchain-based platform tokenizes credit guarantees and has already issued over 65k in Colombia

AWS Trainium & Inferentia: purpose-built AI chips, up to 50% lower cost & 4x inference throughput vs GPUs. Splash Music slashed training costs via the GenAI Accelerator. Train & run models at half the cost — no performance trade-off. PyTorch ready.

VC news 🚀

Columbus Venture Partners raised €210M for its Columbus Innvierte Life Sciences Fund V. The Valencia-based fund will back growth-stage biotech, healthtech, and AI-applied-to-health companies

Ecotechers published an article on the flow of funds from EIF to Spanish VC firms over the years. EIF committed €205M to six Spanish VC funds in 2025 (4Founders, BSocial, Klima II (Alantra), Montana (Ship2b), LifeX and SC Net Zero) after 2024’s €610M peak driven by a €350M cheque to Kembara (Mundi Ventures). Spain has held a steady 5-7% of the EIF’s European VC over five years

Samaipata launched a network of Operating Partners to support its portfolio startups beyond capital

Big company news 🏢

Sponsor: AWS Trainium & Inferentia: purpose-built AI chips, up to 50% lower cost & 4x inference throughput vs GPUs. Train & run models at half the cost — no performance trade-off

British quantum computing firm Oxford Quantum Circuits chose Barcelona for its first global manufacturing centre, investing €92M and creating 210 jobs over five years. The facility, breaking ground in Q4, follows OQC’s recent €300M Series C, which included €46M from COFIDES

In the travel sector:

• Lastminute.com announced a global reorganization affecting 25% of its 1,628 employees. In Spain, the company filed an ERE to cut 163 jobs in Madrid (34% of its 474 local staff)

• Over 1,400 Spanish hotel companies joined a class action against Booking over abusive parity clauses

Just Eat agreed with unions to a collective layoff affecting up to 50 corporate coordination staff

Workday marked its tenth anniversary in Spain by shifting focus toward mid-sized companies (under 3,500 employees)

Spain’s car-sharing sector reached around €20M in revenue in 2025, with over 3,000 vehicles and 4M annual rentals, though Madrid concentrates 80% of activity. Profitability remains a challenge, with an aggregate loss of €6.81M across the five main players

Interesting reads 🤓

Manu Martin (Tinybird) wrote “Reflexiones sobre el mundo Startup y VC”

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by MOD:

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Startup funding news 💸

€50M+ round:

• Theker, the Barcelona-based AI robotics company, raised $85M in the largest Series A in European robotics, led by CRV. New entrants include Cathay Innovation, 20VC and Korelya, while existing Spanish investors KFund, Kibo, Mission and Itnig doubled down. Industrial partners Samsung, LVMH, Sonae and Henkel joined alongside Inditex, who invested in the previous round. This also CRV’s third deal in Spain, following investments in Factorial and Tinybird. Ecotechers has more round details. To learn more about Theker, Carla and Jia appeared on the itnig podcast in December 2025

€10M rounds+:

• Openchip received a €10M loan from Catalonia’s government to advance its microprocessor technology while securing private funding. This follows a previous €25M credit in March. The BSC spin-off, founded in 2021, employs 300 people

€1M to €10M rounds:

• Laborai, a Madrid-based AI-powered tax and financial optimization startup, closed a €3.7M funding round led by German fund Cusp Capital

• Enera, a London and Barcelona-based EV startup, raised $2M to fix EV charging, in a round led by Lakehouse Ventures (their first investment outside the US), with Divergent Capital, Masia

• Energiot Devices, a Barcelona-based IoT startup, raised €1.5M led by Inclimo, with participation from Easo Ventures and BStartup.

• Toteemi, a Madrid-based sport tech company that gamifies cycling and running workouts, closed a €1M+ funding round led by family group Asentis through StartupXplore

M&A news 🎉

• Cyberclick, the Barcelona-based marketing and sales specialist founded more than 25 years ago, was acquired by European HubSpot solutions group Siloy

• Begalvi got acquired by Phenna Group, the UK compliance and certification platform backed by Oakley Capital. The Spanish startup provides regulatory compliance management and SaaS for the property management market

Startup news 💡

Startup financials:

• Clarity AI has been seeking emergency capital for weeks, holding talks with private funds and public entity SETT, according to Ecotechers. Seaya marked down its valuation from ~€300M to €74M. Clarity has around €19.3M ARR (+25% YoY)

• Bcas, the fintech that specializes in education financing, signed an €18M guarantee agreement with the EIF to mobilize up to €72M in financing for over 14,000 students across Europe

• Enginy (AI sales automation) has crossed €5M+ ARR, built almost entirely through outbound sales. They explain how in the LinkedIn post

• Prudencia.ai, a bootstrapped legal AI platform, projects reaching €1.5M ARR by end-2026, just 11 months after commercial launch in February

International companies active in Spain:

• OpenAI will open its first office in Spain in the second half of 2026, landing in Madrid. It won’t be an engineering hub: the team will focus on sales, technical support and public policy

• AI legal giant Legora opened offices in Madrid, Milan, and Paris, plus a dedicated engineering hub in London

• Italian software consolidator Bending Spoons opened its first Spanish office in Madrid ahead of its Nasdaq IPO targeting a $20B valuation

• Ubisoft announced a restructuring affecting 51 employees at its Barcelona studio, roughly 28% of staff

New companies and products:

• Walter! came out of stealth to fix IT management at scaling tech companies. Founded by Marc Ginjaume and Carlos Andion

• Omnia published the first edition of its AI Visibility Index, tracking which brands surface most in answers from AI assistants and search engines

• Devengo has become the first non-bank in Europe cleared to send instant euro payments across borders

Other news:

• HappyRobot opened its 7th office worldwide, in Mexico City

• Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo discussed the company’s IPO plans on Bloomberg Crypto, explaining that going public will raise the profile of tokenization and provide capital for strategic acquisitions

• Embat hired former Pleo Southern Europe GM Dexeus to lead its Global Banking division

Amazon SageMaker AI: build, train & deploy ML/GenAI models at scale. HyperPod cuts training time 40%. Glovo processes 2TB/day powering recommendations & pricing across 25+ countries. Go from experiment to production — fully managed.

VC news 🚀

• Base10 Partners, the firm co-founded by Adeyemi Ajao (co-founder of Tuenti and Cabify) raised two funds totaling $850M. The San Francisco-based firm has been quite active in the past couple of years backing Spanish founders in Spain and abroad. Happyrobot, Infintewatch, Traza, Throxy, Speridlabs, etc

• Deborah Li, formerly of Mundi Ventures, launched All Blue, a 4-week founder residency program in Madrid for builders. All Blue is part of Alta One, an early-stage fund she’s launching

• The Andalusian Government launched a €10M co-investment fund to support tech startups, alongside plans for Tandem, a new scaleup hub in Seville

• Mission (formerly Demium) dissolved its €5M Matchday Innovation Fund FCRE, which was set to be the first fund collaborating with a football club’s innovation center (Valencia CF)

Big company news 🏢

• The Spanish government opposes letting the European Commission veto China’s Huawei and ZTE from European telecom networks

• Amazon Web Services received partial approval from Aragón’s government to advance construction of new data centers in El Burgo de Ebro, Huesca, and Villanueva de Gállego

• Kumo Networks, El Corte Inglés’ data center subsidiary, launched a new facility in Valencia’s Paterna after a €52M investment and three years of construction

• Spain opened a new ICEX economic office in San Francisco to attract investment and connect with Spanish talent in Silicon Valley

• Renault plans to deploy 10 humanoid robots across European plants, including Spanish facilities in Valladolid and Palencia, by late 2026 through a strategic partnership with startup Wandercraft

Interesting reads 🤓

• Miguel Carranza (RevenueCat) published “100 Lessons From Building a 100-Person Org”

• My colleague Miguel Arias and Elisenda Bou (Cala) published the AI Context Layer Market Map

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Crescenta:

Invierte en los ganadores del mañana con Crescenta Growth III:

• Acceso a una selección fondos flagship de Equity Growth, Tech Buyouts y secundarios de VC

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Startup funding news 💸

€100M+ rounds:

• Perk, the Barcelona-based corporate travel startup, secured a $300M credit facility led by Neuberger. The company grew revenue 48% in 2025, crossing $360M in annualized revenue

• Factorial, the Barcelona-based HR tech company, raised $150M in Series D funding led by General Catalyst (GC), reaching a $2.5B valuation. The company is transitioning to an AI Workforce Operations Platform serving 16k+ businesses across 90+ countries. GC also committed an additional $540M through its Customer Value Fund. Jordi Romero was interviewed by Seb Johnson here, and also talked about the funding announcement in the itnig podcast. At Kfund we’ve been investors since 2018 and it’s been a true privilege to be able to be part of this since the early days and see Jordi, Bernat, and the rest of the team execute at such a level and speed 🚀🚀

• Twinco Capital, a Dutch-Spanish fintech specializing in supply chain finance, raised €165M through two operations: a €15M Series B round led by FMO with participation from Bankinter, Quona Capital, and Working Capital Fund, plus a €150M securitization fund

€10M+ rounds:

• The Spanish government approved a €24.9M investment in Canarian animation studio Ánima Kitchent through SETT

€1M to €5M rounds:

• Flipflow, the Valencia-based competitive intelligence platform for retail, raised €3M in funding led by 4Founders Capital, with participation from Decelera Ventures, Secways, and strategic investors including PUIG and Mango

• Zazume, the Barcelona-based proptech, secured €2.5M in funding co-led by Nordstar and GTV Capital. Zazume uses AI for rental property management including tenant screening and automated rent collection. More info here

• Opereit, a Barcelona-based logistics optimization startup, raised €2.2M in a funding round led by Seedcamp and Yellow. Opereit develops AI agents that detect transport invoice errors, identify shipment losses and damages, and manage claims with carriers. More info here

• DARWIN Biomed, the Navarra-based health tech startup, closed a €1M pre-seed round to accelerate development of MICHELANGELO, an intelligent walker based on assistive robotics

• Modelia, a Madrid-based AI-powered visual content creation platform for fashion, closed a €1M seed round led by Next Tier Ventures, with participation from US fund RapidScale and Archipélago Next

Other rounds of funding and rumours:

• Kampaoh, the Spanish camping firm backed by JME Ventures, is negotiating a capital increase that brings Alter Capital and Axon as new controlling shareholders, according to el Economista. Revenue approaches €30M with 3,600 tents installed

• Banbu, a Cantabria-based natural cosmetics brand, secured €200k from Eoniq.fund

• MULA Autonomous Farming secured investment from Swanlaab through its AgriFood Tech Fund to accelerate development of autonomous farming solutions

M&A news 🎉

• Barceló reached an agreement to acquire 100% of Atrápalo, the travel platform. The deal, pending CNMC approval, will be executed through Ávoris, Barceló’s travel division. This marks Ávoris’ second major acquisition in under a year, following its 80% purchase of Rusticae

• Atom Bank, the UK digital bank backed 49% by BBVA, attracted takeover bids from two acquirers. The fintech is seeking over £600M (€693M). If completed, this represents a significant premium over its £350M 2023 valuation, though below its £459M 2022 peak

• Spanish food-safety and operations software Andy was acquired by France’s CHR Group, in a deal backed by a strategic investment from PSG Equity and Verto

• Entravel Group acquired Barcelona-based B2B travel startup Moca Traveltech Group to accelerate expansion into Spanish-speaking markets

• PiperAI was acquired by Aircall after three years of building AI-powered revenue intelligence. The company had raised around €3M from Seaya and others

Startup news 💡

Startup financials and $$:

• SeQura CEO David Bäckström announced that the BNPL company closed 2025 with €133M revenue and €11M EBITDA, following a €410M funding round led by Citi in 2024. SeQura focuses on specialized verticals like education (eduQa, 40% of revenue) and eyewear subscriptions (optiQa), serving 2.7M users across 5,000+ merchants with a 95% transaction acceptance rate

• Clicars, the vehicle ecommerce company owned by Groupe Aramis (Stellantis), reduced losses by 49% to €1.47M in 2025. Revenue grew 1.7% to €322.2M despite a €600k impact from Valencia floods that destroyed 243 vehicles and delayed factory opening. The company expects to return to profitability in fiscal 2026 after four years of losses

• Bcas signed an €18M guarantee agreement with the European Investment Fund to mobilize up to €72M in education financing. The fintech will provide accessible funding to over 14,000 students across Europe

• Urbanitae launched two investment funds targeting institutional investors, expanding beyond its crowdfunding platform. The CNMV-regulated funds, each around €50M, focus on real estate equity and debt financing

• Impress, Europe’s largest invisible orthodontics clinic network, is discussing a sixth funding round to fuel expansion plans including 15-20 new clinics across Europe by 2026. The Barcelona-based company reached €103M revenue in 2025 and targets €140M in 2026, aiming for IPO readiness by 2029

• PLD Space tripled its investment to €35M for its French Guiana launch facility, aiming to complete construction by summer 2026 for the first MIURA 5 rocket launch. The Elche-based company becomes the first private operator to build infrastructure at ESA’s spaceport

Product launches:

• Causa Prima launched its first product, Scribo, a free AI-native e-invoicing tool that generates compliant invoices through conversational AI

• Deale launched Deale Credit, Spain’s first fully integrated LBO financing solution within a digital M&A platform for SMEs. The initiative offers loans up to €300k for M&A purposes

• Idealista integrated Rentalia’s vacation rental content into its platform, allowing users to search for holiday accommodations in Spain and Portugal

• Tinybird moved its growth analytics from PostHog back to its own platform, building “Birdwatcher” - an internal analytics system that combines product data, session recordings, and operational context in one place

Other ecosystem stuff:

• King president Todd Green emphasized Barcelona’s critical importance to the Candy Crush maker, confirming plans to continue hiring talent at their 22@ hub with nearly 500 employees. The mobile gaming giant has operated in Barcelona since 2012

• Bewater Funds released its annual ranking of Spain’s most capital-efficient companies, with Flexicar, Selectra, and PC Componentes maintaining the top three positions

• A Valencia court opened proceedings against Jeff’s former CEO and board president for allegedly defrauding investors by hiding the startup’s insolvency. Prosecutors claim they used falsified bank certificates showing €20M+ in liquidity to secure €909k in convertible loans from the Sean Connery Foundation in 2022, while the franchise company was secretly in pre-bankruptcy proceedings

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VC news 🚀

• Inveready launched its 3rd structured finance fund targeting €150M to finance growth plans and M&A operations for companies trading on alternative markets or mature firms ready for BME Growth listings

• Galician biotech investor Sémola Tech Ventures, founded by the Mestrelab Research team after selling Mestrelab to Bruker, has struck a strategic alliance with Silicon Valley's General Inception to identify, incubate and launch life-sciences companies in Galicia and Spain

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Forage raised $40M in Series B funding led by Mouro Capital

Big company news 🏢

• Sponsor: Build GenAI apps with Amazon Bedrock — access Claude, Llama, Nova & Mistral via one single API.

• Microsoft announced MAI-Thinking-1, the first foundational model from Microsoft SuperIntelligence (MSI). The MSI Madrid team actively participated in the model’s design and training, and the company is now seeking AI engineers to develop Microsoft’s next models from Spain

• Esade director Daniel Traça warns that “knowledge no longer comes from universities, it’s in companies” as AI disrupts business education

• Uber announced plans to launch Spain’s first commercial robotaxi pilot in Madrid, partnering with WeRide.ai and the Madrid Regional Government

Interesting reads 🤓

• Cala co-founder Elisenda Bou published “Every AI company needs a context layer. Nobody agrees what that is"

• REFUGIO founder and anonymous Twitter account Mihura published “Reflexiones sobre el mercado laboral tech en España”

• David Bonilla wrote “La IA de cerca”

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There’s a number from a recent a16z podcast that’s stuck with me. Even with Anthropic and OpenAI now adding more revenue per month than Meta, Google or Microsoft, AI has diffused into less than 5% of the real economy. And almost all of that 5% sits in one place: coding and tech-forward companies. Every other function, and every other industry, is essentially nowhere yet. The takeoff we’ve already watched in software is now starting to repeat itself, one vertical and one department at a time.

That gap is one of the main reasons why we just co-led a €2M pre-seed round in Mafer AI, alongside 4Founders Capital, Masia and Lavanda Ventures (the Puig family’s vehicle), with a strong group of operators and angels around the table.

Mafer is building an AI operating system for the chemical industry, a ~$5T sector that, despite being one of the most R&D-intensive in the world, still runs on spreadsheets, decades-old lab software and the tacit knowledge of senior experts who are now retiring. Founders Fer Oliver and Marc Montalbo are starting with its most complex, value-dense corner: flavours and fragrances. The platform trains proprietary models on each client’s own historical data (chromatograms, formulas, regulatory docs) and embeds forward-deployed engineers Palantir-style inside customer workflows. The more it gets used, the smarter the underlying models become.

What convinced us wasn’t only the thesis. In just six months, Mafer has already sharpened its commercial motion around fast, paid pilots that convert into substantial contracts, and it’s landing them. Pair that with a credible path toward €1M by year-end, privileged access to the Barcelona Supercomputing Center’s H100 cluster, and a team scaling with strong technical hires from the likes of Amazon, MIT and Spain’s top ML programs, and you have a company moving far faster than its age would suggest.

To us, Mafer is exactly what the next phase of AI diffusion looks like. Not another coding tool, but vertical intelligence reaching an industry the software era never really touched. We couldn’t be more excited to be backing Fer, Marc and the team.

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Manfred:

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24 de septiembre en Espacio Rastro (Madrid). Solo hay 300 entradas gratuitas. ¡Corre!

Un evento para líderes técnicos y managers enfocado en llevarte un aprendizaje de cada charla que puedas poner en práctica al día siguiente en tu empresa. Revisa la agenda y consigue tus entradas antes de que vuelen aquí.

Startup funding news 💸

• Multiverse, the Basque quantum software company specializing in AI language model compression, is set to receive an additional €100M from Spain’s SETT (Sepi Digital) as part of a private investor-led funding round. The SETT had already invested €60M in the company last year

• Substrate AI, a Madrid-based AI infra startup whose stock trades on the BME Growth, is finalizing a €40M funding round through convertible bonds

• Capchase, the Madrid and NYC-based revenue based financing company, secured €200M+ in funding to scale its embedded financing platform for enterprise tech companies. The round consists of $26M in equity and a $174M credit facility. 01Advisors led the round, which included participation from Caffeinated Capital, Thomvest Ventures, Scifi VC, Bling Capital, Invesco and others

• Didit, a Barcelona and SF-based AI identity verification platform, closed a €6.4M seed round from YC, Pioneer Fund, Orange Collective, and Masia. Didit says that it is profitable and growing 30%+ MoM while serving 2k+ companies

• Mafer AI, a Barcelona-based AI company for R&D teams in formulation industries like cosmetics, food, and fragrance, closed a €2M pre-seed round led by us at Kfund, with participation from 4Founders Capital, Masia and Lavanda Ventures

• Mathew, a Barcelona-based AI edtech startup, raised €1.2M in seed funding from Encomenda, Decelera, and business angels

• Banbu, a Cantabria-based natural cosmetics company, closed a €120k crowdlending campaign through Goparity

• Publicit, a Barcelona-based adtech startup, closed a €700k pre-seed round co-led by BStartup Banco Sabadell and Successful Fund

M&A news 🎉

• Asana acquired AI workflow-automation startup StackAI for $75M, the US and Spanish startup. Founders Tony Rosinol and Bernard Aceituno join Asana. StackAI had raised just under $20M. More from Toni here. Congrats!

• Clustag, a Valencia-based RFID and intralogistics solutions company, completed the acquisition of Labelmasters, a Sabadell-based firm specializing in advanced labeling systems for high-demand logistics environments. Clustag does €18M in annual sales, while Labelmasters did €1.4M in 2024. More info here

• Amper acquired the assets of Zeleros, the Spanish startup specializing in advanced electrification and energy storage, for approximately €1M during the company’s voluntary bankruptcy proceedings

• Indra sold its consulting unit Minsait Business Consulting to Dutch PE firm Waterland for €125M-€150M, with additional earn-out payments based on future performance. Minsait does ~€200M in revenue and €20M in EBITDA

• Salto Systems, a Spanish company leader in electronic locks and access control, is in exclusive talks for Lukas Asset Management (the family office of Aldi Nord) to buy a ~20% stake. The bid values the group at €1.5B+

Startup news 💡

• Henrik Gebbing and Maex Ament teased Causa Prima, a Madrid/Munich fintech in the B2B payments space. It's a network that sits between buyer and supplier and handles both sides of every transaction. Gebbing co-founded Finoa (the $10B EU crypto custodian); Ament built Taulia (~$50B/quarter, sold to SAP) and Centrifuge. Philip Stanislaus is the third co-founder

• Delivery Hero (Glovo's owner) is being pursued by Uber, which has built a 37% stake plus options and floated an informal €33/share offer, rejected as too low. Seaya Ventures still holds 412K Delivery Hero shares from the 2021 Glovo sale. More info here

• EsTech welcomed four new members: travel agency Destinia (€250M revenue), real estate portal Fotocasa, cybersecurity firm Transparent Edge (€3M revenue), and AI platform Alinia. Barcelona’s electric mobility company Cooltra (€60M revenue) will join soon, bringing EsTech’s total to 24 scale-ups driving Spain’s digital transformation

• SolarProfit, the Catalan solar-panel installer, filed a second restructuring plan with the Barcelona commercial court after creditors challenged its first, proposing a haircut of up to 90%

• Ideaded, the Barcelona maker of more sustainable “beyond-silicon” chips, will invest €12.3M to expand its cleanroom and grow headcount 40%

• GoodNews, a coffee chain with VC as backers, plans to expand into travel retail with its first airport location opening at Barcelona-El Prat T1 in June. The company generated over €13M revenue in 2025, up 65% YoY, with 55% from international markets

• HolaCamp, another retail business with VC backing, is in talks with Hungarian group Indotek to form a ~€100M joint venture investing in Spanish campsites. HolaCamp expects €40M revenue this year

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VC news 🚀

• Junyo launched a startup studio that lets senior operators build companies without quitting their day jobs (fractional senior teams, shared infrastructure, AI, majority ownership and profit sharing). Founded by Gorka Muñecas, it aims to originate ~50 startups in 4yrs and starts with 3: KINDA (corporate social-impact content), XABIK (data center infrastructure with guaranteed energy) and Klipik (real-time AI editing for live events). More info here

• Xunta de Galicia launched three new specialized business accelerators focusing on biotechnology, renewable energy, and healthcare. The €14M initiative aims to support 70+ projects by 2028

Spanish investors active abroad:

• LifeX participated in the €12M Series A round of Munich-based allO

Big company news 🏢

• Sponsor: AWS Summit Madrid. June 4, IFEMA, free entry. A day for founders: direct access to AWS experts and VCs, plus generative-AI and Bedrock demos. Scale faster with AWS. Reserve your spot here.

• Diamond Foundry, the US synthetic diamond company, abandoned a €1B investment in Málaga TechPark due to insufficient electrical capacity, ultimately choosing Zaragoza instead

• Spain's Consumer Affairs Ministry opened sanctioning proceedings against prediction-market platforms Polymarketand Kalshi and ordered their websites blocked, on grounds they're operating in Spain without the required gaming licence

• eDreams reported a 42% jump in adjusted net profit to €72.9M for its fiscal year ending March 2026, reaching 7.9M Prime subscribers

• Spotify reported that Spanish musicians generated €156M in royalties in 2025, a 14% increase from €137M the previous year

Interesting reads 🤓

• Last week we covered NeoCalculator, an open-source graphing calculator built by 15-year-old Juan Ramón Egea from Almería. He authored last week’s Bonilista

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Crescenta:

Comparte el Private Equity

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Crescenta es la primera gestora digital de España especializada en Private Equity. Sus portfolios de fondos están disponibles desde €10k euros a desembolsar gradualmente. Y están compuestos por una selección única: menos del 3% de los fondos que analizan entran.

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Startup funding news 💸

• Orbik Cybersecurity, a Guipúzcoa-based cybersecurity startup, closed a €2M round backed by MONDRAGON, IKERLAN, and Basque Country’s VC fund

• Overwatch AI, a Barcelona-based AI aviation company, closed a $1.5M pre-seed round with participation from United Airlines Ventures, Baobab Ventures (Carles Reina) and others. The platform helps pilots, cabin crew and operations teams surface critical info across fragmented systems

• Drelife, a Barcelona-based solution that enables brands to launch trade-in and resale programs for used products, closed an €800k round with investors including basketball player Ricky Rubio, golfer Rafa Cabrera Bello, and Barça Innovation Hub

M&A news 🎉

• Keybotic, the Barcelona-based autonomous robotics startup founded in 2021 by Irene Gómez and Hilario Tomé, was acquired by German defense tech Helsing. The company had raised around €3M. We talked a few years ago with Keybotic and we found their tech and value prop super interesting. We didn’t manage to invest. Prior to building Keybotic, Hilario Tome was the winner of DARPA’s Subterranean Challenge, one of the world’s most prestigious robotics competitions. More info here

• Spain ranks second in Europe by exit value per dollar of VC invested in 2026 YTD, generating $5.5 in exits for every $1 deployed, according to Dealroom. Germany leads the table by a wide margin at $12.8, followed by Spain ($5.5), Italy ($4.8), the UK ($2.9) and Ireland ($2.5)

Startup news 💡

• Seedtag grew EBITDA 21% in 2025, according to Ecotechers citing Oakley Capital, one of its main shareholders. The figure points to a range between €50M and €100M, though Oakley made no mention of revenues (the target was €400M)

• Barcelona-based Biorce, which recently closed a €61M Series A led by DST Global Partners, disclosed that it has reached €10M revenue in its first year

• Magnific (formerly Freepik) launched Magnific Fund, a €10M program in platform credits and discounts to help European and UK creative teams move from AI experimentation to production workflows. More info here

• Speridlabs came out of stealth with a seed round from Pear VC and Base10. The Spanish AI lab is building Spatial Intelligence: foundation models that understand the 3D world, aiming to be the missing layer between computer vision and 3D generation. The company is co-founded by Chema Garabito (CEO and Chief Researcher) and Guillermo Garabito (COO)

• Abacum launched its “Built for NetSuite” SuiteApp, integrating AI-native FP&A capabilities directly with NetSuite ERP systems

• Petolo, Zurich’s digital pet insurance startup, launched in Spain. Spanish competitors include our portfolio company Barkibu

• Italian legal tech startup Lexroom closed a $50M Series B led by Left Lane Capital, with participation from Spanish VC Acurio Ventures. The Italian AI legal platform will open a Barcelona office and expand its Spanish team from 20 to 30 employees

• Madrid launched Europe’s first autonomous VTC pilot project, partnering with Uber, Cabify, and Bolt to deploy 50-100 level-5 autonomous vehicles starting December

• Cool stuff. NeoCalculator is a DIY open-source scientific calculator project by 15-year-old Juan Ramón from Almería, which aims to break the monopoly of Texas Instruments, Casio, and HP

Tech investor news 🚀

• Mouro Capital, Santander’s fintech investment arm, launched its third fund with $400M. Mouro plans to add external LPs for the first time and targets AI-driven fintech across Europe, North America, and Latin America. Company announcement here and message from co-founder Manuel Silva here

• Plus Partners surpassed €45M for its first fund, exceeding its initial €40M target

• Spain’s SETT (Sepi Digital) invested €752M for a 32% stake in Diamond Foundry‘s Spanish subsidiary. The US company will manufacture synthetic diamond wafers for semiconductors at facilities in Zaragoza and Trujillo

• Asabys Partners has closed €74.7M from CDTI’s Innvierte Deep Start program and the EIF for its new biotech and medtech vehicle, Asabys Innvierte Tech Transfer, targeting a total size of up to €120M

• BBVA Spark partnered with Nasdaq Private Market to provide secondary market liquidity solutions for high-growth private companies in Latin America, initially targeting later-stage companies in Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Swiss AI company Visium closed its first institutional funding round co-led by Spanish fund Columbus Venture Partners

Interesting reads 🤓

• Eduardo Manchón, co-founder of Mailsuite, shared his thesis on why most AI-email startups will fail. He also shared that Mailsuite has 14M signups, 800k MAU and 119k paying customers, all organic, with a new AI product shipping soon

• Francesc Font, co-founder of Incapto Coffee, wrote “Las 3 formas que utilizo para invertir en startups”

• Pau Ramon (Ramensoft) wrote about why he’s introduced "token fasting" at his company: coding by hand at least once weekly to counter CEO "token maxxing" trends

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Startup funding news 💸

€10M+ rounds:

• Embat, the Madrid-based treasury management platform, raised €30M in Series B funding led by Cathay Innovation. Cathay wrote about the investment here. Embat says it has 150 employees serving 400 clients across Europe. More from one of the founders here

• Universal DX, the Sevilla-based startup developing AI-powered liquid biopsy technology, formalized a €29.9M investment from SETT, as part of a larger €62M round

€1M to €10M:

• Cala, the new startup of Elisenda Bou and Issey Masuda (who formerly built Vilynx, acquired by Apple), announced a €7M pre-seed round led by Lightspeed, with participation from us at Kfund, as well as Kibo Ventures, and Masia. The startup built a verified knowledge graph that allows AI agents to query facts without scraping or parsing data. More about the deal here

• KD, a Madrid-based microelectronics company specializing in optical communications, secured €3.67M from ICO

• Fresh People (now called Booster), a Valencia-based company in the talent management space, raised €2.6M in a round led by Inveready

• Dolfin, a Barcelona-based sales compensation platform, raised a $2.5M seed round led by Swanlaab, with participation from Archipélago Next, Inveready and Dozen

• Memorae AI, a Barcelona-based multiplatform AI memory agent company, raised $2M in seed funding led by Mucker Capital. Memorae says it has reached $2.5M ARR and 200k+ users in 12 months,

• Charms, a Madrid-based crypto startup, raised $1.5M to build a character economy for AI interactions. The round was led by Lattice Fund, Coinbase Ventures’ Base Ecosystem Fund, and JME Ventures. More about Charms design here

• Tolemy Bio, a Barcelona-based AI-native platform helping scientists understand and control cellular systems for cell therapy, raised €1.4M in pre-seed funding, led by Norrsken Evolve, with participation from Big Sur Ventures, JME Ventures, Masia, and Redbus Ventures. More here

• Wio Capital, a Madrid-based wealth management platform, closed a €1.2M funding round led by Next Tier Ventures and Bynd VC

Other rounds of funding:

• Ainovis, a startup developing AI-powered virtual assistants for radiology closed a €680k funding round led by Kunsen Ventures

M&A news 🎉

• Australian data center giant Iren acquired Spanish data center developer Nostrum Group (formerly Ingenostrum) for €165M to expand into Europe. More info here

• Factorial acquired YepCode, a developer-first platform for AI-powered integrations.The acquisition establishes a new Factorial engineering hub in A Coruña. YepCode co-founder Marcos Muiño participated in the itnig podcast to talk about the deal and what’s next inside of Factorial

• Overgie, a subsidiary of crypto company Rungie, has acquired Barcelona-based CRM startup Berrly to create a unified platform combining community management and customer relationship tools for clubs, associations, and NGOs

Startup news 💡

Startup financials:

• Wallapop has surfaced its first numbers under Naver. The Korean parent reports 23M monthly users and ~€21M in revenue over two consolidated months, implying ~€125M annualized vs €101M in 2024

• Wallbox reported Q1 2026 results with adjusted EBITDA improving 23% year-over-year to -€6.0M despite revenues declining to €29.7M

• Travel tech company GrandVoyage reported €29.1M revenue (+35%) and 88% profit growth in 2025 in its first annual results as a public company on the BME Growth

• Padel marketplace Playtomic revealed it generated over €30M in revenue and processed €389M in transactions during 2025. The Spanish startup operates in 68 countries with 4.7M users and 6.3k clubs, projecting 40% growth for 2026

Product and startup launches:

• Pau Ramon (former CTO of Factorial) and now running Ramensoft, introduced Handinger, an AI agent platform that helps companies automate knowledge work. More info in the Product Hunt launch

• Diego Arroyo of fashion brand lagaam released Compai, an open-source AI operating system used by his company to manage day to day operations. More details here

• Former Wallapop, Vinted, and Malt executive Belén Alomar Brutau launched ConneQt, a transparent platform connecting sponsors with university students who need funding

In the mobility sector:

• Cabify partnered with Andbank to launch a €20M investment vehicle targeting VTC transport licenses in Madrid. The fund will invest in ride-hailing authorizations to expand Cabify’s fleet competing against Uber and Bolt

• The Spanish government allocated over €97M through its Moves Corredores program to fund 337 EV charging infrastructure projects. Repsol leads with 65 approved projects receiving €10.9M, followed by EV startup Zunder (54 projects, €13M) and Iberdrola | bp pulse (41 projects, €12.2M)

• Glovo has reached an agreement with unions on an ERE affecting 436 delivery workers. Also in the food delivery sector, Just Eat started negotiating layoffs for around 50 office workers as part of operational reorganization focused on standardization and AI automation

Other news:

• AdCities appointed Albert Nieto, Seedtag co-founder, as Non-Executive Chairman to help with international expansion

Tech investor news 🚀

• CRB Health Tech closed its third fund, CRB Digital Health, at €50M. The fund targets digital health startups post-validation phase with initial tickets of €750k-€2M

• Antai Ventures Management launched The Extension Fund II targeting €40M-€75M to finance Spanish startups

• Junipero Capital, the firm created by Nacho Vilela that focuses on buying stakes in pre-IPO and growth companies, completed an oversubscribed close of its new AI Disruption Fund at $10M in four weeks

• Talenta Gestión launched Mastertech Capital IV, a €10M fund of funds targeting early-stage VC funds investing in tech companies

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Iris Ventures led a a multimillion-dollar round in Bostonb-based Lucille Health

Big company & policy news 🏦

• TikTok Shop reached €200M in revenue and captured 1.8% of Spain’s online consumer goods market in its first year since launching in December 2023

• BBVA joined OpenAI’s new Deployment Company as the sole Spanish partner, the goal of this new entity is to help organizations deploy AI systems at scale

• Inditex confirmed a data breach affecting more than 197,000 customers, after cybercrime group ShinyHunters accessed a database held by a former Inditex tech provider

• Booking CEO Glenn Fogel urged Spain to decide what it wants to do about overtourism, calling for a data-driven debate between governments, airlines and platforms to set the right balance.

• The Benjumea brothers (Rafael and José, grandsons of Abengoa’s founder) have secured strategic project status from the Andalusian government to build a €1.26B data center in Málaga TechPark

Interesting reads 🤓

• In collaboration with Dealroom and other Spanish entities, at Kfund we published an update of our Spanish tech ecosystem report. The report is available here. Summary here. 2025 was a great year and in 2026 we might see even more activity

• Bright Spots published “Spain just became one of Europe’s cheapest power markets. Here is how.”

• MarsBased published “The strategy behind the shift: Why MarsBased left Cursor for Claude Code”

• TechCFO launched as Spain’s first professional association for tech CFOs, bringing together over 250 financial leaders from high-growth technology companies

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Startup funding news 💸

• Open Cosmos, the Barcelona-based satellite operator, received €31M from Catalonia’s Institut Català de Finances

• FlexiIC, a Barcelona-based CSIC spin-off that develops flexible integrated circuits, raised €2M in a Series A round led by Bullnet Capital

• eVoost AI, a Spanish-origin startup based in Abu Dhabi developing AI technology for real estate commercialization, closed a €2M funding round led by First Drop

• Humara, a Galicia-based waste infrastructure software company, raised €1.2M in seed funding led by Impact Shakers

• Darwin Biomed, a Navarra-based company developing an intelligent walker for the elderly, closed a €1M pre-seed round led by Easo Ventures and Sodena

• Hirevoice, a Barcelona-based automated interview platform, closed a €900k funding round led by Draper B1 with 4FoundersCapital participating

• Neety, a Basque startup that develops AI agents for B2B sales automation, raised €330k in pre-seed funding from SeedRocket-linked business angels

M&A news 🎉

• I saw this chart on Twitter the other day. It shows the revenue multiple paid in several M&A transactions involving AI startups. The highest multiple paid to date according to this chart? 97.6x ARR that Crowdstrike paid for Madrid-based Onum

• Defense company Amper signed a binding agreement with PE firm Nazca to acquire 100% of Teltronic, a Zaragoza-based defense and security communications company, for €155M plus up to €45M in earn-outs. The deal values Teltronic at under 9x 2025 EBITDA of €20M+

• Ebury, the FX payments company majority owned by Banco Santander, raised €635M in funding to accelerate growth, thus postponing potential IPO plans

• Spanish mobility company Amovens and its parent company GoMore completed a strategic acquisition of Getaround Europe’s operations, to increase its P2P car rental network

• Immfly, the airline entertainment software provider, has hired GP Bullhound to seek a buyer. The company targets a valuation above its current €200M, with revenues of €43M in 2024

• vLex completed its integration into Canadian giant Clio six months after the $1B acquisition closed

Startup news 💡

• A Barcelona court approved Wallbox's restructuring plan, clearing the EV charging company to refinance €170M in debt and execute a capital increase. CEO Enric Asunción called it "a new chapter with a clear roadmap."

• MN Program, a Coruña-based ERP for services companies with €10.7M ARR and €6.4M EBITDA, hired PwC to explore a partial or total exit. The company is owned by founder Gerardo Rodríguez Darriba (70%) and Spanish fund Queka Real Partners (20%). It has 9,300 clients

• HolaCamp closed 2025 with nearly €29M revenue, almost 3x YoY, serving 250k guests across 13 campings in Spain and Portugal

• Monzo launched in Spain as part of its European expansion. The UK neobank established offices in Barcelona and Madrid with over 50 employees

• Revolut is scaling its Barcelona hub with a new global innovation HQ in Barcelona and plans to hire 300 new employees, growing the team from 700 to 1,000 by 2028. Madrid will also expand from 400 to 900

• TuManag3r is a Málaga-based influencer marketing consultancy founded by 24-year-old Vicente Mirasol that has grown to nearly €3M annual revenue in 5 years. 92% of revenue is international and it manages campaigns for Netflix, Amazon, and Ubisoft

Two profiles:

• Profile of Throxy, the London-based AI startup founded by Spanish entrepreneurs Arnau Ayerbe, Pablo Jiménez de Parga, and Bergen Merey

• Another profile of Lace Lithography, co-founded by Spanish physicist Adrià Salvador. Second profile of Lace and Adria in consecutive weeks

Tech investor news 🚀

• Axon Partners Group closed 2025 with €25.2M revenue (+16.6%) and €8.4M profit before taxes (+18.7%), marking its fifth consecutive year of double-digit growth. Assets under management reached a record €838M (+27%)

• Montana Children’s Health Innvierte, a pediatric-focused VC fund managed by Ship2B Ventures, raised €37M in its first close. The fund will invest €500k-€3M in 15+ startups focused on children’s health technologies emerging from academic and hospital research

• AEBAN released its comprehensive report “Business Angels 2015-2025. Startup Investment: Activity and Trends,” available here

• Canary Islands-based VC Archipélago Next invested in five Spanish startups from its second fund: Vantelis (Navarra), Monolayer, Secrets Vault, CareerOS, and Dolfin (all Barcelona-based)

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Kembara (Mundi’s €1B fund) completed its first investment. It co-led a $160M Series C round in UK-based Quantum Motion

• Nauta Capital did a follow-on in SPREAD AI, as part of its €30M Series B

Big company & policy news 🏦

• Anthropic is hiring a Developer Community Lead in Mdarid (salary €195k)

• Uber announced plans to launch autonomous vehicles in Madrid before year-end, starting with 10-20 cars in a pilot program

• Interview with Google chief economist Fabien Curto Millet, a Spaniard based in Silicon Valley. The interview focuses on the economic impact of AI

• OpenAI avoided a potential fine from Spain’s data protection agency (AEPD) by transferring jurisdiction to its Irish subsidiary in February 2024

Interesting reads 🤓

• 🎯, from Javi Santana

  ---

• Samuel Gil (JME) published “Tu empresa no está lista para la IA. Despidiendo IAs para recontratar personas. ¿Por qué no trabajas en lo más importante? Tu salud depende de tu flujo energético.”

• zenital published “Los riesgos ocultos en los datos que comprometen la creación de valor tras un exit”

• Carles Igual, co-founder of Kimera, wrote about Mercadona Tech’s decision to replace their Algolia-based search functionality with an in-house developed solution. His verdict: “Todos alucinan con que Mercadona construyó un buscador interno en 3 días y ahorra 15.000€ al mes, pero… jugando 5 minutos encuentras muchos fallos gordos.”

• Article in ElMundo about the tech market in Granada. Coincidentally, Guli Moreno tweeted about this too

Podcasts of the week 🎧

• Itnig interviewed the founders of Krea AI

• SeedRocket interviewed Diego Arroyo of lagaam, about their use of OpenClaw to manage internal ops

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Startup funding news 💸

• Madrid and NYC-based Fence raised a $20M Series A led by Galaxy Ventures to accelerate its real-time infrastructure for asset-backed finance. Other investors in the round are ParaFi Capital and Crane Venture Partners. Fence was co-founded by Juan Montero and Ignacio Rosario

• TietAI, a Madrid-based company that develops an AI platform for hospital operations, closed a €2.5M seed round led by Plus Partners and JME Ventures

• Impetux, a University of Barcelona spin-off developing advanced photonics instrumentation for life sciences, closed a €2.5M funding round led by Bullnet Capital

• Sateliot launched a €100M Series C funding round to deploy its 5G satellite constellation. Sateliot has six satellites in orbit and expects to launch five more in 2026, backed by €270M in pre-contracts across 60 countries

M&A news 🎉

• Amadeus will acquire French biometrics firm Idemia Public Security (IPS) from Advent International for €1.2B in cash (plus up to €150M earn-out). Amadeus aims to embed biometric identity across the full travel journey, from booking to boarding to border control. IPS has 3,300 employees, 600+ clients and generated €711M revenue with €112M EBITDA in 2025 (9.8x 2026E EBITDA). Closing expected mid-2027.

• Norwegian software giant Visma acquired Málaga-based Bilky, a business management platform connecting accountants, companies, and employees. The acquisition marks Visma’s 8th investment in Iberia and 6th in Spain

• Seaya acquired a majority stake in baby food company Smileat through its Andromeda fund. Smileat generated €21M in revenue in 2025 with €2M+ EBITDA

Startup news 💡

• Amazing stuff from Freepik. I mean… Magnific. Freepik is rebranding as Magnific (the AI startup it acquired in 2024 for €20M+ co-founded by Javi Lopez and Emilio Nicolas. Javilop wrote about the launch here) and has hit $230M ARR with 1M+ paying subscribers, roughly 2x in 18 months. AI suite revenue tripled YoY. Freepik positions itself as a model-agnostic creative production layer, aggregating third-party AI models rather than building its own. EQT (52.9% since 2020) is past its typical 5-year hold, so it will be interesting to see what happens next. More details about the changes here

• ElevenLabs, the voice AI unicorn ($11B valuation, $430M ARR), is opening a Madrid office with ~20 hires across engineering and sales. The company also announced that Banco Santander has joined as investor. More info about the launch here and here

• Several Spanish startups are among 21 European startups that VCs recommended as ones to watch in this Techcrunch article: Theker, HappyRobot, Cala, PLD Space and Multiverse

• Bit2Me CEO Leif Ferreira discussed the company’s expansion challenges in Italy and Portugal, calling the market penetration more difficult than expected

• Revolut will open its first-ever physical store near Plaza Catalunya in Barcelona by late 2026 or early 2027

• Bihar Batteries and NX Technologies announced a partnership to accelerate European deployment of sodium-ion batteries for commercial energy storage. Bihar, founded in 2023, aims to start product sales by late 2026. The company was co-founded by Sebastián Fernández-Medrano (Samaipata, Komon) and Alberto Cendoya

• Multiplo Capital received authorization from CNMV as a financial advisory company. The AI-powered fintech, backed by Antai Ventures and ex-executives from BBVA, Fidelity, and Fintonic, offers wealth management through financial aggregation. After three months, it manages over €20M in AUM. More info here

• Skyboria, a Madrid-based drone startup developing civil and military drones with 500kg cargo capacity, plans to raise around €1M in 2027. The company expects to complete product design this year and begin mass production in 2027, with interest from clients in Chile, Greece, Italy, and Spain

• Profile of Waabi, the Canadian autonomous driving startup founded by Pamplona-born engineer Raquel Urtasun, which just raised $1B. The company is developing "physical AI" for both autonomous trucks and robotaxis

Tech investor news 🚀

• We (Kfund) launched the fundraising process of KFounders Preseed II, our new ~€20M pre-seed fund. The vehicle continues the strategy from our 1st pre-seed fund, which backed 40 companies (70%+ from outside Spain), including Enginy, Quiver, Complaion, Nilo and 2501. Initial tickets of ~€300K targeting early-stage tech founders with global ambition

• LifeX Ventures launched Life Extension Fund II EU, targeting €70M to invest in European life sciences and longevity startups

• Seaya welcomed Rika Christanto (formerly of LifeX and Idoven) as Partner and Co-Head of Ventures

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Tether led a $14M Series A round for Argentine crypto platform Belo, alongside Spanish fund The Venture City

Big company & policy news 🏦

• Bizum launches contactless NFC payments in physical stores on May 18, bypassing Visa/Mastercard rails entirely. Money moves via instant bank transfer directly from buyer to merchant

• A Madrid court ordered Cloudflare to block pirate football streaming sites including Roja Directa and PirloTV, following a lawsuit by LaLiga and Movistar Plus+. The judge also summoned Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince to testify — he didn't show.The company called LaLiga's complaint "an abuse of the system."

• Merlin Properties presented its data center transformation plan at its AGM, targeting 730 megawatts across País Vasco, Madrid, Barcelona, Lisboa and Zaragoza by 2032. Merlin will invest €7.84B in the initiative

Interesting reads 🤓

• Jose Ramon Perez Agüera (Mercadona Tech) published “Cómo construimos nuestro buscador en Mercadona Tech (y cómo construir el tuyo)”. More about it here

• Juan Luis Hortelano (Blinkfire, Startup Valencia) published “IA y salud: siete días para un prototipo, diez años para un producto”

• Antonio Herranz (Director of Global AI Transformation at Banco Santander) published “La paradoja de los 2,5 billones: por qué las empresas invierten más que nunca en IA y obtienen menos de lo que esperan“

• Philippe Gelis (Kantox) wrote “Slow Capital: A Philosophy for Building Wealth That Lasts”

Podcasts of the week 🎧

• SeedRocket interviewed Andreu Dotti (Innovamat)

• Marsbased interviewed Ricard Clau