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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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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 🏢

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• 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

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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

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by zenital:

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Startup funding news 💸

• Citibox, the Madrid-based smart locker company, raised €100M in a mix of equity and debt, per Ecotechers. Infrastructure fund Ithaka (led by ex-FCC execs) contributed €55M in equity and €30M in debt; the remaining €15M came from convertible notes by Pedro Tortosa (Onum co-founder) and others. The deal is anchored by a pan-European commercial agreement with Amazon to become its locker partner across key markets. Citibox generated ~€60M revenue in 2025 with ~200 employees

• Incapto, the Barcelona-based coffee company, raised €10M from British food investor McWin alongside Cardumen Capital and Lever VC. Founded in 2020, Incapto sells coffee machines and subscription coffee beans, generating €14.85M revenue in 2025

• Punto, a Madrid-based company that automates administrative procedures with public administrations using AI, closed a €2M funding round led by Samaipata. Punto is led by Patrik Bergareche (formerly of Just Eat) and Javi Escribano (Ontruck)

• Predictheon, a Barcelona-based startup that helps anesthesiologists monitor patient data and predict surgical complications on a single screen, closed a €1.8M round

• Spacebackend, a Luxembourg and Spanish aerospace engineering startupthat streamlines hardware-software integration for mission-critical systems, raised €1.8M from Bynd, Athos and DraperB1

• Eaship, a Valencia-based SaaS platform for industrial manufacturers, raised €1M in seed funding led by Swanlaab Venture Factory

• BASE4 Biosciences, the Barcelona-based biotech company, closed a $1M pre-seed co-led by us at Kfund and Baobab Ventures (Carles Reina). BASE4 combines blood samples with AI models to assess tissue-level health and biological age before symptoms appear

• SeniorDomo, the Barcelona-based advanced telecare platform and UOC spin-off, closed a funding round led by Bcombinator. SeniorDomo’s autonomous smartwatch that detects falls, health anomalies and emergencies in real-time

M&A news 🎉

• Lang.ai, the Spanish-origin AI startup founded by Jorge Peñalva (spun off from Séntisis in 2018), has been acquired by US customer support automation platform Capacity ($60M ARR, profitable in 2025). Lang.ai raised ~$12.5M (Series A led by Nava Ventures, with Mundi Ventures) and pivoted from ML-based ticket classification to agent analytics on Snowflake after LLMs commoditized bots. Founders and early employees held 30-40% of equity. Price undisclosed; Mundi Ventures had it on the books at ~€35M. This is Capacity's second Spanish acquisition after Barcelona-based Verbio

• Izertis acquired Barcelona-based cloud specialist ACKstorm (€16M revenue, 50 employees) and Madrid consultancy SADE (€4.1M revenue). ACKstorm holds top-tier AWS and Google Cloud partnerships, while SADE specializes in Oil & Gas solutions

Startup news 💡

• Wallbox is reshaping its board and finances as it navigates a full restructuring. The EV charging company added two new directors representing key shareholders. The restructuring plan is backed by 80%+ of creditors, pending court approval in Barcelona

• Mr Jeff executives including CEO Eloi Gómez were acquitted of fraud charges by Valencia’s Court of Appeals. The court found “not even remotely” evidence of a crime. The tribunal ruled that Mr Jeff operated a legitimate business with real structure, employees, and franchisee training, attributing conflicts to normal business risks rather than criminal conduct

• Urbanitae grew 42% in Q1 2026 to over €70M in transactions (vs ~€50M in Q1 2025). Core equity and debt project financing hit €64M (+30% YoY)

• Indexa Capital reached €5B in assets under management and 150k clients after 10 years

• Nova Recruiter launched its agentic talent sourcing platform after a private beta that hit €100k+ ARR in 30 days with 300+ companies waitlisted

• Bit2Me registered with CNMV as a tied agent to expand beyond crypto into traditional investment markets. The Spanish crypto platform will launch Bit2Me Invest, offering access to over 3,000 investment funds, 5,000 stocks, and 4,000 ETFs

• Clikalia secured a major contract to manage Fidere’s 5,000-unit rental portfolio across 47 buildings in Madrid

• Easor, a Finnish collaborative accounting software spinoff from Talenom, targets €20M revenue in Spain over five years. Easor operates in four countries and sees Spain as its second-largest growth market after Finland

• Interesting experiment from RevenueCat. They acquired a subscription app doing ~$5M ARR not to pivot, but to use as a live testing lab for new features without risking customers’ revenue

Profile of 2 startups that recently raised big rounds of funding:

• Profile of Lace Lithography, the Norwegian-Spanish startup co-founded by Spaniard Adrià Salvador Palau, which just raised €40M led by Atomico. The company is developing atom-based lithography machines that could use ~100x less energy than conventional EUV systems, potentially challenging ASML’s dominance. Pilot fab expected early 2027, production-scale by 2030. 50 employees across four European offices

• Profile of Quiver AI, the Barcelona-born, SF-based startup building AI-native vector graphics for brand identity. It recently raised $8M from Andreessen Horowitz with Kfund participating. Quiver generates scalable SVG logos, icons and infographics using its own foundational model (Arrow 1.0), trained in-house on proprietary GPUs

Tech investor news 🚀

Activity from public institutions:

• Spain’s SETT (Digital SEPI) is racing against time to deploy hundreds of millions in EU funds before summer 2026 deadline. The state-backed investor has executed 17 deals totaling ~€200M in startups, with notable investments in Multiverse Computing (€59M) and Universal DX (€30M), plus €250M committed to VC funds, making it one of Spain’s most active investors

• CDTI Innvierte committed €53.4M in 20 startup co-investments and €141.6M in 4 fund vehicles since January 2026

Two new funds announced:

• Langre Tech, a new growth equity fund backed by Merus Capital (CIMD Intermoney spin-off), is raising €50M to back profitable Spanish tech companies. Founded by ex-Alantra colleagues Antonio Giménez de Córdoba and Daniel Calleja, the fund targets companies with €0.5-1.5M EBITDA and aims to scale them to €5-7M

• The Basque Government launched Hazten Scale-up, a €50M VC fund to accelerate Basque startups in their scale-up phase

Carina Szpilka, my colleague and Kfund co-founder, published “Despejando la X: diez años creciendo y ayudando a crecer”

Big company & policy news 🏦

• Prosegur Crypto partnered with Nuek, Indra’s payment infrastructure unit, to develop digital payment solutions using stablecoins and tokenized assets across Europe and LatAm

Interesting reads 🤓

• Manfred published its 2026 salary benchmark for software engineers in Spain. Spanish version here. Spicy take from Javi Sánchez (Rebolt): a VP of Engineering at a Spanish company earns roughly the same (~€120K) as an entry-level engineer at a US/global firm. More in his tweet and in the replies

• Alex Lopez, CS student, wrote about his experience at Project Europe’s hackathon in Barcelona: “We Finished 2nd at Project Europe”

• Txema Rodriguez (Jobandtalent) published “Platform teams aren’t overhead, they’re what keeps your AI engineering from turning into chaos”

Podcasts of the week 🎧

• Interview with Andreas Mihalovits, one of Spain’s most active business angels, based in Marbella

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Crescenta:

M&A y Private Equity: oportunidades y desafíos
Crescenta te invita a un evento en el que referentes destacados del sector se darán cita en una mesa redonda para compartir su visión sobre el momento actual de la industria.

- Miguel Echenique (AltamarCAM)
- Jorge Lucaya (Az Capital)
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El encuentro reunirá a un grupo selecto de profesionales de la industria financiera, family offices, socios de servicios profesionales y empresarios, en un entorno de alto nivel. A continuación, se ofrecerá un espacio de networking acompañado de cóctel.

Aforo limitado y sujeto a confirmación por parte de la organización.

Solicita tu entrada

Startup funding news 💸

€1M+ rounds:

• BigBuy, the Valencia-based B2B ecommerce technology platform, raised €4M from two independent Chinese industrial partners and Zamit Capital (GVC Gaesco Alternative Investments)

• Modern Relay, a Barcelona and US-based startup, raised €3M from Point Nine, Emerge, Amino Collective, and angels to build the context graph for enterprise AI. Co-founder and CTO Aaron Goh wrote about the launch here and so did my beloved former colleague Jorge Campo

• Traza, an AI startup automates procurement and supply chain operations, closed a €1.8M pre-seed round led by San Francisco-based Base10, with participation from us at Kfund and business angels

• GuruSup, a Valencia-based SaaS platform that automates customer support, closed a €1.3M seed round led by 4Founders Capital. GuruSup is a Guruwalk spin-off

• ScrapAd, an AI-powered marketplace for recyclable metals tradin, secured €1.1M from SETT

• BlueWalker Capital, a Barcelona-based startup “hedge fund developing systematic and quantitative trading strategies native to prediction markets.”, raised $1M from Halo Capital and Wouter Gort of Hummingbird Ventures

Other rounds of funding:

• Bel Community, an edtech startup for math tutoring, closed an €800k funding round led by Bcombinator

• CarHub, a startup that operates an end-to-end marketplace for importing used cars from Germany, closed a €350k+ seed round led by Encomenda

M&A news 🎉

• EY acquired supply chain consultancy Supply Nexus. The deal adds a 60-person firm with €5M annual revenue

• Spanish AI-powered maintenance solutions startup Fracttal, which recently raised €30M, acquired Spanish maintenance management company TCMAN

• Revenue Squared, a bootstrapped GTM community for Spanish-speaking tech sales professionals, was acquired by Nova

Startup news 💡

• Swedish and publicly-traded investor Kinnevik slashed Perk’s valuation by 41% in Q1 2026. The markdown brings Perk’s implied valuation to €1.6B from €2.7B. This doesn’t mean that Perk’s valuation is actually down in the private markets. It’s worth noting that Kinnevik does this to align Perks’ valuation closer to that of Navan, its US competitor that has been struggling as stock since going public earlier this year

• Fintech and payroll startup Payflow said that it has reached €9M in ARR, 30% EBITDA margin and cash flow positive

• FP&A software startup Abacum launched Abacum Intelligence, a platform-wide AI layer for financial planning and analysis

• Lookiero launched its men’s fashion subscription service across 12 countries. Earlier this year, the company raised €17M and expects to exceed €100M in revenue with positive EBITDA.

• Theker deployed its AI-powered robots at Paack’s Madrid logistics center to automate package sorting and distribution

• Revolut closed its last fiscal year with over 6M customers in Spain, including 27k businesses with estimated deposits of €40B, up 75% YoY

• Trade Republic reached 2M clients in Spain within 10 months, doubling its customer base

• Methinks Software launched Neuro-rescate, an AI-powered telemedicine project to accelerate neurological diagnosis in emergency services. The initiative secured €2.19M funding from Spain’s State Research Agency through a public-private partnership

• Real estate crowdfunding platform Crowpire closed an €11.5M investment vehicle backed by family offices to t arget real estate opportunities with revaluation potential

Tech investor news 🚀

• The Spanish government announced a $200M VC/PE fund to develop Spanish biotech companies in Boston’s ecosystem. The fund will receive €48.3M from the Spanish government as anchor investor

• Spanish entrepreneur Kemel Kharbachi, owner of space tourism company Eos X Space, plans to launch an aerospace fund targeting €85.M by 2028. The fund is backed by Abu Dhabi sovereign funds and US investors, and will be based in Malaga

• Interview with Edgar Vicente of Enzo Ventures. He talks about fund I (Orbio, Companion, Murphy) and their plans to launch fund II, which they’re currently fundraising for

• Saeed Amidi, founder of Silicon Valley’s Plug and Play accelerator, announced plans to create Spain’s first AI excellence center in Valencia

Spanish investors active abroad:

• IRIS Ventures invested in Boston-based Lucille, a science-based nutrition company for seniors founded by Jess Haghani

• Mundi Ventures participated in the Series C of Convelio, a startup developing AI-powered fine art logistics and storage services

El 30% de las demos que haces es a leads que nunca iban a comprar. Ganima es un agente de IA que hace demos al instante: navega tu producto en tiempo real, cualifica y filtra a cada lead automáticamente. 24/7, en cualquier idioma.

Big company & policy news 🏦

• Movistar Plus+ obtained court approval that will allow it to demand ISPs to block illegal domains and IPs within 30 minutes during live events

• Javier Oliván, Meta's COO, earned $24.5M in 2025, mostly in stock awards ($18.3M)

• Interesting read! Bloomberg published a deep dive on Aragón's €80B+ data center boom, where AWS, Microsoft and others are building ~25 facilities. The region's PIGA fast-track framework enables accelerated permitting and forced expropriation, but is triggering lawsuits from municipalities and residents over land grabs, water use and tax exemptions

Interesting reads 🤓

• A real world example of Claude Code use in the enterprise. Mercadona Tech‘s CPO/CTO shared their experience using the tool to replace Algolia for their online store’s 4.4M weekly searches. Claude Code did a lot of the work but 29 critical decisions required experienced humans. Result: +85% ranking improvement, zero-result searches from 4% to 0%, cost from $9-15K/mo to <$900

• Jose Luis Calvo wrote “La nueva paradoja del software”

• Luigi Mallardo (former VP of Sales of Woffu, among others) wrote "Scaling Complex B2B Tech: When GTM Instinct Ends and Architecture Begins”

Podcasts of the week 🎧

• Itnig interviewed Amir Salihefendić, founder of Doist

• SeedRocket interviewed Carolina Rodriguez, CEO of ENISA

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Startup funding news 💸

The two largest “rounds” of the week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

€1M to €5M deals:

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

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

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

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

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

Other funding news:

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

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

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

M&A news 🎉

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

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

Startup news 💡

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tech investor news 🚀

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

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

Big company & policy news 🏦

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting reads 🤓

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

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

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

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

Podcasts of the week 🎧

• Itnig interviewed Lucas Carne (011h)

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

• Marsbased interviewed Ilya Zayats (CTO of Factorial)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by SLNG:

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

Startup funding news 💸

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

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

Startup news 💡

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tech investor news 🚀

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

Big company & policy news 🏦

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

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

Interesting reads 🤓

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

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

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

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

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Crescenta:

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

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

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

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

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

Invierte como imaginas en Crescenta

Startup funding news 💸

€10M+ rounds:

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

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

€2M to €10M rounds:

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

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

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

€1M to €2M rounds:

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

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

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

Other rounds of funding:

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

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

M&A news 🚀

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

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

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

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

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

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

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

Spanish investors active abroad:

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

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

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

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

Startup news 💡

Startup financials

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

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

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

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

New startups and product launches

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

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

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

Other news

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

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

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

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

Big company & policy news 🏦

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

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

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

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

Interesting reads 🤓

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

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

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

Guillermo Flor published “How money flows”

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

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

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Google Cloud:

What links giants like Freepik, Wallapop and Luzia?

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

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

Learn more

Startup funding news 💸

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

M&A news 🚀

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

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

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

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

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

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

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

Spanish investors active abroad:

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

Startup news 💡

Startup profiles

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

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

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

New startups and product launches

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

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

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

Startup financials

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

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

Other news

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big company & policy news 🏦

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

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

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

Interesting reads 🤓

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

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

Podcasts of the week 🔊

Itnig interviewed Ramiro Iglesias of Crescenta

SeedRocket interviewed Arvin Abarca, founder of GrandVoyage

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

NoBullshitTalks interviewed Francesc Font, co-founder of Incapto Coffee

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Manfred:

Hemos preparado una Guía práctica sobre Cómo Trabajar con Freelancers en equipos tecnológicos. Te explicamos cómo encontrarlos, cómo evaluarlos y qué modelos de colaboración funcionan mejor para que aporten valor desde el primer día.

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Startup funding news 💸

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

M&A news 🚀

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

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

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

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

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

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

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

Spanish investors active abroad:

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

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

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

Startup news 💡

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

Startup profiles

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

New startups and product launches

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

Two Spanish startups launched ChatGPT apps last week:

• The Hotels Network launched an app for direct hotel bookings

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

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

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

Startup financials

Wallbox was in the news last week:

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

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

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

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

Other news

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

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

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

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

Big company & policy news 🏦

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

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

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

Interesting reads 🤓

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

Bernardo Quintero (VirusTotal) published “Lo humanamente posible”

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

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

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Crescenta:

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Startup funding news 💸

Elche-based PLD Space secured €180M in Series C funding led by Mitsubishi Electric. The space transportation company will use the capital to scale industrial capacity and transition to commercial operations with its MIURA 5 rocket, targeting 30+ launches annually by 2030. Sifted published an interview witht he team here. More details here

Cheer Games, a Barcelona-based mobile puzzle game studio, raised $4.5M in pre-seed funding led by Makers Fund, with Play Ventures participating

TaxDown secured €4M financing from BBVA Spark to accelerate growth and develop AI-powered tax solutions. The company serves over 4M users and 500 companies across Spain and Mexico for tax management and filing

DynamicsVR closed a €1.3M funding round led by Axon Partners, Easo Ventures, Fundalogy, and Capital Cell. DynamicsVR develops VR-based rehabilitation platforms for chronic pain management

EchoWi raised €750k in seed funding led by Successful Fund. EchoWi specializes in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

Graddus, an edtech startup specializing in academic and career guidance, closed a €600k funding round led by Successful

Molecular Gate, a Barcelona-based anti-counterfeiting startup founded in 2022 by ICMAB-CSIC, raised €450k from CDTI Innovación and BeAble Capital

M&A news 🚀

Babel acquired Spanish consultancy Anadat Technology, which generated €23M in revenue and €2.3M EBITDA in 2025, adding 200 employees. Babel plans to triple its M&A pace to 3-4 acquisitions annually and it expects €300M revenue this year

Spanish startup Llama Energy was acquired by Camby after 18 months of operations. Llama Energy helps Spanish households reduce energy costs by finding better deals and increasing market transparency. Terms of the deal were not discussed

Nordic Capital-backed Sensio acquired ISECO, the leading care technology provider in Spain and Portugal. ISECO serves 1,000+ installations across care homes and recently won major tenders in Valencia and Barcelona

US cybersecurity firm OneSpan completed its acquisition of German-Spanish startup Build38, a leader in mobile app security solutions

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

Indra committed to invest up to €10M in Hyperion Fund, the €150M defense-focused VC

LUMO Fund, managed by Dutch firm LUMO Labs, received €6M from Spain’s SETT to invest in pre-seed and seed startups across Spain and Europe. The impact VC fund focuses on digital deep tech, AI, cybersecurity, and IoT startups

Lanzadera welcomed 120 new projects in its latest cohort. Full list of companies in the link

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Axon Partners participated in the €14M round closed by Italian deeptech startup ISAAC, that develops intelligent seismic protection systems

Startup news 💡

Startup profiles

Profile of fintech Embat, which processed over €250B in corporate treasury transactions in 2025. It has 350+ clients. Embat recently acquired US-based Necto and expanded to the UK and Germany

New startups and product launches

Agrin’pulse, a Lleida-based agricultural robotics startup, unveiled its commercial AG-X autonomous electric tractor at 4YFN. The company plans to raise €7M-€10M to build a manufacturing facility capable of producing 1,000 agricultural robots annually. Founded in 2024, the startup already closed a €1M seed round

Krea, the San Francisco-based startup co-founded by Spaniards, launched Voice Mode, which allows users to modify designs wth voice and get chances in real-time

Clara, an AI recruiter developed within Jobandtalent, announced it’s onboarding its first external clients after conducting 1.6M interviews internally

Startup financials

Wallbox reported €145M in 2025 revenue, down 11.5% from 2024, amid “more demanding market conditions.” Wallbox currently has a market cap of just €43M

Drumwit, the Barcelona-based surprise travel startup, generated €10M in gross revenue last year. The company mobilizes 1,000 travelers weekly who discover their European destinations 48-72 hours before departure

Twenix, the Almería-based English learning platform, reached €12M in revenue with 96 employees in 2025. The startup offers 26-minute specialized online classes to over 1,500 corporate clients, after raising €3.5M in their latest funding round in 2022

Other news

Freepik created “ROOTS”, an animated short film about family and fatherhood built entirely using AI tools within their platform. The company explained in a series of tweets how they did the whole thing, from beginning to end

N26 opened a new 2,000 sqm headquarters in Madrid to establish its second European operations hub alongside Berlin. Spain is N26’s second-largest growth market with over 1M active customers and 450 employees across Madrid and Barcelona

Big company & policy news 🏦

The craziness continues. When will LaLiga stop doing this stuff? Can someone stop them from making Spaniards seem like lunatics? LaLiga and Movistar Plus+ filed a joint complaint accusing the US tech company of ignoring over 100 requests to shut down illegal streaming sites using Cloudflare’s services, estimating €859M in economic damages. Even worse… a Madrid court summoned Cloudflare CEO Mathew Browning Prince to testify on April 7th regarding intellectual property violations

Prosegur secured a €60M loan from the European Investment Bank to finance R&D activities and boost its digital strategy. The funding will support investments in advanced cybersecurity technologies, AI, smart security centers, and SaaS solutions

Repsol’s payment and loyalty app Waylet reached 10M users, beating its 2027 target ahead of schedule

Ecotechers published a database with startup investment activity done by Spanish corporates over the years

Amazon Web Services announced an additional €18B investment in Spain at Mobile World Congress Barcelona, raising its total commitment to €33.7B through 2035. The expansion will modernize data centers in Aragón to meet AI infrastructure demands and create 29,900 jobs annually

Interesting reads 🤓

Dealroom.co and various Spanish entities, including Kfund, unveiled a teaser of the 2026 Spanish Tech Ecosystem Report at 4YFN, highlighting Barcelona’s tech ecosystem development over the years

Bondo Advisors publised “El SaaS no está muerto (pero tampoco igual que antes)”

Carlos Arboleya published a follow-up to his October post about shutting down his company. The new entry is called “I shut down my startup 4 months ago. This is what happens after. What nobody tells you“

Cesar Miguelañez (Latitude) published “agent patterns, harnesses, and general agents”

Eduardo Manchon (Mailsuite) published “Si vendes SaaS para enterprise tu producto da igual”

Jordi Noguera (JME) published “Todo se puede ver desde ángulos distintos“

Samuel Gil (JME) published “Los optimistas viven más. Qué hacer para ser más optimista. Cómo salvar tu SaaS de la revolución agéntica.”

Ignacio Arriaga published “La era de la abundancia y los productos basura”

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by zenital:

🗣 “Their team effectively combined automation and AI to improve our workflows and processes and boost efficiency”

🗣 “The AI assistant delivers quick and precise answers with up-to-date data in this early stage, showing great potential”

These are just some messages we’ve received at zenital about our AI work. Our aim: genuine AI adoption, implemented in projects and flows that make sense and deliver real value.

Dare to imagine a smarter workflow? Let’s talk and make it happen.

Startup funding news 💸

Almeria-based IKOS, the agtech startup specializing in agricultural input savings and automation through AI, secured €8M from Impact Bridge Asset Management

QuiverAI, the AI startup founded by Spanish entrepreneur Joan Rodríguez, closed a €7M funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Kfund, JME Ventures, and Mission. The company generates editable vector graphics directly through AI, producing structured SVG code. Joan wrote about the launch and investment here. Yoko of a16z wrote about it here

Barbara closed a €4.5M funding round led by Aramco Ventures, the investment arm of the Saudi energy giant. The Madrid-founded, Bilbao-based company develops industrial software for AI-powered automation

Grodi, an Almería-based startup specializing in autonomous robotics and artificial vision for intensive agriculture, raised €2.5M in a round led by Swanlaab

Apartool, the Barcelona-based corporate accommodation platform, closed a €1.8M funding round led by existing investors including Barlon Capital, Roch Ventures, Telegraph Hill Capital and Finaves, with new investor Endra Capital joining

Ola Creators, a Valencia-based platform for hiring social media creatives, raised €100k from Angels

M&A news 🚀

PJ.LOBSTER closed its nine-year journey with an acquisition by Dutch eyewear brand Ace & Tate. More info on the transaction here and here

ABE Capital Partners acquired IoT healthcare company Mysphera to strengthen its health tech Mediance platform. Mysphera specializes serves 60+ projects across Spanish hospitals and reaching 290k patients. It closed 2024 with €2.32M revenue and exceeded €3M in 2025, achieving profitability. Mysphera had raised funding from Swanlaab, Sabadell VC, ALIAD, and Wayra

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

Inveready and Terram Capital formed an alliance to launch a €200M private debt fund through Terram Inveready Credit Partners. The asset-based vehicle will focus on real estate and infrastructure-backed investments, with Atitlan as an investor and Andbank as co-investor. This expands Inveready’s portfolio beyond VC and PE

The Agencia Espacial Española (AEE) is preparing to launch a VC program to invest in space sector startups

Encomenda Seed II received €9.5M from SETT. Encomenda has raised over €30M from private investors and targets 45-50 Spanish tech startups, with final close planned for April 2026.

Spanish investors active abroad:

• NVIDIA acquired Israeli AI startup illumex, a portfolio company of Cardumen Capital. Cardumen co-led illumex’s $13M seed round in 2024. The price is rumoured to be $60M

Startup news 💡

Startup profiles

PadelPROShop CEO Dionisio Ugalde built the world’s second-largest padel e-commerce platform, generating over €17M in revenue. It has presence across Latin America, EMEA, and the US

Profile of Kloutit, the Barcelona-based startup developing AI-powered chargeback management tools for e-commerce. It serves customers such as Wallapop, Cabify, Playtomic, Factorial, and several hotel groups

New startups and product launches

Multiverse Computing released HyperNova 60B 2602, a free compressed AI model on Hugging Face that’s half the size of OpenAI’s original while maintaining similar accuracy. The Basque startup is reportedly raising €500M at a €1.5B+ valuation and claims €100M ARR

Pullpo announced it will allow clients to purchase its complete DevEx platform codebase as a one-time purchase. Interesting move from Marco Patiño and team

Rebolt introduced Holocron, a digital twin platform that creates real-time knowledge graphs connecting people, concepts, actions, and systems within departments

Bewater Funds launched a private markets fund-of-funds in collaboration with Indexa Capital, targeting €40M. The diversified portfolio allocates 70% to private equity, 20% to private debt, and 10% to infrastructure, with 2.45% annual fees and 11.2% projected net returns

Startup financials

Softonic is still around. It increased revenues 14.1% to €32.4M in 2025, with EBITDA growing 21.4%

On-demand salary platform Payflow hired Arcano Partners to explore strategic alternatives including a majority sale. The Spanish fintech expects €10M ARR by 2026 after 55% annual growth and achieved positive EBITDA in 2025. It has raised €26M in equity and €27M in debt from investors

Subscription-based meal delivery platform Wetaca reported revenue exceeding €20M in 2024, up from €16.2M in 2023. The company now serves over 160,000 subscribers with 40 different homemade, additive-free dishes and expanded to Germany in 2025

Catalan entrepreneur Maite Barrera joined MyInvestor‘s capital through her family office Redcap in the neobank’s latest €30M funding round. The round valued the Andbank-backed digital bank at €300M. MyInvestor closed last year with €13.8B in business volume and 750k clients, including €3.9B in deposits and €9.3B in investment products.

Tener proyectos rentables que no quemen a tu equipo es posible

Gestionar proyectos parece sencillo, pero el éxito real no es solo cumplir plazos. Se trata de equilibrar dinero, entregas y personas. Presionar el calendario daña la calidad y recortar costes sin criterio agota el talento. Si este equilibrio se rompe, el problema no desaparece: solo cambia de manos. Descárgate el ebook y descubre Factorial.

Big company & policy news 🤓

Banco Santander expects AI to generate €1B in benefits over three years, helping lower the efficiency ratio from 45.3% to 36%

Booking, Airbnb, and Uber highlighted Spain as a major regulatory risk in their annual reports amid escalating government tensions. Airbnb faces a €65M fine from Spain’s Consumer Ministry for licensing violations, while Booking confronts a €413M competition penalty and potential hoteliers’ lawsuit. Uber cited Spanish restrictions on ride-sharing and VTC driver requirements as business limitations

Amadeus dropped 24% this year, becoming the worst performer on the Ibex as AI concerns impact travel booking platforms. Precisely last week, Amadeus announced the acquisition of New York-based AI travel technology company SkyLink to accelerate AI deployment across the travel sector

eDreams multiplied its net profit by 10 to €40.3M in the first three quarters, with shares surging over 20%. The online travel agency expects €172.9M adjusted EBITDA by March and 7.9M Prime subscribers

This is a joke. I don’t think anyone really understands that Aesia does… Aesia, Spain’s EU-first AI supervision agency, announced the creation of a think tank to analyze AI’s societal and economic impacts

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in Madrid last week, where he praised Spain as a leader in AI adoption (I wonder what data they have to claim that, maybe none?). Nadella noted 2.5M Spanish developers on GitHub with 22% annual growth and reaffirmed Microsoft’s $10B investment in Aragón data centers

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Holafly:

El fin del roaming corporativo para startups globales

Para muchas startups, el roaming no es un gasto menor: es un síntoma de un modelo obsoleto. Equipos distribuidos, viajes constantes, despliegues internacionales y facturas imposibles de prever.

El problema no es el consumo. Es la arquitectura.

Activar planes por viaje, depender de SIMs físicas o esperar facturas semanas después genera fricción en IT y cero visibilidad para Finanzas. En entornos de alto crecimiento, eso no escala.

Soluciones como Holafly for Business convierten la conectividad internacional en infraestructura: eSIMs corporativas gestionadas desde un único panel, activación automática por país y coste 100% predecible. Si un equipo viaja cada semana, los datos permanecen activos. Si no hay desplazamientos, no hay cargos innecesarios.

Compañías como BBVA o Volvo ya han eliminado el roaming reactivo. Pero no hace falta ser enterprise para hacerlo. En 2026, las startups globales no optimizarán el roaming. Lo habrán sustituido.

Holafly for Business

Startup funding news 💸

Barcelona-based Mitiga secured €8.4M through the EIC Accelerator program (€2.4M in grants, €6M in equity investment) to expand its climate risk intelligence platform for energy assets

Barcelona-based Pharmacelera closed a €6M funding round led by life sciences fund Heran Partners. Pharmacelera applies quantum mechanics and AI to drug discovery through

Vitoria-based Optimitive, a startup that optimizes industrial processes in realtime with AI, closed a €5M Series A round led by Suma Capital (€1M)

60Nd, a UC3M spin-off in the biomechanical modeling field, secured €2.4M in EIC Transition funding plus private investment, totaling over €3M, to commercialize NeoMag

Barcelona-based fintech startup Iqana closed a €1.1M pre-seed round led by Kfund. Iqana develops a professional crypto asset portfolio management platform

Madrid-based Mettis AI closed a €1.1M funding round combining private investment and public support. Mettis uses AI and sensors to provide objective driving evaluation during driving school lessons

myGolf, the amateur golf digital platform, closed a €370k funding round combining private capital and an ENISA loan to accelerate growth

M&A news 🚀

Idian company Ixigo acquired a 60% majority stake in Spain-based Online Travel Solutions (Trenes.com) for €13.5M, marking the Indian AI travel platform’s first major international expansion into Europe. Trenes is Spain’s second-largest train booking platform with roughly €5.6M in revenue and a profit of about €1.4M

French legal tech company Doctrine acquired Spanish AI-powered legal platform Maite.ai for over €10M. The company was founded in 2024 and serves 2,000+ clients

Roiward, a Spanish fintech specializing in employee incentives and benefits management, acquired Qoala’s technology assets. Qoala operated a B2C platform offering automatic coupon redemption and cashback for online purchases

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

Spain’s Ministry of Industry and Tourism announced provisional allocation of €134.7M to 34 projects under the Electric and Connected Vehicle PERTE program. Notable recipients include KD (€5M for vehicle connectivity), LIEDER Automotive (€4M for electric component manufacturing), and Schaeffler Iberia (€3M for battery housing production)

Spanish investors active abroad:

• FoF Galdana Ventures participated in the $300M Series F round of Mexican used car marketplace Kavak, led by Andreessen Horowitz
  

Startup news 💡

Startup profiles

Factorial’s Bernat Farrero discussed the company’s AI strategy and addressed the current (overblown) market climate of SaaS apocalypse. Bernat highlights two key moats:

• The hard 20%: Vibe coding gets you 80% of a product fast, but the remaining 20% — critical edge cases around security, data control, access permissions — takes years to build and protects against new entrants.

• Diversification: Expanding beyond core HR (50% of revenue) into talent management (40%), finance/expenses (10%), and a brand-new IT management vertical (launched one month ago, targeting 10M in year one). Being the single “source of truth” for an entire organization makes it hard for vertical-only competitors to displace them

More details in the Ecotechers article.

New startups and product updates

Cala AI released its MCP integration, enabling AI agents to directly query its knowledge graph for structured data on companies, people, and funding rounds

Startup financials

PropHero closed 2025 with revenue exceeding €35M, doubling the previous year, and positive EBITDA. The AI-powered real estate investment platform expects to reach €50M revenue in 2026 with 10%+ profitability

Organic baby food company Smileat reported 26% revenue growth in 2025, reaching €21M for the first time

Nomade Nation, the Catalan camper van startup, reported €6M revenue in 2025, nearly triple from the previous year, and achieved operational profitability.

Cabify faces a €1.36M tax regularization demand from Spain’s Tax Agency following an inspection of its 2019-2020 accounts. The VTC company disputes the additional corporate tax and VAT payment

Other news

Sateliot and PLD Space signed Spain’s first fully domestic commercial space mission contract. The 2027 launch will deploy two 160kg Tritó satellites via PLD’s MIURA 5 rocket, providing 5G direct-to-device connectivity for IoT applications and defense use cases in low Earth orbit

RatedPower co-founder Andrea Barber said she expects RatedPower to become Blackstone’s European tecdh headquarters. Enverus, the company that acquired RatedPwoer, is owned by Blackstone. 170 people currently work at RatedPower

French IT equipment and cybersecurity provider Fleet will double its Barcelona workforce to 50 employees, positioning the city as its main operations hub for Latin American expansion. Spain accounts for 20% of Fleet’s total revenues

A study says that Spain’s delivery market contracted 7% in 2025 while Europe grew 4%, as Glovo, Uber Eats, and Just Eat face severe rider shortages after transitioning from freelance to employee contracts

Manfred launches FREELANCE recruiting for tech teams: access vetted senior freelancers, transparent rates and technical screening handled for you. No marketplaces, no CV piles. Just the right person in days, not weeks.

Big company & policy news 🤓

Telefónica launched commercial Edge Computing services across five Spanish cities (Madrid, Valencia, Sevilla, Bilbao, A Coruña), becoming the first operator in Spain to exploit this technology. With the project it aims to transform old telephone exchanges into proximity data centers that process information locally, reducing latency for AI and Industry 4.0 applications

This is crazy and terrible. LaLiga is trying to close a loophole in its match-day piracy blocks: people were using VPNs to bypass the IP bans, so now the plan is to get the VPN companies themselves to block the “problem” IPs for users in Spain. The targets mentioned are NordVPN and ProtonVPN. Both say they haven’t been officially notified yet, and they can still challenge the request—so it’s not guaranteed this will actually be enforced. David Peterson, ProtonVPN’s general manager, reacted to the news here. This is also an interesting reactiong from Haralabos Voulgaris, owner of CD Castellon

Spain’s Council of Ministers will formally request the Attorney General’s Office to investigate X (formerly Twitter), Meta, and TikTok for potential crimes related to AI-generated child pornography

Ikea’s online sales in Spain grew 11% to €537M, representing 25% of business

Amadeus dropped 24% this year, becoming the worst performer on Spain’s Ibex index amid AI disruption concerns in travel tech. The Spanish travel platform faces pressure from Sabre-PayPal’s new AI travel agent launching Q2

Sage opened a new digital hub in Barcelona’s 22@ district with 650 employees, reinforcing its commitment to the city. Sage recently acquired on-the-go CRM ForceManager

Interesting reads 🤓

Omar Pera (CPO at Freepik) wrote “El nuevo 10x y las hostias que se vienen”

Ignacio Arriaga wrote “Compound startups: ¿el futuro o la mediocridad?“

David Miranda (Osborne Clarke) shared an interesting presentation about the process of moving the headquarters of a Spanish company to the US, also called “redomestication process”

El Referente put together a list of “15 Spanish proptech companies to follow in 2026”

Tinybird engineer Jordi Villar shared his experience after leaving the Spanish data startup following 4+ years: “What I learned building real-time data infrastructure at a high-growth startup”

Banktrack CEO and cofounder David Álvarez de la Torre shared his entrepreneurial journey from leaving a high-paying corporate job in Switzerland to building a financial management SaaS

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This is an amazing graph by David Blark of VenCap

In a follow-up tweet he also clarified the following:

Number of US VC-backed exits over $10k from Pitchbook:

05-09: 1,309
10-14: 1,873
15-19: 2,057
20-24: 2,214
25+: 291

When you parse it and draw some conclusions, it gets even more incredible:

• 29 exits of at least $2.5B in 2025-26 alone

• Top 1% exits doubling in value every 5-year period

• 10% exits growing by 50% compared to last 5 years, and 3X to last 10 years

🤯 No wonder fund sizes are getting bigger and bigger and median rounds increasing significantly (even in Spain and at pre-seed and seed).

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Crescenta:

Si crees que estás sobreexpuesto a bolsa, no frenes tu inversión: diversifícala. Aprovecha la traspasabilidad para reinvertir tus plusvalías en Private Equity con una estrategia total: Growth, Buyouts y Real Assets en un solo vehículo y sin impacto fiscal inmediato.

Pásate al Lado Lima con el nuevo FIL de Crescenta. Tenlo todo en una cartera diseñada para potenciar y descorrelacionar tu futuro.

Invierte con Crescenta

Startup funding news 💸

According to Bloomberg, Multiverse Computing is discussing raising €500M in funding at a €1.5B+ valuation, expected to close in H1 2026. Multiverse currently focuses on making AI deployment more efficient by shrinking large language models to reduce energy consumption. According to the same source, Multiverse reached €100M ARR in January

WtEnergy raised €10M in a round led by SC Net Zero Ventures (Suma Capital). WtEnergy transforms industrial waste and biomass into renewable syngas

London-based Mozart AI raised €6M in seed funding led by Balderton Capital to develop its AI-native digital audio workstation. Mozart is co-founded by Spaniard Pascual Merita

Barcelona-based Dopelist raised €600k ahead of launching its AI-powered app that automatically organizes digital content

M&A news 🚀

Dcycle, the Madrid-based sustainability data management platform, acquired 100% of Munich-based ESG-X to accelerate European expansion

Submer acquired Australian company RadianArc, “an established provider of an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform for running sovereign, telco-focused GPU cloud services”. I think this is a very interesting move by Submer to complete a full-stack AI infra offering, providing a complete solution, from core datacenters to edge compute

Suma Capital launched the sale of Zero Waste Energy, its waste-to-energy platform. The Catalan fund hired PwC to run the auction for the company, which generated €106M revenue in 2024

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

The European Investment Bank (EIB) announced a €300M investment in Seaya‘s new €1B megafund for European scaleups. Seaya, who sold a 30% stake to Santander in 2024, is one of only 13 European megafunds receiving EIB support. Spain now hosts two of these funds, Kembara (Mundi) and Seaya

Martin Varsavsky reflected on his years as a business angel and investor via Vars Ventures, a 2017 €9.6M fund. TVPI: 4.54x, DPI: 1.59x and Net IRR: ~17%

First Drop received €8.3M from SETT, Spain’s digital transformation agency, bringing the pre-seed impact fund’s assets under management to over €19M

Proaltus Asset Management launched VVV Capital Partners FCRE, targeting €100M to invest in Spanish growth-stage tech companies

Alantra Private Equity raised a €155M continuation fund with participation from Altamar and BNP to reinvest in genetic diagnostics company Health in Code, valued at €200M. The company serves hospitals across 30 countries and doubled revenues from €24M in 2020 to €50M currently under Alantra’s ownership.

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Hyperion Fund invested in British electronic warfare company Antares Defence Systems, marking its first investment outside the EU

• Cardumen participated in the $30M round of Israeli AI visibility startup Brandlight

• Kfund participated in the €9M round of Berlin-based health startup Circle Health

Startup news 💡

New startups and product updates

Tuio became the first insurance company to get OpenAI approval for a native ChatGPT app. The Spanish digital home insurance startup enables users to get personalized quotes directly within ChatGPT without intermediaries, with policy contracting coming soon. As a reaction to the news, insurance broker stocks plummeted. Probably an overreaction to any news AI-related these days…

Imperia launched Supply Chain Planning Studio, a platform using native generative AI to autonomously create and adapt supply chain planning software in real-time

French startup rzilient, a SaaS for centralized IT asset management, says it’s now officially launching its commercial offering in Spain

Startup financials

Velorum, the Barcelona-based AI startup, targets €12M revenue by year-end and plans Mexico expansion after opening Seattle office. The company develops an AI assistant that integrates fully with enterprises, accessing all company data to create strategic plans

AI-powered intelligence platform Genesy said that it closed 2025 with €4M in sales, 400 customers and 50 employees

Startup profiles

Zepo was profiled twice last week: here and here. The company combines AI and cybersecurity to train employees against deepfakes, phishing, and social engineering attacks. It recently announced a €15M round

Other news

Bnext announced it will cease consumer neobank operations on April 13 and pivot to B2B financial infrastructure services. The company cited increasingly challenging market conditions, growing competition, and regulatory complexity as reasons for the strategic shift

Glovo news last week:

• Glovo revealed that Morocco has become the company’s third or fourth-largest market by order volume, with Casablanca receiving the most daily orders among 1,800+ cities globally

• Milan prosecutors launched a judicial review of Glovo‘s Italian subsidiary Foodinho, alleging criminal association in exploiting 40k riders nationwide. More info here

• Glovo faces escalating labor disputes as CCOO union denounced anti-union practices and alleged weekly layoffs affecting 45 workers among 200-250 employees in Navarra during December

Qbeast, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center spin-off, relocated its headquarters from Barcelona to Delaware. The data processing acceleration startup joins other Spanish tech companies moving abroad for better legal frameworks, commercial development and fundraising. In my opinion, this is very common and not bad. It’s actually a sign of companies maturing and growing

Open finance Belvo updated its brand and positioning as Belvo AI. The company now has agents that transform financial signals into real-time decisions and automation

Real estate crowdfunding platform Housers transforms into Crowpire. Juan Guruceta, founder and CEO of fintech Divilo, becomes general director. The platform secured €4M in new funding

Big company & policy news 🤓

Roja Directa creator Igor Seoane faced trial at A Coruña court for allegedly streaming paid football matches illegally between 2015-2016. Prosecutors sought four years in prison

Spain’s competition regulator CNMC has opened a new anticompetitive practices case against Amazon and Apple subsidiaries for failing to end iPhone maker privileges on the e-commerce platform until May 2025, following a €194M fine imposed in December 2023. Both companies will appeal the new proceedings.

Oracle co-CEO Mike Sicilia launched a global AI adoption tour in Madrid. The visit follows Oracle’s third cloud region opening in Madrid, part of a $1B+ long-term Spain investment plan

Madrid’s regional government under Isabel Díaz Ayuso announced a €16M drone strategy to integrate autonomous flight technology across all public services

Interesting reads 🤓

Jorge Gomez Sancha (Tinybird) published “We gave our team a self-learning Slack agent. It’s just a prototype, but it’s already changing everything.”

Eduardo Manchón (Mailsuite) published “La utopía de buscar la verdad y tomar decisiones a través de los datos“

Simon Muñoz (Voicemod) published “El negocio de crearte ansiedad con la IA”

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I published this on Twitter last week. I continue to explore automation via agents and I’m having a ton of fun.

Hace unas semanas hice un agente para Kfund que lo que hace es leer los docs legales de las inversiones -que a veces pueden ser infernales- y en base a nuestros criterios (especificados de antemano) y a varios templates de docs legales firmados anteriormente, nos da una opinión de si los docs incluyen los temas que son relevantes para nosotros.

Es un game changer en cómo el equipo de inversión analiza la parte legal.

No sustituye la parte que hacen nuestros abogados in-house de verificar que firmamos lo correcto, pero sí un primer barrido que ahorra mucho (MUCHO) tiempo.

Yo lo hice de cero en Claude Code y lo sigo ejecutando ahí, aunque lo tenemos conectado también a Slack. En un primer momento nos hace un primer análisis de las primeras versiones de los docs legales, para decirnos qué falta de lo que solemos incluir, y flaggear otros temas relevantes.

Después, según avanza el proceso de cierre de una inversión, le vamos haciendo preguntas de las diferentes versiones de los docs para entender qué va cambiando, por qué, etc. Y si hay duda de si algo es normal, aceptable, o no, le pedimos también que nos dé su opinión en base a lo que conoce del mercado y del ámbito legal en España y USA.

Es la leche.

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by The Startup CFO:

Cada año se activan decenas de ayudas y subvenciones para startups y pymes innovadoras. El problema no suele ser la falta de opciones, sino saber cuáles encajan realmente y cómo orientarse.

En The Startup CFO hemos preparado un calendario de ayudas y subvenciones que recoge las principales líneas activas (ENISA, CDTI, regionales, incentivos fiscales) y las organiza en un formato visual y fácil de consultar. Un recurso práctico para entender el ecosistema de ayudas y saber por dónde empezar.

Descárgalo aquí

Startup funding news 💸

Barcelona-based healthtech Biorce raised a $52 million Series A round to expand globally and further develop its AI platform for clinical trials. The round was led by DST Global Partners. Biorce’s Aika platform uses AI to streamline the design and execution of clinical trials

Bcas raised €30M in debt funding led by neobank MyInvestor to expand its flexible education financing platform. Bcas combines Income Share Agreements with installment payment solutions for tech education programs in AI, data science, and cybersecurity

Valeria raised €2M led by Venture Friends to build AI-powered payroll infrastructure for high-turnover industries like hospitality and logistics. Valeria serves 100+ companies, automating onboarding via WhatsApp and streamlining payroll for variable schedules and complex compliance, with plans for pan-European expansion.

Nneat, a Bilbao-based cybersecurity startup promoted by Versia and led by one of CounterCraft’s founders, closed an €800k funding round. Investors include Easo Ventures, Basque Fund, Seed Capital Bizkaia and BBK Fundazioa

Biotasmart closed a €500k funding round led by Angels. Biotasmart specializes in clinical microbiota interpretation

M&A news 🚀

Hispasec, Spain’s pioneering cybersecurity company and the last remaining veteran in the domestic sector, has been sold to Italian company ReeVo. Founded in Málaga in 1998 by Bernardo Quintero (VirusTotal), Antonio Román, Antonio Ropero and Jesús Cea, Hispasec will keep its headquarters, team (~100 employees), and CEO Miguel Manteca. Cybersecurity is ultra competitive at the moment, and competing globally requires a lot of capital and resources. Miguel Manteca said: “Esta empresa siempre ha crecido de forma orgánica y pausada. Pero hay tanta competencia en el mercado de la ciberseguridad, con empresas tan grandes, y las inversiones que hay que hacer para estar en vanguardia tecnológica son tan fuertes que si no crecemos, nos quedamos fuera. Somos fabricantes de tecnología muy de nicho y necesitamos músculo para poder comercializarla a gran escala”. Bernardo Quintero wrote about the sale and journey here

The Startup CFO acquired Growth Finance after years of collaboration on financing projects. The acquisition adds non-dilutive financing expertise to The Startup CFO’s services

French consulting firm Devoteam acquired Spanish Atlassian solutions specialist Deiser. Deiser did €12.8M in sales in 2023

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

Kembara, the deep tech fund managed by Mundi Ventures, completed its first close at €750M toward a €1B target, making it Europe’s largest deep tech vehicle. The fund targets Series B/C rounds with €15M-€40M tickets, focusing on robotics, clean energy, space, and quantum computing to address Europe’s technological sovereignty gap against the US and Asia. More info also here. The list of LPs includes EIF (€350M), CDTI (€300M), CriteriaCaixa (€100M)

Hyperion, the defense-focused VC firm led by Pablo Casado, plans to raise up to €1B for its second fund with pan-European scope

Indra plans to expand its €200M Indraventures fund to €1B by 2027-2030. The fund targets deep tech startups and spinoffs in defense technologies

The Basque Government launched the first call for its Indartuz fund-of-funds, inviting private managers to propose investments in Basque SMEs and midcaps. Private firms must invest double the public contribution and maintain local offices. The initiative targets €100M+ for scaling startups, with minimum fund size of €50M and maximum 49% public participation. Proposals accepted twice yearly.

Telefónica appointed Andrés Saborido as new CEO of Wayra, its corporate VC arm

Interesting read about Mobile World Capital‘s tech transfer program The Collider, which reached a portfolio valuation of €107M in 2025, up 28% from the previous year. The 13 active deep tech spin-offs raised €20.2M last year

Spanish investors active abroad:

• AppFactor secured a €4M Seed round co-led by Adara Ventures and Tensor Ventures. The London-based platform uses AI to automate software maintenance for enterprises

• Suma Capital co-led a €20M round in Luxembourg-based company R3 Robotics

• GoHub Ventures participated in the $24M Series A round of FX risk management company Bound

Interview with Carmen Alfonso Rico, founder of VC firm Cocoa. She shares the story of her first angel investment ever, in Hopin. Hopin grew from €2.5M in value to more than €8B in two years, before collapsing in value

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

Check them out

Startup news 💡

New startups and product updates

The hit of the moment in the AI world, OpenClaw, announced a partnership with Malaga-based and Google-owned VirusTotal to bring automated security scanning to ClawHub, its AI agent skill marketplace

Laborario launched as an affordable time tracking tool designed to help Spanish companies comply with mandatory work hour registration laws. The platform was developed by Loly Garrido and Walter Kobylanski

Cala AI showed Knowledge Query, a tool that allows users to query structured data about companies and startups using natural language commands

Predictable Code is the first product out of Predictable Machines, the company co-founded by Spaniard Jorge Galindo. More info here

Startup financials

Ebury Partners closed its fiscal year with revenues up 30% to €330.8M and net losses cut 28% to €22.3M. The Santander-owned SME payments platform grew its client base 25% to 21,100 companies and improved EBITDA margin from 4% to 16%. The company remains a candidate for a 2026 IPO after postponing plans in 2025

Clikalia closed 2025 with €5.5M EBITDA and €279M revenue

Incapto, the Spanish coffee startup challenging Nespresso with automated bean-grinding machines, reported €15M revenue in 2025 with over 40k B2C customers

Urbanitae raised a record €280M through crowdfunding in 2025, marking a 30% increase from 2024. The real estate financing platform helped fund 3,400 homes and returned over €100M to investors

Profile of companies

Modelia, a Spanish AI startup, claims to reduce fashion shoot costs by 95% using virtual models. The company has worked with 250 brands including Adidas, Mango, H&M, and Zalando, reporting 30% monthly growth and targeting €1M revenue by 2026

Other news

Mr Jeff’s founders are currently facing a court case brought by franchisees who claim they were misled about the business model and customer acquisition via the app, allegations the founders deny. Spanish prosecutors do not see sufficient evidence of criminal wrongdoing, and the case is pending judgment. The company argues it operated a real business and that Covid-19 and financial constraints ultimately led to its failure

Tradeinn has strengthened its board with the appointment of Javier Pérez-Tenessa (ex-CEO of eDreams and co-founder of 4Founders Capital) as non-executive chairman and Jonathan Nielsen (ex-CEO of Backcountry) as board member

Matteco and Dunia Innovations launched a strategic collaboration to accelerate development of next-generation catalytic layers for AEM electrolyzers, key technology for large-scale hydrogen production

Crescenta hired Alejandra Muguiro as Investment Director. Muguiro previously worked at AltamarCAM Partners, Goldman, among other firms

Big company & policy news 🤓

A black market for Glovo and Uber Eats delivery accounts has expanded despite both platforms transitioning away from freelance models. Riders rent their accounts for 20-30% commissions through organized social media groups, often to undocumented workers

PayPal appointed Spanish executive Enrique Lores as CEO starting March 1st, making him the highest-paid Spanish executive at a public company. His compensation package guarantees €33M this year through stock payments, with potential earnings of €34M annually if performance targets are met.

eDreams received a €9M fine from Italy’s competition authority for unfair commercial practices. eDreams was penalized for using deceptive design strategies and dark patterns to pressure consumers into signing up for and maintaining their Prime subscription service. Also, eDreams Odigeo filed a lawsuit against Danish travel platform Tryp.com in Portugal, alleging “fraudulent and large-scale abuse” of its Prime subscription model. The Spanish OTA claims Tryp.com systematically exploited free trial periods to access Prime benefits and resell tickets, bypassing contractual requirements

Uber announced robotaxi expansion to Madrid, Houston, Hong Kong, and Zurich, targeting 15 markets by year-end

Diamond Foundry, the US multinational backed by Leonardo DiCaprio, will invest €1B to build a synthetic diamond wafer manufacturing plant in Zaragoza

Interesting reads 🤓

Bernardo Quintero (VirusTotal) wrote “Le di acceso root a una IA (parte III): el caso Gaucín y el futuro del programador humano”

Ignacio Arriaga (ex-Acumbamail) published “¿Va a destruir la IA nuestra capacidad de aprender?”

Simon Muñoz (Voicemod) published “El valor terminal del SaaS es cero”

Software and AI engineering studio The Agile Monkeys published “The Engineer Is Dead. Long Live the AI Architect”

Ametic, Spain’s digital industry association, presented its Digital Agenda 2026-2030 featuring 218 measures to boost the national digital economy. Key proposals include creating a public-private investment fund for AI and big data projects, developing agile regulatory frameworks for AI experimentation, and simplifying data center installation procedures to attract investment

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Last week I published a long article on Twitter explaining how I’m using Claude Code to automate a lot of the work behind this newsletter. It’s in Spanish, and you can read it here.

LLMs can summarize content much better than humans. What LLMs can’t do -yet- is add context to news items based on what I know about a company, a deal, a person, etc. That’s what I’m planning to do. Let LLMs write most of the summaries and focus a lot of my time on creating more original content and more context to the news that I share in the newsletter.

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Crescenta:

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Invierte con Crescenta

Startup funding news 💸

€5M+ rounds

• Nu Quantum, the UK quantum computing startup founded by Spanish physicist Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, secured €9.75M from the Spanish government as part of a $60M Series A round. The Cambridge spinout will establish its first subsidiary outside the UK in Spain, creating 30-40 specialized jobs

€1M to €5M rounds

• MITO AI raised $4.5M in pre-seed funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners for its AI video production platform. Kfund also participated in the deal, as well as Kibo Ventures and other angels and firms. The startup helps filmmakers storyboard, organize, and generate AI assets through integrations with Runway, Veo 3, and Pika. More info here. Iñaki Berenguer, co-founder and CEO, wrote a out the launch here

• Warden, a startup co-founded by Spaniard Luis Vaello, closed a $4M strategic funding round at a $200M valuation from infrastructure partners including 0G, Messari, and Venice.AI. Warden is an AI-powered cryptocurrency wallet and trading platform that describes itself as an "Agentic Wallet."

• STAMP raised €4M in funding led by Dozen. The Madrid startup digitizes VAT refunds by applying tax benefits directly at point of sale, eliminating traditional post-purchase reimbursement processes

• BigGuardian closed a €1.5M funding round led by Swanlaab Innvierte Agrifood-Tech. The precision veterinary startup develops IoT-based continuous monitoring platforms for livestock body temperature to enable early detection of infectious diseases in cattle and pigs

• TetraxAI, an AI-powered B2B SaaS platform transforming due diligence and risk management in renewables, closed a €1.2M pre-seed round led by The Footprint Firm

• AI-powered vocational guidance platform for schools Growth Road closed a €1M funding round led by Archipelago Next VC and Dozen Investments

Other rounds of funding:

• AI-powered recruitment startup NovaHiring closed a €350k pre-seed round led by Solvo Global and Angels Capital

• Navarra-based Opportunity Health raised €334k to develop Yarnasa, an automatic choking intervention device

• iMeureka, an insurtech startup specializing in tech solutions for the insurance sector, closed a corporate operation with two investment firms acquiring 20% of the company
  

M&A news 🚀

After holdout investors including fund 14W finally accepted the offer following legal challenges, South Korean tech giant Naver has completed its acquisition of Wallapop for €600M. The deal values the Barcelona-based secondhand marketplace below its 2024 valuation of €806M

Urbanitae completed a secondary transaction, selling a 5% stake for €10M to institutional investors including family offices and real estate developers, reaching a €200M valuation. We (Kfund) have been investors in Urbanitae since the very beginning and they continue to deliver on their promise. The company also recently received CNMV authorization for its asset management arm, enabling three investment channels: crowdfunding, direct investments, and fund management

“How a Small Spanish OTA Scooped Up 2 UK Travel Brands 50 Times Its Size”. A story about Destinia, the Madrid-based OTA with just €7.5M revenue, that recently acquired Travel Republic and Netflights from Emirates Group’s dnata. Despite the UK companies being significantly larger, dnata wanted out due to Travel Republic’s distressed finances and operational challenges at both firms. The deal transforms Destinia from a regional player into a pan-European operator without external capital.

Barcelona-based startup CareerOS acquired Norwegian company Highered to create a unified global career platform for students and universities

Busup acquired Spanish mobility-as-a-service startup IOMOB and signed a strategic partnership with corporate carpooling specialist Tribbu to expand its corporate mobility platform

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

Suma Capital launched its third SC Expansión fund, targeting €200M after its predecessor raised €160M post-pandemic. Suma Expansion’s previous funds invested in the likes of Tradeinn

Former Popular Party president Pablo Casado registered Hyperion‘s asset management firm with Spain’s CNMV after his defense-focused VC fund exceeded expectations. The fund, which raised €150M in 2024, plans to launch a second pan-European fund of at least €500M by Q4 2026

In 2025, Enisa granted 514 participatory loans totaling €86.2M to Spanish innovative SMEs

Spanish funds active abroad:

• Nina co-led a seed round in US-based healthtech Navidence

• Paris-based GoCanopy raised €2.1M in pre-seed funding from Yellow, among others

We recently invested in Silver, Santi and Sergio, who are building Traza and reinventing how the world’s largest manufacturers and distributors operate.

They’re building AI workers that automate and optimize complex supply chain processes, transforming an industry that moves trillions of $$ in goods every year but still relies on manual workflows, fragmented systems, and outdated tools.

They’re now looking for a Founding AI Engineer to design and build the workforce of the future. If you’re interested in the role, check it out here. And if you prefer a direct intro with the team, let me know and I’ll put you in touch!

Startup news 💡

New startups and product updates

New companies:

• Temos AI launched by Sergi Gomez and Xavier Riba-Anglada to automate manual regulatory processes in the energy sector through AI agents, targeting outdated workflows that remain inefficient across energy companies

• Prudencia.ai launched its AI platform designed specifically for lawyers and law firms, attracting over 250 legal professionals to its limited free version

New products:

• Endor Labs released Rover 2.0, an open source tool for managing and automating AI coding agents like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Gemini CLI

• I missed this in December! Soraia Lima launched MiroMiro, a Chrome extension that extracts website assets in one click, including colors, fonts, images, icons, SVGs, Lottie animations, and CSS styles. The tweet got 2.3M views

• Co-founder Gerard Clos shared that Latitude moved upmarket by replacing its free tier with a 30-day trial and launching new plans at $300/month and $900/month. While self-serve volume dropped, demo-to-paid conversion increased substantially

• YepCode launched Yep Agent, a new “build it for me” feature that generates runnable JavaScript or Python automation processes from natural language descriptions

Other news:

• Enginy.ai (formerly Genesy) rebranded to continue to address chaos in sales teams

Startup financials

Internxt, the digital privacy and secure cloud services company, achieved positive EBITDA and over 100% net revenue growth in 2025. Internxt targets €10M annual revenue in 2026

Tutrocito, a Spanish custom furniture startup founded in 2020, expects to reach €6-7M in revenue for 2025, up from €4.8M in 2024. The company employs 35 people and produces 50-70% of its furniture in-house

Profile of companies

Impress, the Barcelona-based dental startup, has treated over 250k patients since launching in 2019. The orthodontic company operates 110 in-person clinics across Europe and uses an AI-enabled app to deliver treatment, positioning itself as a major player in the digital health sector.

Profile of Pangea Propulsion, the aerospace startup (founded in 2018) developing rocket and satellite engines focused on efficiency, reusability, and greener fuels

Other news

The way VTC works in Barcelona is nuts. Anti-innovation playbook. Bolt Spain director Daniel Georges criticized Catalonia’s new VTC law requiring 2-hour advance booking, warning it could cut on-demand mobility by 25% and collapse Barcelona’s transport during tourism peaks

Crescenta hired Elisa de Molinedo as Head of Legal. She was previously at Santander

Big company & policy news 🤓

Telefónica launched a national edge computing network with 17 nodes across Spain to meet growing AI and cloud demand. The telco deployed 10 active nodes in major cities and plans 7 more by year-end. The project uses €100M in EU funds and leverages existing facilities as mini data centers, offering low-latency AI capabilities and data sovereignty for enterprises

Interesting reads 🤓

EU-Startups highlighted 10 promising Spanish startups founded in 2024-2025, Notable companies include Accountable (€8.2M raised, fintech verification), Biorce (€8.5M, AI clinical trials), Lookiero (€17M, fashion e-commerce), Murphy AI (€12.6M, debt collection), and Zynap (€11.7M, cybersecurity).

Latitude published “AI Is a Force Multiplier and a Price Compressor”

Pablo Hansen, co-founder of Proliferate, wrote about how he rejected an 8-figure acquisition offer and convinced Lovable to become his design partner

“I left my own startup to not become my father”. Factorial co-founder and former CTO Pau Ramon shared his personal story of leaving the company to become a stay-at-home dad. Pau chose family over the “founders don’t quit” mentality. After two years focused on family, he recently launched Ramensoft using proceeds from selling Factorial shares.

Javi Santana (Tinybird) published “Programador”

Jorge Galindo (Predictable Machines) published “How to improve your productivity by 200% in just 9 months”

Two articles about Clawbot (now OpenClaw): Samuel Gil (JME) published “El momento Clawdbot (ahora OpenClaw) y el futuro del trabajo”, and David Bonilla, wrote “La semana de la langosta”

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Boostomer:

Boostomer helps Customer Experience & Operations teams cut cost per contact and raise CSAT with practical CX + automation (no AI theater). Recent results: -12% cost/contact, +7% CSAT.

Get The COO Formula (for free) for metrics & playbooks.

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Startup funding news 💸

Language learning platform Preply raised €150M in Series D funding at a €1.2B valuation, achieving unicorn status after 14 years. Despite the war, Preply maintains 150 employees in its Kyiv office, where it was originally born. Preply’s main office is now Barcelona, where it has more than 1,000 employees and where most of its C-level people are based

Universal Diagnostics closed a €62M funding round with €30M from the Spanish government through SETT. The Seville-based AI cancer detection startup uses liquid biopsy technology to identify early-stage colorectal cancer and precancerous lesions

Madrid-based Fracttal raised $35M led by US investor Riverwood Capital, with participation from existing investor Seaya Ventures, Kayyak, GoHub Ventures and Amador. Fracctal provides maintenance management software that converts assets into productivity

Buendía, the Oviedo-based experiential tourism traveltech, closed a mixed €8M funding round comprising equity and debt

Taalentfy, the employability and career guidance platform, raised €1.5M from Axon and CaixaBank to strengthen connections between education and the job market through digital solutions

Dopelist raised €600k in pre-seed funding. Founded by ex-Google and Airbnb veterans Arianna Chica and Higinio Raventós, Dopelist uses proprietary multi-agent AI to classify content sent via WhatsApp or its app.

M&A news 🚀

US-listed OneSpan acquired 100% of Barcelona-based cybersecurity startup Build38 for an undisclosed amount. Build38 provides mobile app protection tools for financial institutions. Build38 previously raised €13M in 2023 from Tikehau Capital, Caixa Capital Risc and others

Destinia acquired UK travel agencies Travel Republic and Netflights to enter the British market

Exits involving tech consulting firms:

• Indaws, a Valencia-based Odoo ERP consulting firm with 55 employees and offices across Spain, agreed to integrate with Belgian Dynapps, the world's largest Odoo distributor

• Jungle acquired digital marketing consultancy Rocket for 100% equity, marking its fifth acquisition since 2022. The Barcelona-based firm, with offices in Madrid and Milan, brings 80 professionals and certified Shopify partnerships to Jungle's portfolio. The deal will help push Jungle's revenues past €80M by 2026

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

Demium launched Mission Fund I, targeting €35M to invest in around 80 pre-seed Spanish companies. The firm rebranded as Mission, marking its transition from incubation to direct VC investment. Led by Jorge Dobón, the fund will invest initial tickets of €250k, scaling to €2M for top performers, backed by ICO, IVF, and successful founders. Jorge appeared on the itnig podcast to talk about the new fund

The European Investment Fund (EIF) and Spain's CDTI invested €30M in Montana Children's Health Fund, managed by Ship2B Ventures. Montana is a fund specialized in transforming pediatric deep-tech research into clinical solutions

Next Tier GVC Gaesco, an AI-focused venture capital fund launched by GVC Gaesco and Next Tier Ventures, secured €9.5M from Spain's digital transformation agency SETT. The fund targets 30-35 B2B AI startup investments across Europe, US, and Latin America, with a €50M investment goal

Andalucía TRADE launched €58.8M in public venture capital funds, 62% more than previous programs. The initiative includes two lines: €9.8M for startups and €49M for expansion-stage companies. Fund managers can apply until mid-February

Personnel moves:

• Armilar welcomed Darío Villena as Principal to strengthen its presence across Spain

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Agomab, the Belgian biotech backed by Banc Sabadell-supported fund Asabys, filed for a Nasdaq IPO. Asabys holds under 10% after investing €38M in 2022 and participating in a €95M round in 2023

• Faraday Ventures participated in the €4M round of Belgian startup Dripl
  

Startup news 💡

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New startups and product updates

Crescenta launched its first hedge fund, Crescenta Multistrategy Private Equity Access, targeting €10-15M to provide diversified exposure to private equity through Growth, Real Assets, and Buyouts strategies. It is available to retail and professional investors from €10k minimum investment

Omnia launched its public API, enabling teams to integrate the platform's visibility and citation data with their own systems, dashboards, and CRMs

Francisco Martínez launched TuCuento, an interactive storytelling app that enables parents and children to collaboratively create stories by choosing characters and making decisions together to shape their adventures. As Paco explained on Twitter, it was mostly a vibe coded project

Italian legal AI startup Lexroom will launch its services in Spain in mid-February, marking its first international expansion. The company raised €16.2M in Series A funding in September with participation from Spanish VC Acurio Ventures

Startup financials

Doofinder, the Spanish e-commerce search engine technology company serving 12,000+ clients across 85 countries, has initiated preparations for its first external funding round after a decade of bootstrapped growth. The company generated €20M in revenue in 2024 with ~€5M EBITDA and seeks a valuation above €200M for a majority stake sale

Barcelona-based travel insurance broker Heymondo reached €70M in premiums in 2025, up 75% YoY, following US fund JC Flowers' investment

Housfy closed 2025 with €45M annualized revenue and €7M EBITDA after acquiring 12 local real estate agencies. The Barcelona-based proptech manages 4,896 communities and covers the full housing lifecycle

Immfly, the Barcelona-based startup developing in-flight connectivity and entertainment technology, is exploring a potential sale after a previous attempt failed to materialize. The company grew revenues 25% to €38M in 2024 and generated €1.1M in pre-tax profits. Immfly was valued at around €200M in 2023

Civitatis, the travel experiences startup, announced plans to expand aggressively in Latin America with 30% growth projected for 2026. The company operates three regional hubs in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, employing 70 of its 360 staff there

Profile of companies

Ramensoft, founded by three former Factorial executives including ex-CTO Pau Ramon as CEO, is the company behind Fika. Fika uses AI to support writers with content correction, audio/video formatting, and translation, rather than generating content. With 110 active blogs in December, Fika will introduce monetization features in January

Other news

After 12 years as CEO, Alejandro Artacho stepped down from Spotahome to pursue new ventures. Eduardo Garbayo, the company's sales and operations director since 2019, takes over as CEO. More from Artacho here

Cala AI released the second video in their documentary series about building an AI infrastructure startup. The uncut episode features co-founders Elisenda Bou and Issey Masuda explaining knowledge graphs, agentic search, and information retrieval technologies that power their product

Revolut appointed Santiago Pérez Olano, former CEO of remittance firm Remitly's European operations, as the new country manager for Spain

French cyber insurtech Stoïk closed a €20M Series C round co-led by Impala and Opera Tech Ventures to accelerate expansion, particularly in Spain

Big company & policy news 🤓

KPMG launched Startup Connect, a new program targeting Spanish startups across all growth stages. The consulting firm hired former N26 Spain GM Marta Echarri as external advisor to strengthen ecosystem connections. The initiative offers specialized audit, consulting, legal, and operational services to founders, funds, family offices, and accelerators

Aragón president Jorge Azcón highlighted the region's transformation into a major tech hub ahead of February 8 elections, citing over €75B in new investments

Bizum posted a 13% increase in transactions to 1.24B operations in 2025, moving €67.7B (+53%)

Interesting reads 🤓

I did not know that iLovePDF -a service I’ve used tons of times to compress PDF files- was created created in 2010 by Barcelona student Marco Grossi for a school project. iLovePDF has grown to 150M monthly visits, ranking as the 34th most-visited website globally

Javier Martínez Gilabert, CIO of Murcia, published “¿Y si ardiera la Administración?”

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by zinco:

Que la burocracia no te robe el runway

Cada hora que pierdes en gestoría es una hora menos de producto, ventas o fundraising. Y cuando la burocracia se acumula, los errores fiscales o laborales salen caros —y siempre llegan en el peor momento.

Zinco se ocupa de tu gestión fiscal, contable y laboral, para que vuelvas a centrarte en crecer.

Mas de 3.000 clientes ya confían en Zinco para proteger su runway y escalar sin fricciones

Libérate del back-office

Kfund’s SpaceTech Thesis: From SpaceTech to Space Infra

Following our investment in LookupSpace, we’ve published our evolving thesis on space and satellite technology. The core insight: space is undergoing the same transformation that cloud brought to computing. What was once a capital-intensive, government-driven domain is becoming modular, software-driven, and increasingly investable.

What changed: Launch costs have collapsed from ~$400,000/kg in the 1960s to ~$6,500/kg today (thanks largely to SpaceX), while satellite hardware has shifted from bespoke machines to standardized microsatellites. APIs, onboard compute, and integration tools are abstracting complexity—you no longer need to build or operate a satellite to benefit from one.

Spain specifically has accelerated rapidly. Since 2021, Spanish orbital payloads have more than tripled (21 → 69). Companies like FOSSA Systems have deployed 20+ satellites with less than €10M in funding. Notable recent rounds include Aistech Space (€8.5M), Kreios Space (€8M seed), and Pangea Propulsion (€23M Series A).

Where we’re cautious: Moats remain thin—launch is commoditizing, data is often replaceable, and many teams are tech-led rather than market-led. The biggest bottleneck? Customers don’t buy data; they buy answers.

Where we’re looking: Abstraction layers that let non-space companies access space assets, latency reducers (onboard compute, smart scheduling), and workflow integrators delivering insights into industries like climate, agriculture, and insurance—without asking customers to become space experts.

Kudos to my colleagues Pablo Ventura and Paula Andreu for putting this together! Read the full report with our industry maps and Spanish ecosystem Airtable here.

Startup funding news 💸

€50M+ rounds:

• According to Echotechers, Biorce, the Barcelona-based AI startup revolutionizing clinical trial preparation, is finalizing a €50M funding round led by DST Global, marking the global fund's first major Spanish investment

€10M+ rounds:

• Zepo Intelligence closed a $15M seed round led by Kibo Ventures, eCAPITAL, and TIN Capital. Zepo is a human-centric security startup provides a workspace platform that simulates AI-driven social engineering attacks to identify vulnerabilities and train teams against threats like deepfakes and personalized phishing

€1M to €5M rounds:

• Tetraneuron completed a €5M funding round to advance its gene therapy for Alzheimer's disease to clinical development. Founded in 2012 as a spin-off from Instituto Cajal, Tetraneuron targets neurodegeneration causes rather than symptoms.

• RepScan, the startup specializing in legal protection and removal of harmful online content, closed a €3.5M funding round. The round was managed through Startupxplore and included investors like Bonsai Partners, Swanlaab Venture Factory, and Pinama Capital 23

• Ringr raised €3M led by Pangram Capital to accelerate European expansion of its enterprise conversational AI platform. Ringr achieved 600% revenue growth, operates in 12 countries

• Mediterranean Algae Technologies secured €2M in European funding through CDTI to commercialize its marine bioremediation technology BIOREMED ALGAE®

Sub €1M rounds of funding:

• Revicasa raised over €600k led by The Lab Ventures to scale its home inspection platform across Spain

• Swipet, an insurtech specializing in hyper-personalized veterinary insurance, closed a €400k pre-seed round led by Aticco

• REIDITE Industries, a Spanish electronics and industrial technology company, closed a €300k funding round led by Seed and Grow Ventures

Bankinter joined Bit2Me's €30M funding round announced in August. The investment aims to explore technological synergies and positions Bankinter in DLT solutions development alongside a national tech partner

M&A news 🚀

French multinational Audensiel, owned by private equity firms Sagard and Capza, acquired a 75% stake in Spanish tech consultancy Kairós DS for around €100M. Founder Carlos Moure retains 25% and stays as CEO of the €45M revenue company

Syngoi Technologies, a Basque biotech company developing synthetic DNA platforms for gene and cell therapies, was acquired by US-based Artis BioSolutions. Founded in 2021 and backed by Columbus Venture Partners, the company will maintain its Bilbao operations while expanding to the US through Landmark Bio to scale its enzymatic DNA production technology globally.

According to El Confidencial, Spanish streaming platform Filmin struggles to find buyers after a year-long sale process by majority owner Nazca Capital. Despite €26.8M revenue and 1M subscribers, founders demand over €50M valuation—well above industry estimates of €40-50M. Potential acquirers balked at the premium pricing for a content curator lacking owned IP, while timing coincides with sector-wide uncertainty.

Blu Selection acquired Qamyno and merged both operations under the blu brand to build a pan-European talent recruitment platform.

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

Nazca Capital announced Airbus as a strategic investor in its €425M+ aerospace and defense fund, Spain's largest sector-focused fund. The fund has completed two investments: Teltronic (critical communications) and Ravenloop (AI-based cyber intelligence)

Samaipata published a summary of its investment activity in 2025, with €17M deployed across 13 deals

Zubi Group appointed Javier Megias as Chief Operations Officer to coordinate strategic and operational activities across its impact investment initiatives

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Nauta participated in the $10M Series A round of Berlin-based NetBird

• Goparity received investment from Spanish impact investing platform Bolsa Social to strengthen its presence in Spain and accelerate European expansion
  

Startup news 💡

New startups and product updates

Perk Events launched its event planning platform after starting as an experimental project with just 4 people in September 2024. The product leverages Perk’s travel expertise and internal events experience to help companies streamline event planning, and is already being used by some of the company’s largest customers.

Genesy built an internal AI-powered system enabling non-engineers to ship code directly from Slack. The platform uses AI Engineer for Slack-native requests, autonomous Cursor agents for coding, and Xata’s database branching for preview deployments with production data.

Glucovibes partnered with Garmin to integrate wearable data into personalized nutrition plans.

finReg360 and wealth management tech firm Flanks have launched EDX (European Data Exchange), Europe’s first standardized protocol for financial data exchange between custodial banks, wealth managers, and advisory firms. More info here.

Industry Labs expanded its manufacturing software business across Spain and Latin America, particularly Mexico, through new client acquisitions and platform evolution. The Barcelona-based company launched Agentic AI, an intelligent agent platform for factories that interprets data and recommends decisions. Founded in 2000, Industry Labs develops MES, APS, and warehouse management solutions.

Startup financials and personnel moves

Tradeinn reached record revenue of €585M in 2025, up 5.6% YoY, after US fund Apollo acquired 30% stake from Suma Capital for ~€300M in July. The sports e-commerce platform shipped 9.2M packages and targets €2B revenue medium-term while expanding its Girona warehouse from 30k to 50k sqm with automation to handle 150k daily orders.

Holaluz emerged from a 2024 financial crisis through a €22M investment from French industrial partner Icosium Investment, which now holds 33% of the company. The green energy firm operates 10,000 energy communities and 250,000 contracts across Spain, offering unlimited flat-rate electricity subscriptions. President Carlota Pi credits AI implementation and operational restructuring for the recovery.

Innovamat closed 2025 with €25M revenue, nearing profitability despite US market losses. The Catalan math education company became the first non-American firm approved by California’s education department, enabling classroom implementation from September 2026. Operating in nine countries with 600k students, Innovamat expects the US to become its main revenue source within two years.

Payflow shared that they’ve hit $8M.2 of ARR

Profile of companies

Uxia co-founder Borja Díaz-Roig argues that modern UX failures stem from validation lag, not lack of user understanding. The Spanish startup uses synthetic users to validate design decisions at prototype speed, helping teams avoid skipping research due to time constraints

Other news

Harvey appointed Jorge Bestard to lead EMEA sales. The legal AI company continues expanding its European presence with teams in London, Spain, Germany, and a new Paris office, building partnerships with leading law firms and in-house legal teams across the region.

Urbanitae, Spain’s largest real estate crowdfunding platform, created Urbanitae Asset Management to launch private capital funds. The move expands beyond its crowdfunding model, targeting institutional investors with diversified real estate funds across Spain, Portugal, Italy and France.

German AI agents startup Parloa tripled its valuation to $3B after raising $350M in Series D funding led by General Catalyst. The company, which became a unicorn in 2024 with a $1B valuation, will expand operations in the US and Europe, including Madrid and London offices.

Big company & policy news 🤓

Uber's Spanish operations showed contrasting results in 2024. Its mobility division multiplied profits eightfold to €3M, while Uber Eats posted €28.2M losses due to €172M in provisions for labor sanctions over alleged misclassification of delivery riders as freelancers instead of employees.

Interesting reads 🤓

Manfred's 2025 Tech Salary Report is out. AI-related roles dominate, with Data Scientists, AI Engineers, and MLOps commanding top salaries (€70-100K+ for seniors). Full-stack developers gained value as startups prioritize hybrid profiles. Meanwhile, frontend, mobile, QA, and product design roles saw salary declines and fewer opportunities. The market shows a growing divide: professionals integrating AI see rising compensation, while traditional roles stagnate. On-site positions now require ~20% salary premiums as remote work remains the preference.

Alex Vaughtton (Nocodehackers) published “Un año haciendo proyectos con IA para clientes reales. Esto es lo que aprendimos”

Madrid's podcast studio market has exploded with nearly 50 recording spaces now operating across the city - more than its 29 functioning cinemas.

Tech entrepreneur Iñaki Berenguer shared his 10 predictions for 2026, including stablecoins going mainstream despite reaching $35T volume in 2025, robotaxis launching in 10+ European cities, and AI video becoming software rather than just content