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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.

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

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Startup funding news 💸

€10M+ rounds:

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

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

€2M to €10M rounds:

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

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

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

€1M to €2M rounds:

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

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

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

Other rounds of funding:

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

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

M&A news 🚀

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

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:

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

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

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Startup funding news 💸

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

M&A news 🚀

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

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

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

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

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

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

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

Spanish investors active abroad:

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

Startup news 💡

Startup profiles

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

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

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

New startups and product launches

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

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

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

Startup financials

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

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

Other news

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big company & policy news 🏦

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

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

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

Interesting reads 🤓

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

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

Podcasts of the week 🔊

Itnig interviewed Ramiro Iglesias of Crescenta

SeedRocket interviewed Arvin Abarca, founder of GrandVoyage

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

NoBullshitTalks interviewed Francesc Font, co-founder of Incapto Coffee

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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.

Si estás pensando en incorporar talento freelance a tu equipo, te ayudará a evitar errores comunes y a hacerlo mucho más rápido.

El equipo de Manfred 💙

Leer la guía sobre cómo trabajar con freelancers 🚀

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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👉 Reserva tu plaza

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:

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 💸

€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.

Dealflow Bonus: The first 5 downloads can book a free 30min diagnostic. We’ll review your help center and send 5 concrete fixes.

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

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Startup funding news 💸

Tucuvi raised $20M in Series A funding led by Kfund and Cathay Innovation. The Spanish clinical voice AI startup's platform uses AI agents like LOLA to conduct patient phone calls, execute clinical workflows, and escalate to human teams when needed. We wrote about the investment here

Lookiero completed its integration with German rival Outfittery and raised €17M in funding, including €7.25M from SETT ('Sepi Digital')

Hannun, the BME Growth-listed sustainable furniture company, approved a €1.9M capital increase with preferential subscription rights to strengthen its financial structure and support business development

PoolComet raised over €800k in a round led by Bewater II FCRE and other investors

Pragmatech AI Solutions raised €655k in a funding round led by Valencia-based First Drop

Movements secured €150k in pre-seed funding through convertible notes from notable business angels. Co-founded by Paco Polo, the platform enables users to convert causes into sustainable movements by combining mobilization, community building, and economic support in one space. Profile here

Deudafix, a Spanish debt mediation platform specializing in Second Chance Law services, seeks new investors through Lincoln International. CEO Matthew Osborn holds 40% while Axon Partners owns 20% after investing €5M in 2023. The company posted €12.4M revenue in 2024 with €1.6M operating profit, helping 8,000+ families resolve debts in Spain's rapidly growing personal insolvency market

M&A news 🚀

IriusRisk, the Huesca-born cybersecurity startup specializing in threat modeling, was acquired by US-based ThreatModeler for over $100M. The company had raised around $37M from various investors, including JME, Swanlaab and Inveready

Movilia emerges from the merger between fleet management companies Movertis and Localizador Sherlog, with financial backing from Seaya Andromeda. The new tech group manages 100k vehicles and serves 10k clients in Spain, with €10M in recurring revenue

Indian eyewear giant Lenskart acquired Spanish sunglasses brand Meller for over €40M, with €23M going to external investors led by Grupo Peralada, €11.6M to founders, and €5M in earnouts. The deal delivered 100x returns to early angels who invested since 2014 on total funding below €500k. Meller generated €28.2M revenue (+32%) and €5.5M EBITDA in 2024

Widhoc Smart Solutions acquired ec2ce's assets and business portfolio for nearly €1M to strengthen its precision agriculture solutions with AI and predictive analytics

White Vega, a Madrid-based SaaS platform specializing in physical and real estate asset management, received a majority investment from Nzyme, the private equity fund by Kibo Ventures and Oliver Wyman. The transaction becomes Nzyme's fourth platform investment from its recently closed €160M fund

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

4Founders launched a new €60M hospitality fund targeting underperforming hotels in Tier 2 cities with strong tourism. The Barcelona-based VC, which manages €125M across tech investments, hired Gaiarooms founder Enrique Domínguez to lead hotel investment strategy

Jose de Cabo, former co-founder of Olapic, unveiled Clara.Ventures a fund that will give continuation to their investment strategy, which they’ve been doing for more than 8 years (50 portfolio companies)

CaixaBank reached €30M across seven venture debt operations in its first year, deploying capital from its €150M fund launched in December 2023

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Articul8, a GenAI enterprise software company spun off from Intel, secured Series B funding led by Adara Ventures

• At Kfund we recently backed Xavier (Jack), founder of mo1, an Amsterdam-based motion graphics startup. Other investors in the round include Itnig and David Okuniev (co-founder of Typeform)
  

Startup news 💡

Startup financials and personnel moves

Perk (TravelPerk) hit $360M in peak annualized revenue in 2025, achieving 76% gross margins and 48% YoY growth. Profile of the company here

Indexa Capital closed 2025 with €4.5B in AUM, reaching over 130,000 clients and €100M monthly inflows with average returns near 9%

LOGI (formerly GOI Travel) has filed for bankruptcy after failing to restructure its debt with creditors including Banco Sabadell and Bankinter. The company cut its workforce by half this year amid financial difficulties. A group of partners is expected to present a rescue offer in coming weeks

Wallbox continues restructuring negotiations with banks and lenders over nearly €180M in debt, mostly short-term with variable interest rates. The EV charger manufacturer extended payment suspension deadlines again after reporting to the SEC, as debt has driven up financial costs and complicated capital structure

Civitatis founder Alberto Gutiérrez will step down as CEO on January 1st, with current CPTO Andrés Spitzer taking over. The online activities platform, which serves 1.2M monthly travelers, has maintained positive cash flow since its 2008 founding and received majority investment from Vitruvian Partners in 2022

Juan Miqueo, co-founder of MyBooking, shared on Twitter that the company closed 2024 with €462.5k in total revenue and €36.7k MRR, serving over 150 clients. The company grew 62.9% in revenue

PJ Lobster, the Barcelona-based optical startup founded in 2018, filed for voluntary bankruptcy in November while seeking business continuity

Profile of companies

Profile of HappyRobot. The company raised $44M in 2025 led by Base10 Partners and a16z, totaling over $60M since inception. The company creates AI voice agents that negotiate freight rates and handle logistics calls for clients including DHL and Flexport, improving margins by up to 20%

Profile of Heydiga. Founded by David Zafra (ex-Tuenti, Hawkers, Jobandtalent), the company raised €1M led by Kf for its AI customer service agents targeting SMBs like salons and restaurants

Profile of Bound4blue, a Cantabria-Barcelona scaleup, raised $44M in Series B funding led by Octave Capital. The company develops steel tube wind-propulsion systems for ships, reducing fuel consumption and emissions by 20% on average

Other news

Altia president Constantino "Tino" Fernández advocated for consensus to help Spain and Europe compete with China and the US in tech. Altia expects to close 2025 with €300M in sales

Alias Robotics won the international NeuroGrid CTF competition as the world's best AI cybersecurity agent. The Basque startup combines AI and cybersecurity for robotics, serving clients like Guardia Civil and regional police forces

Revolut reached 6M customers in Spain, making it the UK digital bank's third-largest market after Britain and France

Big company & policy news 🤓

Telefónica and Wayra veteran Gonzalo Martín-Villa left the company after 30 years to pursue new business ventures

Spain's government significantly scaled back its digital transformation ambitions, cutting SETT's investment target from €20B to €3.3B. The Perte Chip program was reduced from €12B to €1.5-2B. The Next Tech fund was also reduced to €1.5B from an initial €4B target

Spain's competition authority CNMC has begun analyzing Swedish fund EQT's acquisition of Adevinta's Spanish operations, including major platforms Fotocasa, InfoJobs, Milanuncios, Habitaclia, Coches.net and Motos.net

Interesting reads 🤓

Miguel Carranza (RevenueCat) wrote “My role as a founder CTO: Year Eight”

Marcos Rubio (Tucuvi) wrote “On Build vs Buy in Clinical AI. A realistic look at the hardest question in AgenticAI today”

Adria Blancafort (Factorial) wrote “Training an LLM from Scratch: A bit of theory, the process I followed and some helpful resources“

Adrian Galea (VP Finance at VC firm Bitkraft) published “Capital Allocation into European venture capital: potential met by structural fragmentation”

Joshua Novick (Bondo Advisors) published “¿Y SI TU EMPRESA ES DEMASIADO RENTABLE PARA VENDERLA BIEN? El error habitual al pensar que más EBITDA siempre implica más valoración”

Miguel Arias (Kfund) published “Mis predicciones para 2026 en emprenderagolpes”

Simon Muñoz (Voicemod) published “El proceso te protege de la mala ingeniería”

German Del Zotto (Workato) published “Code review in the AI era: what actually matters when AI writes the code”

Felix Lopez (Technosylva) wrote “Nuestra estrategia para la adopción de AI”

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👀 Sponsorship slots for 2026 are now open. Demand has been stronger than I expected and I only have 13 slots/weeks remaining for all of 2026. If you’re interested in sponsorship opportunities, send me an email at jaime@dealflow.es 👀

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Holo:

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Startup funding news 💸

Galician pet health startup Barkibu announced that this year it completed a €40M primary + secondary transaction with Correlation Ventures. The company also announced that it will close the year with €47M in annual paid subscriptions. Barkibu has been around for more than a decade and went through several pivots until they found strong product-market fit with the current insurance product. We at Kfund first invested in the company in 2021 and we didn’t sell any shares in the Correlation transaction. We believe the best is yet to come

Playtomic raised €5.1M from more than 4,600 private investors via Crowdcube, opening its cap table to players, clubs and fans of its racket-sports booking platform

InfiniteWatch has raised a $4M pre-seed round led by Base10 Partners with participation from Kfund, Kibo Ventures and others, to launch its AI observability platform that helps companies monitor, measure and deploy AI agents across web and voice customer interactions. More info here. The company is led by several CoverWallet alumni, including former CEO and founder Iñaki Berenguer, as well as Pablo Molina (ex CTO) and Alberto Gonzalez (ex CTO, VP Eng)

Wodan AI has closed a €2M pre‑seed funding round led by JME Ventures, Swanlaab and Adara Ventures. Wodan AI develops homomorphic encryption technology that allows AI models to process fully encrypted data without compromising privacy

Eltex has closed a €1.8M funding round led by Vireo Ventures with support from Kopa Ventures to accelerate its integrated residential electrification platform

Flinket, a Madrid-based platform in open insurance and wealthtech, raised €1.4M. The round includes backing from Antai Venture Builder founders Gerard Olivé and Miquel Vicente, ex‑Cuatrecasas partner Eduardo Ramírez, and adds MGC Mutua as a strategic partner to strengthen regulatory support

M&A news 🚀

Onum’s sale to CrowdStrike has now been revealed to be far more complex than the headline figure, with the economics of the deal approaching $350M once cash, working-capital adjustments and incentive packages are factored in. Newly disclosed filings show over $40M in stock-based bonuses and retention packages for key executives and employees

Agile Content received a €51M takeover bid from a consortium led by Onchena (Ybarra Careaga family), Inveready and José Eulalio Poza. Agile Content is a video, TV and digital media technology provider, which guides €46–48M revenue and €11–12M EBITDA for 2025.

GrandVoyage debuted on BME Scaleup with a nearly 20% first-day jump, valuing the Catalan travel-tech company at around €20M. The experiential and tailor-made travel marketplace reported ~€21.5M in revenue in 2024 with positive EBITDA of around €1.3M, and reached €22.5M in revenue and ~€1.6M EBITDA through September 2025

Indra acquired Wake Engineering, the drone unit of Spanish group CPS, in a deal valuing the business at €8–12M, strengthening its push into unmanned aerial systems

Micole acquired the UK-based platform International School Advisor to build what it claims is the world’s largest global aggregator of educational centres

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

ICO announced a more flexible access to its VC programmes, allowing fund managers to request capital contributions at any time, rather than only during fixed windows

New funds:

• Suma Capital is preparing the launch of SC Expansion Fund III, a new growth fund for Spanish SMEs targeting around €200M. The fund will invest in 8–10 companies with revenues of €10–60M, focusing on high-growth businesses linked to sustainability, health, social inclusion and digital transition, building on the strong performance of SC Expansion Fund I, which delivered a 7x gross return to investors

• Creas Impacto II has reached a size of €56M following the entry of Cofides, and Aurae Impact, a French impact-focused family office. The fund will back impact-driven startups across education, healthcare and mobility, with a final close expected in February 2026 and a target of €100M AUM

• Impulso Global – Fund of Funds reached its final close at €40M, led by Cardumen Capital and Portocolom AV. The fund of funds focuses on backing international VC managers specialised in impact, deeptech and sustainability, with a strong European bias and exposure to North America

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Mundi led a $27M round in Israeli/US insurance company Parametrix

Batir a largo plazo al mercado es complicado, y poca gente lo consigue. Si además no tienes tiempo o conocimientos para invertir en bolsa, lo mejor que puedes hacer es utilizar Indexa Capital.

Startup news 💡

New startups and product launches

• Cabify is preparing to launch robotaxis in Spain. The Spanish VTC group is closing partnerships with international autonomous vehicle players while working with regulators, with Madrid seen as a likely first testing ground and 2026 as the earliest window for commercial deployment

• Ramensoft has been bootstrapped with €400k by former Factorial executives to build a human-first content platform designed to help companies create authentic, high-quality content in an AI-saturated environment. Its first product is Fika

• Landbot launched Landbot 4, a product update designed to eliminate the trade-off between flexible AI agents and high-conversion, button-based chatbots

• Factorial launched Factorial IT, a new product line aimed at automating and securing IT operations for SMBs, led by Biel S., who steps down as Chief of Staff to the CEO. The initiative targets €10M ARR in 12 months

Startup financials

• Tech consulting and media firm Mio Group is targeting €100M in revenue by 2027–2028 after completing its delisting from BME Growth. In 2024, Mio reported €58.4M in revenue, €1M EBITDA and €3.6M net losses

• Mundimoto reported a tough 2024, with losses widening 61% YoY to €8.1M and revenue falling 15% to €46M, as the motorcycle marketplace pivots its strategy toward renting. Mundimoto is now betting on renting to restore profitability and long-term sustainability

• VIVLA expanded its financing capacity to €55M via a real-estate asset-backed credit facility led by Fasanara Capital

Other news

• Profile of Maisa, the company that has developed a platform designed to audit and explain how AI models make decisions, helping companies in highly regulated sectors understand data sources, errors and reasoning behind LLM outputs

• Uber Eats could face criminal action in Spain if it does not immediately hire its self-employed couriers, according to the Ministry of Labour

• Revolut will open new hubs in Madrid and Barcelona and plans to hire 800 people in Spain by 2028, reinforcing its long-term commitment to the market

Big company & policy news 🤓

More details about Telefonica’s ERE. It will affect at least 4,539 employees in Spain

Amazon has agreed to cut 791 jobs at its Barcelona offices, down from an initial plan affecting 978 employees, following negotiations with unions. More details here

Kumo Networks has been rebranded as El Corte Inglés’ standalone data-centre subsidiary after the group took full control of the business, formerly operated with Kio Networks. The unit secured its largest-ever public contract, a €27M, five-year deal with the Region of Murcia

Interesting reads 🤓

Bernardo Quintero (Virustotal) published “Dos bytes, un autor y 33 años: la historia completa del Virus Málaga”

Pepe Borrell (Masia) published “Learnings From One Year Building a Super Angel Fund from Barcelona”

Interesting discussion on Twitter about the role that secondary transactions can play in the development of a tech ecosystem, and on whether they can be a net positive or negative for founder ambition. Click on the images for more details

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👀 Sponsorship slots for 2026 are now open. Demand has been stronger than I expected and I only have 14 slots/weeks remaining for all of 2026. If you’re interested in sponsorship opportunities, send me an email at jaime@dealflow.es 👀

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

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Startup funding news 💸

€10M+ rounds

• Barcelona-based wind propulsion company bound4blue has closed a $44M (€37.8M) funding round to accelerate the decarbonization of the maritime sector

• Fintech Denarius, which provides financial solutions for the healthcare sector, has successfully closed a second funding round of €11.2M

€5M to €10M rounds

• Spanish-French startup Ray Studios, a chain of tattoo removal centers, closed a €10M funding round led by Factory Capital and Nickleby Capital

• Zynap, a Barcelona-based company specializing in preventive cybersecurity, secured €6M in a seed extension led by existing investors Kibo Ventures and Kfund. This all-equity injection brings the total funding to €12M

€1M to €5M rounds

• Elderly care services company Qida secured €4M in venture debt financing from CaixaBank’s Venture Debt fund and DayOne division

• Madrid-based Algori, which offers a consumer purchase and behavior data platform for the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry, closed a €3.6M additional funding round.

• London and Barcelona-based healthtech Punto Health raised a $2.7M seed round co-led by Shilling VC and Plus Partners. The investment will be used to scale its AI-powered platform for dementia and cognitive care across the UK and Spain

• Vigo-based Vig-Sec Drone, specializing in advanced airspace management and secure drone integration for critical environments like defense and emergencies, closed a €1M funding round led by Encomenda

• Barcelona-based Manglai, which uses AI for corporate environmental management, closed a €1M investment round led by Acurio Ventures

Other rounds of funding:

• FYLA, a Valencia-based startup specializing in ultrafast laser-based wireless communications, secured investment from Indraventures, which now holds 24.8% of the company. This is the first deal from Indra’s €200M fund focused on dual-use technologies
  

M&A news 🚀

Details of Cobee and Forcemanager’s exits. French firm Pluxee has already paid €174M for benefits platform Cobee (€154M upfront plus a €30M earn-out tranche), with a final €20M earn-out payment pending in 2027. UK-based Sage acquired the CRM software Forcemanager for £30M (approx. €35M), integrating it completely into its Spanish structure; Forcemanager contributed £5M to Sage’s revenue in the last fiscal year

Madrid-based PropTech Libeen, which facilitates home ownership for younger generations through a rent-to-buy model, is going public on the Portfolio Stock Exchange and aims to raise €100M in debt/equity in the coming months.

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

Former Groupon Spain CEO Ferdinando Meo and ex-Enel executive Gianfilippo Mancini have launched a new venture capital fund, Corbites Fund II, targeting up to €150M. Managed by Abante, the fund will invest in deep-tech and climate technology solutions

The Spanish Ministry of Industry and Tourism has provisionally allocated €30.5M from the second call of the PERTE CHIP fund to 33 new projects across 10 autonomous communities. One notable beneficiary is Multiverse Computing, which is set to receive €12.7M for critical infrastructure chip design

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Kfund invested in Colombian accounting and GA services company Numbi

• JME participated in the €10M round of Italian cybersecurity company Equixly

Batir a largo plazo al mercado es complicado, y poca gente lo consigue. Si además no tienes tiempo o conocimientos para invertir en bolsa, lo mejor que puedes hacer es utilizar Indexa Capital.

Startup news 💡

New startups and product launches

• Nacho González-Barros, the founder of Infojobs, has co-founded a new startup, Hirevoice, which uses voice-based AI to conduct the first round of job interviews

• Internxt launched “Internxt AI,” a conversational AI model positioned as Spain’s first 100% sovereign alternative to US/Chinese giants, focusing on absolute privacy

• Indexa Capital is set to enter the private markets with the launch of “Indexa Private Markets 2026,” a fund-of-funds. The vehicle will accept investments from €10k for Indexa Capital clients. The fund will invest 60%–90% in private equity funds, 10%–20% in private debt, and up to 20% in infrastructure funds

Startup financials

• Filmin, backed by Seaya Ventures and Nazca Capital (who control 84% of the capital), is seeking to consolidate its position amidst the accelerating global M&A activity in the streaming market, despite its owners having failed to secure a sale at an estimated €50M valuation earlier this year. The company, which is profitable and is regarded as the “Gallic village” of Spanish streaming, is expected to surpass €30M in revenue this year, maintaining a growth trajectory from the €26.7M earned in 2024

• Spanish mobility company Cabify has quantified the financial benefit of its ESG projects, announcing they contributed €12M to its EBITDA in 2024, representing 36% of the total.

• Lleida-based circular economy startup Recomotor, which sells used car parts online to professionals, acquired its fifth salvage yard in Spain. The company reported €4M in sales in 2024 (a 33% increase)

• Payflow, which specializes in allowing employees to access their accrued salary on demand, announced it will not pursue new equity financing rounds. The company, which has raised over €20M to date, is profitable and plans to double its current team of 110 employees by 2026

Other news

• Interview with Wallapop’s CEO Rob Cassedy. Wallapop got acquired by existing shareholder Naver a few months ago, valuing the company at €650M, but some other existing investors are pushing back on the deal because they don’t think the valuation was fair. Wallapop has 19 million MAUs

• Bit2Me strengthened its management team ahead of its 2026 international expansion goals. Pablo Campos (ex-Google, Telefónica) joins as the new Chief Operating Officer (COO), while co-founder Andrei Manuel transitions to Co-CEO, focusing on global strategy

• NATO has selected six Spanish companies—Fossa Systems, VIG-SEC Drone, XRF.ai, ATOM H2, Alias Robotics, and Kreios Space—to participate in the next cohort of its Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) program

• Pablo López Gil-Albarellos, Head of Trade Republic in Spain and Portugal, revealed that Spain is the company’s fastest-growing market, now accounting for over 1 million clients, meaning “one in ten European clients is Spanish

Big company & policy news 🤓

Santander has paid its Global Head of Consumer Business, Nitin Prabhu, who joined form PayPal, a total of €3.36 million in stock bonuses during his first year with the bank. Also, the bank announced that it has strengthened its tech division with two senior hires: José Luis Bellosta, ex-Intrum España, joins as DG of Santander Digital Services, and Felipe Peñacoba, former global CIO at Revolut, becomes CEO of Payments Hub

Interesting reads 🤓

El Referente published its ‘Top 25 AI Startups to watch for 2026’ list

Javi Santana (Tinybird) published “Recortes 2025”

Felipe Talavera (ex Flywire) published “My Week in New York: The Future of Code Arrived Early”

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👀 Sponsorship slots for 2026 are now open. Demand has been stronger than I expected and I only have 14 slots/weeks remaining for all of 2026. If you’re interested in sponsorship opportunities, send me an email at jaime@dealflow.es 👀

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Digital Brain:

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Startup funding news 💸

Titan OS, the Barcelona-based startup providing an independent operating system for Connected TV, secured €50M in a Series A round led by Highland Europe

MyInvestor, the neobank backed primarily by Andbank, completed a €30M capital increase to support its rapid growth in deposits, which currently stand at €3.9 billion. The operation was led by Andbank, which maintained over 50% ownership, and valued the digital entity at nearly €300M

Alinia AI, a New York and Barcelona-based startup, secured $7.5M in a seed round led by Mouro Capital. The company provides a compliance platform and Guardrails API to help regulated industries, such as banking, deploy generative AI safely. More info here

ScrapAd, an Eibar-based platform for trading recyclable metals, raised €6M in a Series A investment round led by Inclimo Climate Tech and Suma Capital

Adcities, the adtech startup that digitizes Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising with real-time data, raised over €3M in a seed round led by Adara Ventures

Stamp closed a seed round of nearly €2M to fund its expansion. The company provides a technology solution that allows tourists to receive VAT exemption (tax-free) instantly at the point of sale

Didit, the Barcelona-based identity verification platform, secured ~$2M in fresh capital and officially joined the Winter 2026 batch of Y Combinator

HeyDiga, a Madrid and Barcelona-based startup applying generative AI and voice agents to customer engagement, closed a €1M seed round led by Kfund

M&A news 🚀

British investment firm Oakley Capital acquired a majority stake in Malaga-based hotel booking software provider Paraty Tech. Founded by siblings Gina and Franz Matheis and bootstrapped to date, Paraty specializes in direct reservation management and pricing tools for hotels

Legaltech Conversia completed its sale to British consultancy Wilmington for €121.6M. Conversia was majority owned by Inveready, who acquired the company for around €55M in 2022-2023

NPAW (Nice People At Work), the Spanish streaming video analytics software company, hired GP Bullhound as a financial advisor to explore strategic alternatives. Founded in Barcelona in 2008 and currently 25% owned by Suma Capital, the profitable company boasts an ARR of €25M and an estimated EBITDA of €8M, with over 95% of its sales generated outside of Spain

Unibo, the Barcelona-based startup offering a neobank-like platform for property managers and homeowners’ associations, was acquired by US investment firm TPG for over €15M. The company did €2.5M in annual revenues

Indexa Capital lifted the ‘lock up’ agreement for its historical investors seven months ahead of the July 2026 deadline to increase market liquidity and flexibility. The agreement’s termination allows a dozen core shareholders, including the founding team, Cabiedes & Partners, All Iron, and Fides Capital, to trade their shares. Indexa Capital currently trades at a market cap of €165M

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

Javier Santiso’s firm, Mundi Ventures, received CNMV authorization for Kembara Fund I, a mega-fund targeting up to €1.25B. Anchor investors include the European Investment Fund with €350M and Criteria Caixa with €100M, aiming for a first close once €600M is secured. You can read the filing here

Draper B1 announced the final closing of its new vehicle, Draper B1 Frontier Tech, raising over €20M

Crescenta, the digital platform democratizing access to alternative assets for retail investors, launched the third vintage of its flagship vehicle, Private Equity Growth Top Performers III, raising its target size to €50M. Concurrent with this fundraising, Crescenta onboarded its first Spanish fund, investing in Qualitas Energy VI, a €3.25B vehicle

Spanish funds active abroad:

• Iris Ventures led a $15M investment in French medical-grade skin care clinic network Innerskin

International funds active in Spain:

• Ecotechers published an overview of the activity of international VC firms in Spain. From the days of Accel and Index being quite active, to a period now with more presence from Creandum, Atomico and others

Batir a largo plazo al mercado es complicado, y poca gente lo consigue. Si además no tienes tiempo o conocimientos para invertir en bolsa, lo mejor que puedes hacer es utilizar Indexa Capital.

Startup news 💡

Startup financials

• Cabify closed 2024 with net losses of €53.8M, a slight improvement from the previous year. While the ride-sharing platform achieved its best-ever operational EBITDA (€30M) and secured new capital through an internal financing round and a convertible note, the balance sheet remains under stress, largely due to accumulated debt management. The company is valued by Seaya at approximately €660M

• Yaba, the Barcelona-based ecommerce brand aggregator, secured court approval for its debt restructuring plan. French fund Tikehau Capital, which provided €50M in debt, will become its main shareholder through a debt-for-equity swap

Other news

• Sifted put together a list of “15 Spanish startups to watch, according to VCs”

• Clikalia entered the alternative financing market, offering credit to housing developers to reactivate stalled construction projects

• Creditas, the fintech specializing in secured lending in Brazil, acquired Andbank’s banking license in Brazil and raised €100M at a €3B valuation, bringing Andbank into its cap table

• Recruitment and freelance platform Shakers expanded its model into Portugal

• US legal tech startup Harvey AI, backed by OpenAI and valued at $8B, to accelerate its international expansion by reinforcing its presence in Spain and beginning to hire professionals in Madrid

• Revolut, the UK-based fintech giant, increased its bet on Spain, where it currently serves 4.5 million customers, by announcing plans to surpass 7 million users by 2027. I recently saw this silde about Revolut’s market share and penetration in Spain. Quite remarkable!

  

Big company & policy news 🤓

Inditex achieved record results during the first nine months of its fiscal year 2025, reporting a 3.9% rise in net profit to €4.622B on sales of €28.171B. The results were primarily driven by the strength of its integrated model, with digital income now nearing 30% of total sales (over €8B), leading the company to forecast “strong online sales” in 2026

Moeve (Cepsa) formed a strategic alliance with French startup Mistral AI to develop generative AI solutions focused on boosting energy efficiency and productivity

The PSOE party requested the appearance in the Spanish Congress of Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, COO Javier Oliván, and Public Affairs Director José Luis Zimmermann over alleged espionage and privacy violations involving millions of users

The Spanish Navy will soon receive the Sead23, the country’s first maritime drone capable of carrying anti-submarine torpedoes, which was manufactured in Galicia by Zelenza’s subsidiary Seadrone in Vigo

Interesting reads 🤓

Marcos Rubio, CTO of Tucuvi, shared a thoughtful reflection on the gap between AI hype and real-world impact in healthcare. Reacting to a WSJ article on Yann LeCun, he criticized the overpromises of GenAI startups aiming to automate clinical workflows, stressing the need for orchestrated AI systems that blend deterministic logic with LLMs to ensure safety, trust, and scalability in care delivery

Málaga TechPark now generates over one-third of Málaga’s GDP, contributing €4.84B to Andalusia’s economy (2.33% of regional GDP) and supporting 71,000+ jobs

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by 540deg:

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👀 Sponsorship slots for 2026 are now open. If you’d like to get your brand in front of the founders, VCs, and operators within the Spanish tech ecosystem, send me an email at jaime@dealflow.es 👀

Startup funding news 💸

Anyformat closed a €3.3M seed round led by Kibo Ventures, with 4Founders, Abac Nest and DeceleraVentures also joining. The startup builds a generative-AI platform that extracts and structures complex data from documents

Uxia closed a €1M round led by Abac Nest, with Encomenda VC and several business angels also joining. The Barcelona-based startup automates user testing through AI-generated synthetic users, helping teams validate designs in minutes.

ECO-ONE closed a €765k round led by Portugal’s impact fund 3XP Global to boost its sustainability platform for hotels and accelerate expansion in Spain, France and now Portugal

Rebel Tickets has closed a €500k pre-seed round to fight Spain’s irregular ticket resale market

LUDA Partners opened a new funding round aimed exclusively at pharmacies. The startup operates a digital network that connects pharmacies to optimise stock, prevent drug shortages and boost online sales

M&A news 🚀

HWK Techinvestment earned an 11x return on its investment in Onum after the Spanish data-management startup was acquired by US cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike for $290M. More info on HWK here

Ecotechers published an overview of Spain’s 2025 exits, highlighting four major deals above €300M — vLex, Wallapop, Covermanager and Onum — which helped revive a market still limited by valuation gaps and years of liquidity drought

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

New funds

• Carles Reina, head of GTM at ElevenLabs and also an early investor in the company, launched Baobab Ventures, a $15M solo-GP fund backing global pre-seed and seed teams in AI, robotics and defence. The vehicle, raised in three months and oversubscribed, already completed eight deals including Spanish startups THEKER Robotics, Omnia, Murphy AI and Altan. Reina, an operator-investor at ElevenLabs and early backer of Revolut and ElevenLabs, aims to help founders accelerate GTM and product execution across the US, Europe and Asia. More info here and here

• Indra launched a VC fund of up to €200M to invest in dual-use tech across defence, aerospace, cybersecurity and emerging fields such as AI, quantum and VR/AR. The vehicle targets predominantly Spanish companies (at least 51% of commitments) across early stage to growth

• Portuguese firm Indico Capital Partners launched a €125M fund focused on early-stage startups in Portugal, Spain and Italy

• Junta de Andalucía announced a new €30M fund to invest in regional tech companies

• Crescenta announced the launch of a new €50M tech-focused fund, Private Equity Growth Top Performers III. The vehicle targets 5–7 global funds investing in megatrends, combining growth PE, tech buyouts and VC secondaries to aim for an 18% net annual return and a 2.5x multiple

VC fundraising activity

• European Investment fund (EIF) committed €40M to Nazca Capital’s new defence-focused fund. The target size is €600M. CDTI had previously comitted €300M

• EIF also committed €70M to Klima2, the new energy-transition fund being launched by Alantra

Spanish funds active abroad

• BBVA Spark granted Clara a $36M financing package to support the Mexican spend-management platform’s expansion in Colombia

• Analysis of exits achieved by Santander and BBVA via their investment arms, Mouro Capital and Propel VC, respectively

Batir a largo plazo al mercado es complicado, y poca gente lo consigue. Si además no tienes tiempo o conocimientos para invertir en bolsa, lo mejor que puedes hacer es utilizar Indexa Capital.

Startup news 💡

👉🏼 Sponsored bullet point: Once you’ve got product–market fit and start scaling, the challenge is speeding up development without sacrificing stability. 540’s full-stack teams have supported the growth of standout startups like Declarando, Stay, Acciona Mobility (Acciona’s electric scooters). Here’s how they helped IED 👈🏼

New products and companies

• Nacho Gonzalez Barros (Infojobs, Mailtrack, Hireflix, etc) announced the launch of Hirevoice, his last company: AI Voice Agents that automate high-volume interviewing for any role

• Karumi, a SF-based startup co-founded by Spaniards Toni Lopez and Pablo Omenaca, launched on Hacker News. The company is part of YC’s latest batch and is building an AI-driven system capable of doing automated product demos. Guillermo Flor, an angel in the company, also wrote about them

• YepCode unveiled Yep Agent, an AI-powered coding partner that discovers APIs, services and databases through execution and iterates until integrations are fully operational. The product launches in the coming weeks, with beta access offered to early participants

Other news

• XRF profiled as one of Spain’s rising defense-tech startups. Founded in the Canary Islands, it develops the Compass suite — the AR platform Ares, the tactical app Apolo and the command-center system Colossus — allowing military units to visualise operations, manage data and coordinate decisions in real time

• Profile of Gravity Wave, as it shifts strategy from ocean clean-ups to building a market for certified plastic credits. The Alicante-based social startup now tracks all collected waste on blockchain

• Camping operator HolaCamp targets €30M in sales for 2025 after a year of rapid expansion (3X YoY)

• Securitize received CNMV approval to operate Spain’s first blockchain-native trading and settlement system, allowing issuance, trading and instant settlement of tokenized shares and bonds

• N26 entered Spain’s personal-loan market, launching consumer credits from €1k to €15k with interest rates between 4.06% and 13.69% TAE
  

Big company & policy news 🤓

Tesla expanded its autonomous driving testing program in Spain: its Full Self-Driving (FSD) is now under supervised trials on public roads, making Spain one of the first European countries to host such tests

Santander reinforced its new Data & AI division with a series of senior hires and internal moves, completing the leadership team created after the bank elevated AI to a first-line strategic priority last summer. Iñaki Bernal was appointed Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, reporting to Ricardo Martín Manjón, while Marco Bressan joined as Chief Scientist to build a top-tier AI research and engineering group. José Manuel de la Chica, previously responsible for generative-AI initiatives, now leads the bank’s AI Lab

Bizum is preparing a major expansion for 2026 with Bizum Pay, a new app enabling direct in-store payments without Visa or Mastercard

Telefónica outlined a maximum of 6,088 layoffs in its new ERE, affecting 24% of its 25,000-person workforce in Spain

Spain and Diamond Foundry agreed to invest €2.35 billion in a new semiconductor-grade diamond substrate factory in Trujillo (Cáceres).The plant will be Europe’s first large-scale producer of monocristalline diamond wafers for high-performance chips and is expected to create more than 2,100 jobs

The LaLiga travesty continues. Last week I actually had trouble viewing certain sites while putting together this newsletter on Sunday, because of LaLiga and its broad internet-blick powers. Guillermo Rauch of Vercel shared an update on X. Rauch explained that Vercel has kept all customers unaffected by taking protective measures while rejecting LALIGA’s overly broad blocking requests

Interesting reads 🤓

Josep Marc Mingot, co-founder of Prosper AI, wrote about FDEs (Forward Deployed Engineers) and AI Product Managers: why “Forward Deployed Engineers” in AI-first companies should function more like business-driven product leaders than traditional engineers

Joao Alves, Head of Engineering at Adevinta, wrote “Private Equity en tech: todo lo que siempre quisiste saber”

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👀 Sponsorship slots for 2026 are now open. If you’d like to get your brand in front of the founders, VCs, and operators within the Spanish tech ecosystem, send me an email at jaime@dealflow.es 👀

Startup funding news 💸

Valencia-based deep-tech robotics startup Voltrac secured €7M in seed funding, led by Extantia. Voltrac develops “Thor,” an autonomous electric tractor (UGV) for agriculture and logistics

Barcelona-based AI financial automation platform Dost raised a €6.7M Series A round, led by Octopus Ventures. The capital will fuel Dost’s launch in the UK market and accelerate its proprietary AI solution for automating financial document processing

Barcelona startup Tacmind, founded by Taclia founder Àlex Casals, raised €2.4M from investors including CUSP Capital, Stage 2 Capital, and THCAP. The company developed an AI visibility platform designed to help brands understand and improve how they appear in the results of generative AI engines

Spanish and Mexican startup Cofers, developers of treasury management software, raised $1.5M. The round saw participation from Sabadell Venture Capital, 4Founders Capital, and JME Ventures

Other rounds of funding, with size undisclosed:

• Albert Pereta launched BuildForever and unveiled its first product: Extra, a reimagined email app focused on clarity and ease. Backed by top investors like Felicis, Elad Gil, SV Angel, and DST Global, the Barcelona-born designer had previously sold his previous startup, Icebers, to Pinterest, where he spent 10 years

• Barcelona-based FP&A platform Abacum announced a new fundraising addition, welcoming US-based FOG Ventures as an investor. Abacum, which has now raised over $100M in total, was chosen by FOG Ventures—a community of world-class operators—as their preferred FP&A platform after extensive due diligence
  

M&A news 🚀

Additional details have surfaced regarding the acquisition of Metricool by Belgian software and hosting group Team Blue. While the sale price remains undisclosed, the acquiring group purchased 50.9% of the shares.The change of control unlocked a phantom share incentive plan, distributing €3.6M among the team. In 2024, the year of the sale, Metricool closed with net revenues of €15.3M, nearly doubling the previous year’s figure, and maintaining a net profit of over €3M. Founder stakes (Juan Pablo Tejada and Laura Montells) dropped from 81% to 40.25%, and Axon Partners’ stake was reduced from 17.8% to 8.7%.

Nazca Capital acquired a majority stake in Ravenloop, a Madrid‑based software company specializing in AI‑driven predictive cyber intelligence for defence and national security

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

Ecotechers published a breakdown of ICO’s Next Tech activity over the years:

• Direct investments: Wallapop (€20M), Cabify (€20M), Sparc (€17M), Wallbox (€9.5M), Xoople (€10M), Paack (€10M, now valued at €4M), Inbrain Neuroelectronics (€7.5M)

• Indirect (investments in funds), measured as % of total commitments in the fund: Korelya Capital (10% of the whole fund), GP Bullhound (18%), SC Net Zero (41%), Invivo Ventures III (31$%), A&Energy Transition Tech (36%), Leadwind (45%), Seaya Andromeda (33%)

• Indirect, measures a millions comitted: Zubi (€8M), Big Sur (€40M), Axon Innovation Growth II (€85M), Armilar (€20M)

Profile of global VC platform IDC Ventures, founded in 2019, that manages $850M in assets, with its largest team base of 40 professionals located in Madrid. The firm specializes in growth capital with a strong focus on fintech and marketplaces across Europe, the US, and LatAm

Ship2B Ventures launched its second impact VC fund, BSocial Impact Fund II, with a target size of €80M and a first close at €65M

Grow Venture Partners launched Spin-off Launchpad, a permanent support program to help researchers and PhDs launch science-based startups. GVP will co-found and invest up to €1M in the most promising projects.

The Spanish government, via the Sociedad Española para la Transformación Tecnológica (SETT), announced an €8M investment in the Spanish fund Zubi Capital

ENISA announced it has approved 407 participatory loans totaling €65.3M so far this year. Figures for 2025 were not available, so it’s tough to compare if that’s an increase of activity or not

Spanish investors active abroad:

• Mouro participated in the $40M round of UK startup Hyperlayer

Batir a largo plazo al mercado es complicado, y poca gente lo consigue. Si además no tienes tiempo o conocimientos para invertir en bolsa, lo mejor que puedes hacer es utilizar Indexa Capital.

Startup news 💡

👉🏼 Sponsored bullet point: With more than 7 years of experience in personal finance and +$15M raised, Goin is the European benchmark for financial gamification, easy crypto investing, and rewarded shopping. It continues to expand its giftcard and cashback offering with new merchants, and a renewed subscription model designed for the smart shopping generation. 👈🏼

Profile of Opositatest. Founded nearly a decade ago in A Coruña, OpositaTest has become Spain’s top online platform for civil service exam preparation, serving 1.5 million users and projecting €6.5 million in revenue for 2025. It has 80 employees

Prosper AI, the AI voice agent platform for the healthcare sector with offices in the US and Barcelona, announced a recent period of explosive growth. The company reported a 4x revenue increase in 60 days and secured eight new clients, including a $5B healthcare organization

Sesame, the Valencia-based HR tech startup, has grown to €20M in ARR and 350 staff, despite posting €6M in losses in 2024. The company says that it has rejected several acquisition offers “in the hundreds of millions” and recently set up a €50M funding vehicle with BBVA Spark

Spanish startups like Holded, Quipu, Declarando, and Billin are gearing up for Verifactu, the anti-fraud invoicing system that becomes mandatory in Jan 2026. All businesses must use compliant software that generates QR-coded, real-time invoices to the tax agency

Emprendedores published an article about ‘Rocket Internet Spain Mafia’, alumni who have gone on to build or lead startups like Playtomic, Payflow, and Blank, or join VCs such as Samaipata and 468 Capital

Back Market, the French refurbished electronics marketplace with its third-largest office in Barcelona, expects to reach €3B in sales in 2025 — up 30% year-over-year. Spain, its third-largest market, represents 18% of revenue and 70% of online refurbished phone sales

Big company & policy news 🤓

A Spanish court has ordered Meta to pay €479 million ($552 million) to 87 Spanish digital media companies for unfair competition and breaching EU data protection rules. More info here

KPMG is launching a new dedicated business called KPMG Startup Connect. The program is aimed at boosting the growth of young companies across all stages. To reinforce its capabilities, KPMG has hired Marta Echarri, former General Director of N26 in Spain as an external advisor

eDreams shares plummeted over 40% after the company cut its FY2026 cash EBITDA forecast from €215M to €155M, citing slower Prime subscriber growth and reduced access to Ryanair

BBVA appointed Jordi García Bosch, former head of the failed Sabadell integration office, as its new Head of Strategic Projects for AI and Data

Interesting reads 🤓

Sifted asks if “Is Spain Europe’s AI dark horse?”. Spanish AI-native startups have raised €442m across 39 equity deals so far this year, compared with €56m across 11 deals in 2024

Ecotechers talked to Atomico’s partner Tom Wehmeier, backer of Factorial, Perk, and Abacum. Atomico expects $2B in Spanish VC investment in 2025 (+18% YoY) and plans to keep investing. Wehmeier praises Spain’s maturing ecosystem but sees structural gaps: limited pension fund involvement, weak global investor base, and cultural hesitation around risk

El Referente put together a list of Spanish journalists and publications writing about tech

Samuel Gil (JME) published “Tokenización de activos”

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Startup funding news 💸

€10M+ rounds:

• PLD Space is raising €130M to expand production of its Miura 5 rockets and add new launch sites, including one in Asia. The company expects to close the round before the end of the year

• Amenitiz, the Barcelona-based SaaS platform for independent hotels, secured €38.9M in Series B funding led by Kfund, with Thayer Ventures and Columbia Lake Partners joining. Amenitiz has 15,000+ hotel clients and does €3B in processed bookings

• Playtomic raised €13M via crowdfunding at a €330M valuation. It reported €29M in net revenue over the past year, aims for €33M in 2025, and plans to expand in the U.S. and into pickleball. 2024 gross revenue hit €181M, with €14M in losses

Rounds €5M to €10M:

• The Spanish government, via SETT, invested €9.5M in Ideaded, a microelectronics company developing sustainable microchips using alternatives to silicon

• Lative, a sales intelligence startup co-founded by Spanish entrepreneur Laura Tortosa Sancho, raised $7.5M to scale its AI-powered platform. While headquartered in Dublin, the company also operates from Barcelona

Rounds €1M to €5M:

• Inveready invested €5M in Experience Group, a Madrid-based firm providing operational services for major fashion and sports brands

• Velorum, a Barcelona-based startup focused on applied AI and enterprise knowledge automation, raised €3M from Iris Venture Builder

• Standard21, Spain’s first native bitcoin treasury, is raising up to €13M ahead of a planned 2026 IPO. The firm has begun with a €3–4M “friends and family” round and will follow with a €10M institutional round. 90–95% of the capital will go toward buying bitcoin

• Holo, a Barcelona-based healthtech startup founded by former Factorial employees, raised a €1M pre-seed round led by Calm/Storm Ventures and Mission VC. The company offers an all-in-one health app integrating lab testing, wearables, and AI to provide preventive, personalized care. More info here

Other rounds of funding:

• NZero, a Spanish brand specializing in organic waxes and lubricants for snow sports and cycling, secured €150k from Eoniq.fund

M&A news 🚀

Deal finalized. Clio, the Canadian legaltech giant, closed the $1B acquisition of vLex, a Barcelona-based legal research platform. Backed by US$500M in equity and US$350M in debt

Libeen, a Madrid-based proptech focused on rent-to-own housing, has listed its own SOCIMI on the Portfolio Stock Exchange with an initial valuation of €4.1M. Backed by Andbank (via Actyus and MyInvestor), Cusp Capital, and notable angels, Libeen plans to invest €25M in 130–150 homes in phase one

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

Kibo Ventures is developing a new pre-seed fund to capitalize on the surge in early-stage AI startups in Spain

Tressis launched Capital Tech II, a new tech-focused fund of funds aiming to raise up to €30M

Batir a largo plazo al mercado es complicado, y poca gente lo consigue. Si además no tienes tiempo o conocimientos para invertir en bolsa, lo mejor que puedes hacer es utilizar Indexa Capital.

Startup news 💡

New startups and product launches

New companies:

• Founded by Spaniards Toni Lopez and Pablo Omenaca, Karumi (YC S25) uses AI agents to run automated, personalized product demos in video calls—available 24/7 and in any language

• Checkia.ai is a new compliance-focused legaltech venture, launched in Spain to help companies navigate the EU’s AI Act. The company is led by Luis Gosálbez and Metricson

New products and (key) features:

• Lingokids has partnered with Disney to bring characters from Mickey & Friends, Frozen, and Moana into its app through nearly two dozen exclusive educational activities

Startup financials

The good news:

• Profile of Seedtag and interview with Albert Nieto, who will step down as CEO by year’s end. The company operates in 17 countries with nearly $400M in 2025 revenue, half from the US

• Holafly, the Spanish startup founded by Pedro Máiquez and Yingyan Hu, has grown into a global player offering unlimited data plans for travelers via eSIMs. After pivoting from physical SIMs and surviving COVID’s collapse in travel, the company reached €200M in revenue in 2024 with 600 employees. Pedro was recently interviewed in the itnig podcast

• Typeform closed 2024 with €83M in revenue via its Spanish entity, up 4% YoY, though growth slowed due to shifting U.S. client billing to its American subsidiary. Its net profit more than doubled to €8.7M

• Biorce is a Barcelona-based developers of Aika, an AI platform that manages clinical trials from start to finish. Already working with major pharma clients, the company expects to reach €12M in revenue by the end of 2025, just 18 months after its founding

• Genesy has reached $3M in revenue by deploying a structured, data-driven outbound sales system, which they explained here. Italy now generates 35% of Genesy’s revenue

The not so good:

• Bodas.net, the Spanish wedding services platform owned by The Knot Worldwide, launched an ERE affecting 175 employees—around 28% of its Barcelona workforce. Despite growing revenue to €86.5M in 2024 and posting €23.6M EBITDA, the company cites organizational restructuring

Other news

Multiverse Computing is helping Telefónica enhance its customer service by applying quantum-inspired AI to compress large language models (LLMs)

Glovo faces an additional claim of €100M from Spain’s Social Security, on top of the €450M already provisioned for unpaid contributions and fines related to its former use of “autónomos” riders

Fintech news

There were a bunch of fintech related news last week:

• Klarna is accelerating its transition from a BNPL fintech into a full digital bank in Spain. The Swedish firm just launched a debit card linked to a current account, allowing users to split payments into three interest-free installments

• Bit2Me has secured CNMV approval to transform its subsidiary into a broker-dealer, enabling the launch of Spain’s first tokenized stock exchange

• Revolut is planning to launch a private banking division in Spain, aiming to serve high-net-worth individuals

• SeQura has entered the crypto space with a new cashback app offering up to 10% back in Bitcoin at over 500 premium retailers
  

Big company & policy news 🤓

Microsoft has received preliminary approval for its €10B data center project in Aragón, set to be its largest in Southern Europe

The CNMV has fined Twitter/X €5M for repeatedly allowing ads from “chiringuitos financieros”

Indian company Zoho has opened a new office in Valencia, aiming to double its team from 45 to 100 employees to support growth in Spain

Inditex reported a 13% drop in net profit for its subsidiary Fashion Retail, which manages online sales in markets without physical stores. Despite revenues reaching €411M in 2024, rising logistics and service costs reduced net profit to €62.5M. The unit now accounts for just 4% of Inditex’s €10.16B global online sales

Interesting reads 🤓

Manfred published its 2025 Tech Career Report, analyzing over 112k developer profiles in Spain

Interview with Javier Megias, COO of Frenetic, about entrepreneurship in Spain

Ignacio Arriaga wrote “Cómo podemos modelar un buen negocio”

Enrique Dominguez wrote “La caída de Sonder, cuando la narrativa pesa más que los números”

Pau Ramon (Fika) wrote “Building the pipeline: A sales-driven process for hiring”

Javier de la Torre (CARTO) responded to Mozilla’s open letter on “Harnessing open source AI to advance digital sovereignty,” warning against conflating technology competitiveness with sovereignty. He argues that while open-source AI boosts innovation and competitiveness, relying solely on open-source software for sovereignty is unrealistic and could deepen Europe’s tech dependencies.