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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Aircall:

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

Startup funding news 💸

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

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

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

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

Other fundraising news:

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

M&A news 🎉

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

Startup news 💡

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

Startup financials:

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

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

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

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

Startup profiles:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases: give your company and AI brain. Fully managed RAG. Connect your data and get accurate, source-cited answers, no hallucinations and no pipelines to build. Secure, private & startup-ready. Do you want to chat? click here.

VC news 🚀

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

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

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

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

Spanish investors active abroad:

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

Big company news 🏢

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting reads 🤓

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

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

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

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

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

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Crescenta:

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

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

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

Startup funding news 💸

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

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

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

€1M to €5M rounds:

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

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

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

Other rounds of funding:

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

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

M&A news 🎉

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

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

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

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

Startup news 💡

Product launches:

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

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

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

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

Startup financials:

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

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

Other announcements, especially in the fintech space:

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

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

Amazon Bedrock Agents: autonomous AI that reasons, plans & executes multi-step tasks — calling APIs, updating CRMs, processing orders. Italy's A2A lets executives query complex data in natural language, no analyst needed. Beyond chatbots — action. Do you want to chat? click here.

VC news 🚀

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

Spanish investors active abroad:

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

Big company news 🏢

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting reads 🤓

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Crescenta:

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

En Crescenta, no solo damos acceso al Private Equity, damos selección. Nuestro equipo analiza cientos de fondos de capital privado al año, pero le dicen que no al 97%. Solo nos quedamos con el top 3% y construimos una cartera diversificada a la que puedes acceder con una sola inversión.

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

👉 Invierte como imaginas en Crescenta.com

Startup funding news 💸

€100M+ rounds:

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

€10M to €50M rounds:

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

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

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

€1M to €10M rounds:

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

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

Other rounds of funding:

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

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

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

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

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

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

M&A news 🎉

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

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

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

Startup news 💡

Startup financials and corporate stuff:

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

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

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

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

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

Product launches:

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

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

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

Other news:

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

Amazon Q Developer: AI assistant that understands your full codebase. Generates code, reviews PRs, scans for security, migrates legacy apps. Wallbox (Barcelona → NYSE) ships across firmware, cloud & mobile at scale on AWS. Your team's superpower. Do you want to chat? click here

VC news 🚀

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

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

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

Spanish investors active abroad:

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

Big company news 🏢

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

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

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

Telefónica completed the deployment of 17 edge computing nodes across Spain

Interesting reads 🤓

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

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

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

David Bonilla (Manfred) wrote “IA sin miedo”

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by zenital:

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

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

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

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

Startup funding news 💸

€20M+ rounds:

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

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

€5M to €10M rounds:

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

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

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

€1M to €5M rounds:

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

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

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

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

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

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

M&A news 🎉

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

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

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

Startup news 💡

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

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

Startup financials:

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

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

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

New companies and product launches:

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

• ShowMe launched AI Sales Reps for teams selling inbound

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

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

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

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

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

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

VC news 🚀

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

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

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

Big company news 🏢

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

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

In the travel sector:

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting reads 🤓

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

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by MOD:

¿Buscas un partner tecnológico para tus desarrollos, marca digital, ecommerce, automatizaciones, IA o gestión de datos, todo integrado? Quizás acabas de encontrarlo.

No somos la típica consultora de PowerPoints, reuniones eternas y presupuestos desorbitados. Venimos de ahí, y por eso montamos una empresa tecnológica moderna, enfocada en ejecutar, acompañar y resolver problemas de negocio con tecnología. En MOD llevamos desde 2018 trabajando con más de 80 empresas como Deleito o Data Natives, resolviendo todas sus necesidades tecnológicas y digitales.

Si quieres un partner de confianza para construir, evolucionar o acelerar tu proyecto digital, hablemos: mod.es/contacto

Startup funding news 💸

€50M+ round:

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

€10M rounds+:

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

€1M to €10M rounds:

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

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

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

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

M&A news 🎉

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

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

Startup news 💡

Startup financials:

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

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

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

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

International companies active in Spain:

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

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

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

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

New companies and products:

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

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

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

Other news:

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

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

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

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VC news 🚀

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

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

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

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

Big company news 🏢

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting reads 🤓

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

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

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Crescenta:

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Startup funding news 💸

€100M+ rounds:

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

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

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

€10M+ rounds:

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

€1M to €5M rounds:

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

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

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

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

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

Other rounds of funding and rumours:

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

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

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

M&A news 🎉

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

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

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

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

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

Startup news 💡

Startup financials and $$:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Product launches:

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

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

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

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

Other ecosystem stuff:

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

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

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

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VC news 🚀

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

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

Spanish investors active abroad:

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

Big company news 🏢

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

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

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

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

Interesting reads 🤓

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

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

• David Bonilla wrote “La IA de cerca”

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

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

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

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

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

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Manfred:

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Startup funding news 💸

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

M&A news 🎉

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

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

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

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

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

Startup news 💡

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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VC news 🚀

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

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

Spanish investors active abroad:

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

Big company news 🏢

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

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

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

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

Interesting reads 🤓

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

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Crescenta:

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Startup funding news 💸

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

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

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

M&A news 🎉

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

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

Startup news 💡

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tech investor news 🚀

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

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

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

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

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

Spanish investors active abroad:

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

Interesting reads 🤓

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

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

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

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Startup funding news 💸

€10M+ rounds:

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

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

€1M to €10M:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other rounds of funding:

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

M&A news 🎉

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

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

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

Startup news 💡

Startup financials:

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

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

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

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

Product and startup launches:

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

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

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

In the mobility sector:

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

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

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

Other news:

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

Tech investor news 🚀

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

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

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

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

Spanish investors active abroad:

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

Big company & policy news 🏦

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting reads 🤓

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

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

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

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

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Startup funding news 💸

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

M&A news 🎉

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

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

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

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

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

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

Startup news 💡

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two profiles:

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

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

Tech investor news 🚀

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

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

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

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

Spanish investors active abroad:

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

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

Big company & policy news 🏦

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

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

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

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

Interesting reads 🤓

• 🎯, from Javi Santana

  ---

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

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

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

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

Podcasts of the week 🎧

• Itnig interviewed the founders of Krea AI

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

Subscribe now

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Startup funding news 💸

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

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

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

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

M&A news 🎉

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

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

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

Startup news 💡

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tech investor news 🚀

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

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

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

Spanish investors active abroad:

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

Big company & policy news 🏦

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

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

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

Interesting reads 🤓

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

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

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

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

Podcasts of the week 🎧

• SeedRocket interviewed Andreu Dotti (Innovamat)

• Marsbased interviewed Ricard Clau

Subscribe now

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by zenital:

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Startup funding news 💸

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

M&A news 🎉

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

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

Startup news 💡

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tech investor news 🚀

Activity from public institutions:

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

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

Two new funds announced:

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

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

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

Big company & policy news 🏦

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

Interesting reads 🤓

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

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

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

Podcasts of the week 🎧

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

Subscribe now

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Crescenta:

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

- Miguel Echenique (AltamarCAM)
- Jorge Lucaya (Az Capital)
- Ramiro Iglesias (Crescenta)

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

Solicita tu entrada

Startup funding news 💸

€1M+ rounds:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other rounds of funding:

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

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

M&A news 🎉

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

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

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

Startup news 💡

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tech investor news 🚀

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

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

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

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

Spanish investors active abroad:

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

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

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

Big company & policy news 🏦

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

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

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

Interesting reads 🤓

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

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

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

Podcasts of the week 🎧

• Itnig interviewed Amir Salihefendić, founder of Doist

• SeedRocket interviewed Carolina Rodriguez, CEO of ENISA

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Startup funding news 💸

The two largest “rounds” of the week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

€1M to €5M deals:

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

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

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

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

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

Other funding news:

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

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

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

M&A news 🎉

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

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

Startup news 💡

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tech investor news 🚀

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

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

Big company & policy news 🏦

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting reads 🤓

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

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

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

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

Podcasts of the week 🎧

• Itnig interviewed Lucas Carne (011h)

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

• Marsbased interviewed Ilya Zayats (CTO of Factorial)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by SLNG:

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

Startup funding news 💸

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

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

Startup news 💡

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tech investor news 🚀

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

Big company & policy news 🏦

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

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

Interesting reads 🤓

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

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

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

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

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This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Crescenta:

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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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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:

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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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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:

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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