Dealflow.es #491: Carles Reina launches fund. Anyformat raised €3.3M. Tesla's FSD in Spain.
A weekly summary of everything that happened in the Spanish startup and tech investing ecosystem.
Welcome to another edition of Dealflow.es. If you’ve been forwarded this email but you’re not a subscriber, please do so here. On to this week’s news!
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by 540deg:
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Nuestro mantra: un software desarrollado con intención y mantenible soluciona problemas, te hace ganar dinero y mejora la vida de quien lo usa.
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Startup funding news 💸
Anyformat closed a €3.3M seed round led by Kibo Ventures, with 4Founders, Abac Nest and DeceleraVentures also joining. The startup builds a generative-AI platform that extracts and structures complex data from documents
Uxia closed a €1M round led by Abac Nest, with Encomenda VC and several business angels also joining. The Barcelona-based startup automates user testing through AI-generated synthetic users, helping teams validate designs in minutes.
ECO-ONE closed a €765k round led by Portugal’s impact fund 3XP Global to boost its sustainability platform for hotels and accelerate expansion in Spain, France and now Portugal
Rebel Tickets has closed a €500k pre-seed round to fight Spain’s irregular ticket resale market
LUDA Partners opened a new funding round aimed exclusively at pharmacies. The startup operates a digital network that connects pharmacies to optimise stock, prevent drug shortages and boost online sales
M&A news 🚀
HWK Techinvestment earned an 11x return on its investment in Onum after the Spanish data-management startup was acquired by US cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike for $290M. More info on HWK here
Ecotechers published an overview of Spain’s 2025 exits, highlighting four major deals above €300M — vLex, Wallapop, Covermanager and Onum — which helped revive a market still limited by valuation gaps and years of liquidity drought
Investor & accelerator news 🚀
New funds
Carles Reina, head of GTM at ElevenLabs and also an early investor in the company, launched Baobab Ventures, a $15M solo-GP fund backing global pre-seed and seed teams in AI, robotics and defence. The vehicle, raised in three months and oversubscribed, already completed eight deals including Spanish startups THEKER Robotics, Omnia, Murphy AI and Altan. Reina, an operator-investor at ElevenLabs and early backer of Revolut and ElevenLabs, aims to help founders accelerate GTM and product execution across the US, Europe and Asia. More info here and here
Indra launched a VC fund of up to €200M to invest in dual-use tech across defence, aerospace, cybersecurity and emerging fields such as AI, quantum and VR/AR. The vehicle targets predominantly Spanish companies (at least 51% of commitments) across early stage to growth
Portuguese firm Indico Capital Partners launched a €125M fund focused on early-stage startups in Portugal, Spain and Italy
Junta de Andalucía announced a new €30M fund to invest in regional tech companies
Crescenta announced the launch of a new €50M tech-focused fund, Private Equity Growth Top Performers III. The vehicle targets 5–7 global funds investing in megatrends, combining growth PE, tech buyouts and VC secondaries to aim for an 18% net annual return and a 2.5x multiple
VC fundraising activity
European Investment fund (EIF) committed €40M to Nazca Capital’s new defence-focused fund. The target size is €600M. CDTI had previously comitted €300M
EIF also committed €70M to Klima2, the new energy-transition fund being launched by Alantra
Spanish funds active abroad
BBVA Spark granted Clara a $36M financing package to support the Mexican spend-management platform’s expansion in Colombia
Analysis of exits achieved by Santander and BBVA via their investment arms, Mouro Capital and Propel VC, respectively
Batir a largo plazo al mercado es complicado, y poca gente lo consigue. Si además no tienes tiempo o conocimientos para invertir en bolsa, lo mejor que puedes hacer es utilizar Indexa Capital.
Startup news 💡
👉🏼 Sponsored bullet point: Once you’ve got product–market fit and start scaling, the challenge is speeding up development without sacrificing stability. 540’s full-stack teams have supported the growth of standout startups like Declarando, Stay, Acciona Mobility (Acciona’s electric scooters). Here’s how they helped IED 👈🏼
New products and companies
Nacho Gonzalez Barros (Infojobs, Mailtrack, Hireflix, etc) announced the launch of Hirevoice, his last company: AI Voice Agents that automate high-volume interviewing for any role
Karumi, a SF-based startup co-founded by Spaniards Toni Lopez and Pablo Omenaca, launched on Hacker News. The company is part of YC’s latest batch and is building an AI-driven system capable of doing automated product demos. Guillermo Flor, an angel in the company, also wrote about them
YepCode unveiled Yep Agent, an AI-powered coding partner that discovers APIs, services and databases through execution and iterates until integrations are fully operational. The product launches in the coming weeks, with beta access offered to early participants
Other news
XRF profiled as one of Spain’s rising defense-tech startups. Founded in the Canary Islands, it develops the Compass suite — the AR platform Ares, the tactical app Apolo and the command-center system Colossus — allowing military units to visualise operations, manage data and coordinate decisions in real time
Profile of Gravity Wave, as it shifts strategy from ocean clean-ups to building a market for certified plastic credits. The Alicante-based social startup now tracks all collected waste on blockchain
Camping operator HolaCamp targets €30M in sales for 2025 after a year of rapid expansion (3X YoY)
Securitize received CNMV approval to operate Spain’s first blockchain-native trading and settlement system, allowing issuance, trading and instant settlement of tokenized shares and bonds
N26 entered Spain’s personal-loan market, launching consumer credits from €1k to €15k with interest rates between 4.06% and 13.69% TAE
Big company & policy news 🤓
Tesla expanded its autonomous driving testing program in Spain: its Full Self-Driving (FSD) is now under supervised trials on public roads, making Spain one of the first European countries to host such tests
Santander reinforced its new Data & AI division with a series of senior hires and internal moves, completing the leadership team created after the bank elevated AI to a first-line strategic priority last summer. Iñaki Bernal was appointed Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, reporting to Ricardo Martín Manjón, while Marco Bressan joined as Chief Scientist to build a top-tier AI research and engineering group. José Manuel de la Chica, previously responsible for generative-AI initiatives, now leads the bank’s AI Lab
Bizum is preparing a major expansion for 2026 with Bizum Pay, a new app enabling direct in-store payments without Visa or Mastercard
Telefónica outlined a maximum of 6,088 layoffs in its new ERE, affecting 24% of its 25,000-person workforce in Spain
Spain and Diamond Foundry agreed to invest €2.35 billion in a new semiconductor-grade diamond substrate factory in Trujillo (Cáceres).The plant will be Europe’s first large-scale producer of monocristalline diamond wafers for high-performance chips and is expected to create more than 2,100 jobs
The LaLiga travesty continues. Last week I actually had trouble viewing certain sites while putting together this newsletter on Sunday, because of LaLiga and its broad internet-blick powers. Guillermo Rauch of Vercel shared an update on X. Rauch explained that Vercel has kept all customers unaffected by taking protective measures while rejecting LALIGA’s overly broad blocking requests
Interesting reads 🤓
Josep Marc Mingot, co-founder of Prosper AI, wrote about FDEs (Forward Deployed Engineers) and AI Product Managers: why “Forward Deployed Engineers” in AI-first companies should function more like business-driven product leaders than traditional engineers
Joao Alves, Head of Engineering at Adevinta, wrote “Private Equity en tech: todo lo que siempre quisiste saber”