Dealflow.es #501: Trenes.com and Maite.ai acquired. LaLiga's craziness continues. Factorial AI.
A weekly summary of everything that happened in the Spanish startup and tech investing ecosystem.
Welcome to another edition of Dealflow. If you’ve been forwarded this email but you’re not a subscriber, please subscribe. And if you’re interested in sponsorship opportunities, send me an email at jaime@dealflow.es and I’ll share more details
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Holafly:
El fin del roaming corporativo para startups globales
Para muchas startups, el roaming no es un gasto menor: es un síntoma de un modelo obsoleto. Equipos distribuidos, viajes constantes, despliegues internacionales y facturas imposibles de prever.
El problema no es el consumo. Es la arquitectura.
Activar planes por viaje, depender de SIMs físicas o esperar facturas semanas después genera fricción en IT y cero visibilidad para Finanzas. En entornos de alto crecimiento, eso no escala.
Soluciones como Holafly for Business convierten la conectividad internacional en infraestructura: eSIMs corporativas gestionadas desde un único panel, activación automática por país y coste 100% predecible. Si un equipo viaja cada semana, los datos permanecen activos. Si no hay desplazamientos, no hay cargos innecesarios.
Compañías como BBVA o Volvo ya han eliminado el roaming reactivo. Pero no hace falta ser enterprise para hacerlo. En 2026, las startups globales no optimizarán el roaming. Lo habrán sustituido.
Startup funding news 💸
Barcelona-based Mitiga secured €8.4M through the EIC Accelerator program (€2.4M in grants, €6M in equity investment) to expand its climate risk intelligence platform for energy assets
Barcelona-based Pharmacelera closed a €6M funding round led by life sciences fund Heran Partners. Pharmacelera applies quantum mechanics and AI to drug discovery through
Vitoria-based Optimitive, a startup that optimizes industrial processes in realtime with AI, closed a €5M Series A round led by Suma Capital (€1M)
60Nd, a UC3M spin-off in the biomechanical modeling field, secured €2.4M in EIC Transition funding plus private investment, totaling over €3M, to commercialize NeoMag
Barcelona-based fintech startup Iqana closed a €1.1M pre-seed round led by Kfund. Iqana develops a professional crypto asset portfolio management platform
Madrid-based Mettis AI closed a €1.1M funding round combining private investment and public support. Mettis uses AI and sensors to provide objective driving evaluation during driving school lessons
myGolf, the amateur golf digital platform, closed a €370k funding round combining private capital and an ENISA loan to accelerate growth
M&A news 🚀
Idian company Ixigo acquired a 60% majority stake in Spain-based Online Travel Solutions (Trenes.com) for €13.5M, marking the Indian AI travel platform’s first major international expansion into Europe. Trenes is Spain’s second-largest train booking platform with roughly €5.6M in revenue and a profit of about €1.4M
French legal tech company Doctrine acquired Spanish AI-powered legal platform Maite.ai for over €10M. The company was founded in 2024 and serves 2,000+ clients
Roiward, a Spanish fintech specializing in employee incentives and benefits management, acquired Qoala’s technology assets. Qoala operated a B2C platform offering automatic coupon redemption and cashback for online purchases
Investor & accelerator news 🚀
Spain’s Ministry of Industry and Tourism announced provisional allocation of €134.7M to 34 projects under the Electric and Connected Vehicle PERTE program. Notable recipients include KD (€5M for vehicle connectivity), LIEDER Automotive (€4M for electric component manufacturing), and Schaeffler Iberia (€3M for battery housing production)
Spanish investors active abroad:
FoF Galdana Ventures participated in the $300M Series F round of Mexican used car marketplace Kavak, led by Andreessen Horowitz
Startup news 💡
Startup profiles
Factorial’s Bernat Farrero discussed the company’s AI strategy and addressed the current (overblown) market climate of SaaS apocalypse. Bernat highlights two key moats:
The hard 20%: Vibe coding gets you 80% of a product fast, but the remaining 20% — critical edge cases around security, data control, access permissions — takes years to build and protects against new entrants.
Diversification: Expanding beyond core HR (50% of revenue) into talent management (40%), finance/expenses (10%), and a brand-new IT management vertical (launched one month ago, targeting 10M in year one). Being the single “source of truth” for an entire organization makes it hard for vertical-only competitors to displace them
More details in the Ecotechers article.
New startups and product updates
Cala AI released its MCP integration, enabling AI agents to directly query its knowledge graph for structured data on companies, people, and funding rounds
Startup financials
PropHero closed 2025 with revenue exceeding €35M, doubling the previous year, and positive EBITDA. The AI-powered real estate investment platform expects to reach €50M revenue in 2026 with 10%+ profitability
Organic baby food company Smileat reported 26% revenue growth in 2025, reaching €21M for the first time
Nomade Nation, the Catalan camper van startup, reported €6M revenue in 2025, nearly triple from the previous year, and achieved operational profitability.
Cabify faces a €1.36M tax regularization demand from Spain’s Tax Agency following an inspection of its 2019-2020 accounts. The VTC company disputes the additional corporate tax and VAT payment
Other news
Sateliot and PLD Space signed Spain’s first fully domestic commercial space mission contract. The 2027 launch will deploy two 160kg Tritó satellites via PLD’s MIURA 5 rocket, providing 5G direct-to-device connectivity for IoT applications and defense use cases in low Earth orbit
RatedPower co-founder Andrea Barber said she expects RatedPower to become Blackstone’s European tecdh headquarters. Enverus, the company that acquired RatedPwoer, is owned by Blackstone. 170 people currently work at RatedPower
French IT equipment and cybersecurity provider Fleet will double its Barcelona workforce to 50 employees, positioning the city as its main operations hub for Latin American expansion. Spain accounts for 20% of Fleet’s total revenues
A study says that Spain’s delivery market contracted 7% in 2025 while Europe grew 4%, as Glovo, Uber Eats, and Just Eat face severe rider shortages after transitioning from freelance to employee contracts
Manfred launches FREELANCE recruiting for tech teams: access vetted senior freelancers, transparent rates and technical screening handled for you. No marketplaces, no CV piles. Just the right person in days, not weeks.
Big company & policy news 🤓
Telefónica launched commercial Edge Computing services across five Spanish cities (Madrid, Valencia, Sevilla, Bilbao, A Coruña), becoming the first operator in Spain to exploit this technology. With the project it aims to transform old telephone exchanges into proximity data centers that process information locally, reducing latency for AI and Industry 4.0 applications
This is crazy and terrible. LaLiga is trying to close a loophole in its match-day piracy blocks: people were using VPNs to bypass the IP bans, so now the plan is to get the VPN companies themselves to block the “problem” IPs for users in Spain. The targets mentioned are NordVPN and ProtonVPN. Both say they haven’t been officially notified yet, and they can still challenge the request—so it’s not guaranteed this will actually be enforced. David Peterson, ProtonVPN’s general manager, reacted to the news here. This is also an interesting reactiong from Haralabos Voulgaris, owner of CD Castellon
Spain’s Council of Ministers will formally request the Attorney General’s Office to investigate X (formerly Twitter), Meta, and TikTok for potential crimes related to AI-generated child pornography
Ikea’s online sales in Spain grew 11% to €537M, representing 25% of business
Amadeus dropped 24% this year, becoming the worst performer on Spain’s Ibex index amid AI disruption concerns in travel tech. The Spanish travel platform faces pressure from Sabre-PayPal’s new AI travel agent launching Q2
Sage opened a new digital hub in Barcelona’s 22@ district with 650 employees, reinforcing its commitment to the city. Sage recently acquired on-the-go CRM ForceManager
Interesting reads 🤓
Omar Pera (CPO at Freepik) wrote “El nuevo 10x y las hostias que se vienen”
Ignacio Arriaga wrote “Compound startups: ¿el futuro o la mediocridad?“
David Miranda (Osborne Clarke) shared an interesting presentation about the process of moving the headquarters of a Spanish company to the US, also called “redomestication process”
El Referente put together a list of “15 Spanish proptech companies to follow in 2026”
Tinybird engineer Jordi Villar shared his experience after leaving the Spanish data startup following 4+ years: “What I learned building real-time data infrastructure at a high-growth startup”
Banktrack CEO and cofounder David Álvarez de la Torre shared his entrepreneurial journey from leaving a high-paying corporate job in Switzerland to building a financial management SaaS