Dealflow.es #507: Record month for Playtomic, Enginy. Harvey hiring spree.
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 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”