Xstartups ayuda a emprendedores, pymes y startups a preparar, elaborar y gestionar solicitudes de Financiación Alternativa. Se implican con los proyectos y sus fundadores para lograr los objetivos en materia de financiación y trabajan para obtener los mejores resultados.

Si estás planteando realizar una solicitud de financiación alternativa (ENISA, CDTI…) y quieres que te asesoren, te acompañen y te ayuden en el proceso y elaboración, ponte en contacto con ellos enhola@xstartups.es

Startup funding news 💸

• ADmit Therapeutics, a Barcelona-based startup that’s deaveloping an alzheimer’s disease early detection technology, raised €200,000 from Banco Sabadell and Ship2B
• Madrid-based Decoratio raised an undisclosed sum of funding from Cabiedes & Partners and business angels

Startup exits 🎊

• Wallapop recently distributed more than €140 million to its shareholders (investors and founders) as part of the acquisition by Naspers of its US business. La Informacion has the details about what funds and employees might have won with the deal
• El Confidencial wrote a long profile of Phan Nhat Vuong, the Vietnamese entrepreneur that founded VinGroup, the company that recently acquired Spanish smartphone manufacturer BQ. The article also covers VinGroup’s future plans for BQ

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• Berlin-based ghost kitchen platform Keatz announced a €12 million round. Investors in the German company include Spanish VC firms K Fund and JME VC
• London-based pricing optimisation startup BlackCurve raised £1.5 million from Nauta Capital
• Athens-based startup Welcome Pickups announced a €3.3 million investment. The list of investors in the company includes Alejandro Artacho, CEO of Madrid-based Spotahome
• Great article by Jesus Monleon about his experience and track record as a business angel: 49 investments to date, 21 exits and 12X DPI multiple to date
• Insurance company Santa Lucia announced the name of the five companies that will participate in its latest accelerator program: Nodalblock, Ever Health, Arbor, Opseeker, Wayook
• El Referente wrote about the FCRE (Fondo de Capital Riesgo Europeo) legal figure, which is increasingly being used by Spanish VC firms
• The European Investment Fund (EIF) and Axis, ICO’s wholly-owned venture capital management company, launched a new €40 million business angels fund aimed at Spanish investors

Startup news 💡

• La Informacion looked into Cabify’s cap table and found out that Japanese commerce giant Rakuten owns 47% of the Spanish startup. Rakuten has invested €268 million into the company
• Cabify says that it has gained 100,000 users in just two weeks in Barcelona, as it resumed operations following new legislation by the local government
• Barcelona-based Mailtrack helps 1.2 million Gmail users monitor and manage essential business leads and relationships
• Very interesting profile of Burgos-based company ASTI Robotics and its founder and CEO Verónica Pascual Boé, which develops and sells robots to be used in factories
• Typeform launched Videoask, a video contact form feature
• ElDiario.es looked at Pep Gomez new project, escooter company Reby. Apparently the company has been fined several times by Barcelona’s local government for not respecting local regulation. Pep also published last week a Twitter thread about the escooter space and government regulation
• This article from El Referente talks a bit (not in-depth) about how OnTruck uses machine learning and business intelligence to help customers run their operations more efficiently
• Merca2 interviewed Marcos Alves, co-founder of ElTenedor, about the company’s expansion plans in Latam
• El Referente published an interesting interview with the founders of Ludus, a Basque virtual and mixed reality startup that builds solutions for enterprises to train their employees in industry and emergency situations
• British fintech startup GoCardless says that it plans to open an office in Spain in the next few months. Spain represents 5% of the company’s revenues
• Startup profiles:
• Datumize: product to transform dark data into new and powerful insights
• Edit: graphic design product
• Visualfy: hardware to make life easier for deaf people
• Dixper: free ultra low latency game streaming service that lets you play your PC games from the web browser
• Cobee: SaaS product to manage employee benefits

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Big company news 🏦

• Inditex is infusing the MIT with $4 million to fund a multiyear research project to explore global sustainability challenges as well as promote data analysis that can be applied to business
• Instagram launches shopping checkout, charging sellers a fee. Instagram has partnered with a limited number of companies around the world, including Zara (Inditex)
• Bizum, the mobile payments initiative launched by four Spanish banks, is looking to add new features (European transactions, online payments) as well as integrate with ING’s Twyp

Tech and policy 💂🏼

• Spanish association Adigital is pushing the government and companies to consider delivery riders as TRADE (Trabajador Autónomo Económicamente Dependiente), which would mean access to holidays, unemployment and education
• Madrid’s local government announced new legislation that will further regulate the operations of short term rental companies and property managers
• US-based Bird is one of the larger escooter startups in the world. The company was not awarded any escooter licenses by Madrid’s local government. According to El Español, Bird is lobbying hard in the Spanish capital to be able to operate

Interesting reads 🤓

• Great article in Xataka about sports betting in Spain and the risk it represents for society as a whole and specifically for residents in low-income neighborhoods
• Marina Zaliznyak of Bliss Ventures published an interesting Twitter thread about the HR function at startups
• Tomas Santoro of SumaCRM wrote about how they hire senior employees
• Raul Marcos (Crypto investor at Carbono): ’Is Facebook about to bring millions of users to crypto?’
• Pablo Santos (Codice Software, PlasticSCM): ’From Scrum to Kanban: how to deliver tasks twice as fast’

Podcasts of the week 🎧

• K Fund interviewed Maximo Gavete and Ismael Barros of Soluble Studio
• Itnig talked to Bernat Farrero, Jordi Romero (CEO Factorial), Oriol Blanc (director de producto en Quipu) and César Miguelañez (CPO Factorial) about product roadmap management
• Lunes Inspiradores interviewed Laura Gomez, CEO of Catevering
• Xataka interviewed professor Manuel Hidalgo about the impact of automation in the jobs market