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Nauta and K Fund have new funds. TravelPerk acquires API startup. Teltoo acquired.

July 13, 2020 • Issue #225

Taxfix is on a mission to help people get their maximum tax refund effortlessly, without needing prior tax knowledge. Our user-friendly Taxfix App enables people to file their tax declaration within 22 minutes on average using a chat-like interface to guide the process.

To date, Taxfix has raised $110 million in funding from some of the world’s top investors - Index Ventures, Valar Ventures, Creandum, and Redalpine. We achieved this by putting our customers at the core of everything we do and by helping them save millions of euros every week.

The company has offices in Berlin and Madrid and is looking to add several profiles in the Spanish capital. Scroll down to find out more.

Startup funding news 💸

  • According to a study from Universo Crowdfunding, all varieties of crowdfunding (equity, reward, lending, etc) combined for €200 million raised in 2019
  • Madrid-based logistics startup GOI raised €17 million from Moira Capital. According to the announcement, Moira will end up owning approximately 50% of GOI
  • Barcelona-based biotech company DeepUII raised €3.5 million from Alta Life Sciences, Kurma Partners and Sofimac Innovation
  • Barcelona-based gaming startup Champion Games raised €1 million Play Ventures and Encomenda
  • Other financing rounds: HUBUC
  • Startups looking for funding: Adtuo

M&A activity 🎊

  • Canadian company Haivision acquired Teltoo, a Spanish technology company innovating in the field of peer-to-peer (P2P) and WebRTC enabled real-time video delivery. Terms of the deal were not disclosed
  • Barcelona-based TravelPerk bought Albatross, an API for virus-related travel restrictions, to expand risk management offering. Avi Meir, CEO of TravelPerk, wrote about the deal in this Twitter thread

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

  • Nauta Capital announced a new €120 million fund to back early-stage European B2B startups. Nauta also disclosed its first investment out of its new fund, in UK startup NumberEight
  • At K Fund, we announced a new €70 million fund and the launch of K Founders, an investment program aimed at pre-seed startups with tickets of up to €100,000. We wrote about K Founders here
  • Telefonica invested in American and Swiss IoT startup Nozomi Networks

Startup news 💡

  • Mailtrack, creators of the popular email tracking for Gmail software, announced the launch of its email-tracking add-on on iOS. In the blog post, Mailtrack claims to have 1.5 million active users
  • El Referente profiled StudentFinance, a Spanish startup co-founded by Mariano Kostelec, co-founder of Uniplaces. StudentFinance helps students, companies and educational institutions implement Income Share Agreement (ISA) programs. The company has raised €1.1 million to date
  • In a podcast, Javier Arroyo of Smartick says that the company currently has 35,000 paid users (out of a total of 50,000) and that since covid-19 it has increased the number of students using its platform by 2.4X
  • El Español profiled Taxdown, the Madrid-based startup that helps people do their taxes and save money doing it
  • Fernando Summers, CEO of insurance comparison site Rastreator, talked in an interview about how the company plans to go full remote
  • La Vanguardia talked to Carlos Pierre, co-founder of Badi, about the company's history and current situation. Carlos says that demand has dropped by 70% as a consequence of covid-19
  • Hiring community Circular announced the launch of Talent Pool for VCs, a tool to help investors share potential candidates with their portfolio companies
  • Car ecommerce company Clicars claims to have grown its business by 62% in 2020 and to have processed €120 million in sales since being founded
  • CSS Tricks wrote a long profile of Madrid-based Frontity, calling it "React for Wordpress"
  • Jorge Gomez Sancha, co-founder of Tinybird, wrote a Twitter thread about how they do sales at the company
  • French proptech startup Unlatch raised €5.2 million and said one of the main objectives it has is to expand its real estate sales platform to Spain and the UK
  • Startup profiles: Shellock, DatMean

Taxfix offices in Berlin and Madrid are home to a diverse team of 200+ people who come from more than 40 nations around the world. And with our most recent funding round, we’re looking to scale our team even further.

Every day we welcome new challenges that help us further our mission: to cure tax filing chaos. Why? Because billions of euros in tax refunds are unclaimed each year.

Interested in joining us as a product manager or engineering manager? Learn more about our Madrid engineering team and culture.

Big company news 🏦

  • Expansion wrote about the data centre plans of Amazon, Microsoft and Google in Spain: 'Spain emerges as a cloud European hub'
  • Virgin's Hyperloop project in Spain has been paused. The American company claims that it has not received help from CDTI in the form of public funding

Interesting reads 🤓

  • I don't usually include links about the situation of R&D spending and research in Spain, but these two published last week are worth reading: 'La burocracia mata la investigación española contra el covid' and 'La letra pequeña del plan de I+D: una lotería para tapar agujeros a la espera de la UE'
  • Diego Mariño wrote a blog post about product management and the 'Product Briefing' document
  • Miguel Arias, Director of Wayra, wrote 'Rethinking the corporate accelerator model'
  • Samuel Gil (JME) wrote 'The 10 commandments of fundraising'

Podcasts 🎧

  • K Fund interviewed Juan Pablo Tejela, co-founder of Metricool. The bootstrapped company has reached $100,000 in MRR with no outside financing
  • Itnig interviewed Sisco Sapena, co-founder of Lleida.net
  • En.digital interviewed Aritza Loroño and José Mari del Moral, co-founders of Micolet and Colectivia
  • Mas Que Startups (is back!) interviewed Jose Ignacio Andres, co-founder of Nailted

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