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Investing in SeedRocket winners. Devo wins big US contract. Alibaba to buy Glovo?

July 20, 2020 • Issue #226

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Startup funding news 💸

  • Barcelona-based motorbike sharing company Yego raised €7.5 million
  • Navarra's biotech startup Telum Therapeutics raised €4.1 million, led by Invivo Ventures
  • Barcelona-based home care startup Cuideo raised €1.6 million, led by Alma Mundi Ventures
  • Barcelona-based fintech startup Payflow raised €1.6 million from Rocket Internet, Lanai Partners, Itnig and other investors. Here's more info on the company
  • Barcelona-based fintech startup Finnu, which gives loans for phones (without taking them away from their owners), announced pre-seed funding of $800,000 from Speedinvest, Kima Ventures, Seedrocket4Founders and ArkFund
  • VC firm Bonsai Partners acquired a stake in Madrid-based insurtech startup Codeoscopic
  • Startups looking for funding: Brava Fabrics, Carnovo

M&A activity 🎊

  • According to Cronica Global, Alibaba could be in negotiations with Glovo to acquire the company

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

  • According to an analysis published by Expansion, if you had invested in each and every single startup that has won SeedRocket, you'd have a 3.7X multiple. Great stuff
  • Axon Partners announced a new €150 million fund to back technology companies
  • Javier Megias of Fundacion Bankinter published a report on startup investment activity in Spain in Q2 2020. More info also here
  • The Venture City announced the name of the six startups participating in its July growth program
  • ENISA published a report on the societal and employment impact of their loans
  • Jordi Altimira of Lanzame Capital wrote about the importance of diversifying when investing

Startup news 💡

  • Neobank Bnext to start offering its customers a Spanish IBAN and other services more typical of banks, thanks to deeper collaboration with Mastercard. The company also announced big design changes to its app and online properties, which they wrote about here and here
  • Madrid-based cloud analytics and security startup Devo signed a $9.5 million contract with the US Air Force
  • La Informacion looked at the issues Housers continues to face, including complaints from investors in its platform as well as the legal battle between its co-founders
  • Miguel Angel Fajardo, CTO of fintech startup Ninety Nine, wrote a post about their learnings building Ninety Nine and the technical decisions taken to overcome some of the challenges encountered
  • Iron Hack and Landing.jobs launched a program of up to €300,000 in scholarsips to help those affected by covid-19
  • I wouldn't call El Confidencial a startup, but this is an interesting article they published a few weeks ago about the beginnings of the company, their evolution since and their recent move towards a subscription-based model
  • Soluble Studio published a report on their work with fintech startup Aplazame, which involved a new brand and website for the company
  • Xoel Lopez of NoiceJobs was interviewed and talked about how to get a remote developer job by learning online
  • Startup profiles: RatedPower

Big company news 🏦

  • Uber to lay off 30% of its workforce in Spain
  • Apple and Ireland won an appeal against the European Commission’s $15 billion tax ruling. La Informacion looked into the impact this decision might have on the Spanish Google Tax and other European regulation
  • Merca2 had access to a report put together by BBVA in October 2016 about MasMovil. Interesting to see how the big bank viewed MasMovil at the time in the Spanish telco context, and how the company story has evolved since then
  • El Confidencial wrote about the stock performance of Zalando and Asos, and how it compares to Inditex as they battle for ecommerce leadership in the European fashion market

Interesting reads 🤓

  • Nico Bour of Uvinum, wrote a long post about the story of the startup, which he helped co-found and got acquired a few years ago by Pernod Ricard. Very well documented and worth a read
  • Ignacio Arriaga of Acumbamail wrote a Twitter thread about bonus and economic incentives in startups and how they might hurt (or not) creativity and risk taking

Podcasts 🎧

  • El Referente has a new podcast and interviewed Javier Megias (Bankinter) in its first episode
  • K Fund interviewed Manu Heredia, co-founder of Besoccer and ProfootballDB
  • Itnig recorded a podcast about product development featuring Factorial and Typeform
  • En.digital recorded a podcast about sales and marketing strategies in B2B companies

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