AWS has just announced a new edition of its Startup Day: a free, half-day and fully online event for founders, business and technical stakeholders, and developers that it will take place on October 21st.

The event will kick off with a keynote by Jeff Barr, AWS Chief Evangelist, where he’ll explain how Amazon thinks about innovation, and will be followed by sessions from founders of companies like Fintonic, Talkdesk and Didimo as well as from AWS technical experts.

Whether you are a new startup launching your product or an existing startup looking for ways to grow your business, you will learn something new at the AWS Startup Day. You’ll get to hear about building and maintaining great startup culture, all the way to the right decisions to make to scale your cloud infrastructure to more than 10 million clients or how to combine DevOps with Lean Startup to reach great outcomes.

It’s the perfect environment for business and technical people to share their successes, learn best practices, and adopt new technologies. It’s free, it’s just half a day, it's both in Spanish and English and it’s a great place to learn from people who have done it before. A win-win if you ask me! Sign up here for either the business or technical track!

Startup funding news 💸

• Spanish startups raised a combined €115m across 33 deals in September
• Barcelona-based car comparison site Carnovo raised €6.5 million
• Aragon-based security startup IriusRisk raised €5.7m, led by US investor Paladin Capital. Previous investor and local funds JME and Swanlaab also participated in the round
• Barcelona-based Emjoy, an audio app for women that sells a narrative of sexual self-care and empowerment, picked up $3m in seed funding led by JME Ventures, with existing investor Nauta Capital also participating
• Barcelona-based biotech startup Connecta Therapeutics raised €1.7m
• Madrid-based fintech startup Devengo raised €1.3m from various private investors. Co-founder Alberto Molpeceres wrote about the financing here
• Other rounds of €500k or less: Wolo, OX Motorcycles, Captoplastic, Next Electric Motors

M&A activity 🎊

• Scytl's creditors, mostly banks that are owed €30m, continue to negotiate with Irish group Paragon the sale of the company
• The three funds that could be soon owners of MasMovil (Cinven, KKR and Providence), have a signed a committment not to sell the telco in the next twelve months after completing the transaction. It seems as if the Spanish telco sector is trending towards consolidation

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• Carmen Alfonso Rico has joined London VC firm Blossom Capital as partner. Carmen was previously partner at Madrid-based VC Samaipata. Congrats!
• Faraday to launch a new €40 million fund to invest in European startups
• Capital Energy Quantum is a new €20 million fund to invest in energy, cleantech and sustainability startups
• Business Insider talked to Luis Cabiedes of Cabiedes & Partners about his areas of investment focus at the moment
• The Venture City announced the name of the six new startups that will participate in its accelerator program: Fridai (Germany), Wannalisn and Internxt (Spain), Condofy and PLIPAG (Brazil)
• TechCrunch talked to 9 Spanish investors about remote work, green shoots and 2020 trends, as well as about the impact of COVID-19 era and look to the future
• Wayra and Lanzadera signed an agreement to share dealflow with one another and help each other's startups on business development and other aspects
• Emprendedores interviewed Tom Horsey, business angel that's quite active in Andalucia and founder of StartupLabs Spain
• GoHub is looking for startups to join its next accelerator program in the areas of AI, IoT and other B2B areas

Startup news 💡

• Sponsored
  AWS is bringing together Fintonic’s founder and co-CEO, the founder of Didimo, AWS’s Chief evangelist and several technical experts for their Startup Day Online on October 21st. AWS Startup Day will be an online and free half day event that will offer business and technical knowledge for startups in growth phases and with that line up, the day promises to be interesting
• Wetaca is on a roll. According to an article published by Cinco Dias, the food tech company expects to reach €7m in sales this year (+98% YoY) and profitability. Some other interesting figures about the company: 4.2k weekly orders, average order value of €40, 2.5 orders per customer
• Valencia Plaza published an interesting interview with Juan Luis Hortelano, co-founder of Blinkfire Analytics and also president of the Valencia startup association. He talked about the evolution of the Valencia ecosystem, what they've done to promote it and what's left to do
• TravelPerk launched an open API platform to extend its work trip SaaS, letting its customers and partners build custom integration and apps. The initial APIs cover HR and expense management use-cases, but more are set to be added as usage and demand grows
• Could idealista's exit spark an 'idealista mafia' of entrepreneurs and investors? Business Insider talked about this with Manuel Mates (Big Sur Ventures), Mauricio Prieto (eDreams), Samuel Gil (JME) and others
• Business Insider profiled Sara Serantes and its food tech startup Susifresh and Freshperts. She claims in the article that the company has surpassed €20 million in sales since the founding of the company eight years ago
• Location intelligence startup CARTO explained in an article how they've implemented several upgrades that improve CARTO's platform performance by more than 20%
• Javi Lopez, co-founder and CEO of Erasmusu, disclosed in a tweet the company's revenues and website traffic. €800k in 2020 (vs. 1.6m in 2019) due to the pandemic, and 40m pageviews (vs. 64m in 2019)
• Glovo launched a new logistics service for NGOs and social enterprises
• Talent agency Manfred disclosed its financials for August 2020
• El Confidencial wrote about Lanzadera's activity in the gaming space, sparked by the success of Codigames
• Iron Hack published its student outcomes report for the first half of 2019, looking at how its helped students find jobs after participating in its various programs
• Minimumrun explained in a blog post how it helped Alarma Guardia create a web product for home alarm rentals using low-code tools
• Actualidad Economica talked to Payflow, Odilo and other startups about how they offer work-life balance and professional flexibility to its employees
• Startups' Oasis interviewed Albert Nieto, co-founder of Seedtag, to talk about what his company does, the adtech market and the more than 1,000 brands that to date have worked with the company
• Startup profiles: Situm, Vamos.es

Big company news 🏦

• El Corte Ingles has launched its own equivalent of Amazon Prime. For €19,90 per year, customers can get 24 hour deliveries and other discounts
• Telefonica has taken its merger with Virgin to Brussels and the European Commission. The deal needs to receive regulatory approval and, if so, could be completed by November
• Telefonica launched Movistar Salud, a telehealth service in collaboration with US company Teladoc
• Spanish regulator CNMC has ruled that Amazon's logistics division should be considered as a postal service, and thus should be subjected to Spanish rules and protections when it comes to the disclosure of logistic fees, transparency, etc
• Amazon says that it's looking to hire 100 software developers in Madrid. The company currently employs more than 1,000 people in its Spanish headquarters
• Amazon launched Audible in Spain, its audiobook service
• Spain to put on hold a contract it had with Huawei as a provider of products and services to the Instituto Nacional de Ciberseguridad (Incibe)
• Google has a new subsidiary in Spain, fully owned by one of its Irish entities, to manage the company's cloud business

Interesting reads 🤓

• European publication Sifted wrote: 'Spain’s copycat startups: shame or gain?' The usual (and old) topic of whether Spanish startups are innovative or copycats
• Didac Lee (FC Barcelona, Galdana Ventures) was interviewed to talk about his professional trajectory, his view on Silicon Valley and innovation, what Spain and Barcelona can do to catch up, among other topics
• Samuel Gil (JME) wrote 'Core actions y aha! moments'

Podcasts 🎧

• Acelerando Empresas interviewed Antonio Bustamante, CEO of CheKin
• Itnig interviewed Nico Bour of Uvinum
• Fintech startup NoviCap has started a podcast and published its first three interviews
• SeedRocket interviewed Evaristo Babe of Pulpomatic
• MarsBased interviewed Laura Gascón of DPL ETT