:cara_pensativa: What’s your company’s most valuable asset?

No doubt: the talent you attract :persona_tecnóloga: . However, if you've hired people before, you know the struggle of hiring the best talent on massive platforms and the high cost and lengthy process of traditional headhunters.

Thankfully, we have a solution: :telescopio: Telescope is a reversed headhunting platform powered by Nova, in which you'll be able to spot and apply to superstars :estrella2: who are open to a career change or a gig opportunity.

The candidates on Telescope are all Nova members (top 3% talent, vetted by a rigorous selection process) and their profiles will remain :sabueso_o_espía: anonymous until they accept your request (high potentials don’t want the world to know they are open for a change).

If you want to invest time only on pre-vetted candidates and avoid the high cost of headhunters, sign up today to Telescope and start hiring superstars. You’ll get 1 month for free with the discount code DEALFLOW :cohete:

Startup funding news 💸

• Koa Health, a Barcelona-based digital mental healthcare provider, announced a €30m Series A round of funding. The company is spin out from Alpha, Telefónica’s startup factory
• Madrid-based biotech and medical devices company MedLumics raised €18m, led by Asabys Partners and Kurma Partners
• Barcelona-based mobility startup BusUp raised $6m to bring shared commute service to the US
• Barcelona-based home fitness startup Volava raised €2m from JME and Inveready
• Madrid and San Francisco-based Lang.ai raised $2m to remove technical burden of implementing AI for businesses. The round was led by Village Global
• Barcelona-based ecommerce logistics company Kubbo raised €1m, led by THCAP
• Other rounds of funding: Inbiot Monitoring, Koiki

M&A activity 🎊

• MasMovil announced the acquisition of energy startup Lucera, a portfolio company of ours at K Fund. Lucera currently has more than 100k clients. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. La Informacion has more details about the transaction here

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• Inveready announced a €2m investment in German co-living startup Habyt
• Adara Ventures announced an investment in London-based API security company 42Crunch
• Nuevo Sector interviewed Luis Martin Cabiedes of Cabiedes & Partners
• Webcapitalriesgo sat down with Nauta Capital's venture partner, Pratima Aiyagari, and principals Borja Breña and Markus Düttmann to discuss their 2021 insights, and the technologies, verticals, and ecosystems they are most excited about
• Expansion wrote a profile of Valencia-based investor GoHub Ventures

Startup news 💡

• Sponsored
  Telescope is a reverse headhunting platform focused on the top 3% of talent. All of their candidates are high potential individuals who have undergone a rigorous selection process. If you want to invest time only on pre-vetted candidates and avoid the high cost of headhunters, sign up today to Telescope and start hiring superstars
• Daily Finance wrote an article highlighting what they believe are the top fintech companies in Spain at the moment
• European publication Sifted asked five Spanish investors which local startups they're keeping a close eye on and here are the ones that they recommended
• El Referente published a long overview of the Spanish foodtech market and its various participants. It's a quite comprehensive list of the sector
• Cinco Dias published details about Glovo's financials. In 2019, Glovo tripled its revenues (€218m) and doubled its loss (€199m)
• Wallapop was valued at €450m in 2020, up from €305m in 2019, according to data from one of its investors Vostok New Ventures. Wallapop's revenues last year could have also reached $60m
• Novicap, the fintech startup that allows companies to unlock cash stuck in outstanding invoices and improve their cash flow, disclosed great performance in 2020. It helped more than 1,000 companies unlock cash and it increased its business volume by 50% with €206m financed
• I wrote an article on K Fund's blog about our portfolio company Exoticca. The travel company currently led by Pere Valles faced a tough year in 2020 due to the pandemic but has been able to navigate it quite efficiently and he openly discussed what they did
• Analia Plaza of elDiario wrote an interesting profile of Kave Home, Muebles Lufe, Kenay Home and Sklum, all ecommerce companies that sell furniture online that survived the financial crisis and that have positioned themselves as growing and profitable businesses
• Car leasing company Vamos says that it grew 300% in 2020, surpassing €10m in sales. Vamos also announced that business angels Iñaki Berenguer and Martin Varsavsky have joined the company as investors
• Travel startup GuruWalk says that, despite the pandemic, it increased revenues by 1.5X in 2020, reaching €300k. They did this by mostly focusing on same-city and same-country tours
• Yabba is a new startup out of Barcelona in the ecommerce space that intends to acquire Amazon FBA businesses in order to grow them and create a holding company with synergies among them
• Jeff to open 30 laundry hubs in the Philippines. During the pandemic in 2020, Jeff opened 185 Jeff laundry hubs around the world
• Xataka published a long profile of Devo, the Madrid and Boston-based cloud-native logging solution that delivers real-time visibility for security and operations teams
• Carlos Gomez, CEO of hospitality startup Cheerfy, published a post about boutique marketplaces, the democratization of food delivery and how his company positions itself in the current market environment
• Telefonica to help launch Shaadow, a security startup in the field of document protection and anti fraud
• Startup profiles: Transparent CDN, Heura, Wooptix

Big company news 🏦

• Google announced today that it plans to invest more than $650m over five years in Spain, including the installation of a cybersecurity ‘Centre Of Excellence’ in the city of Malaga. Congrats to Bernardo Quintero and the VirusTotal gang (the cybersecurity startup Google acquired in 2012) for the achievement

Tech and policy 💂🏼‍♂️

• The Spanish government unveiled more details of its strategy to transform Spain into a "Entrepreneurship Nation". The whole document can be read here. The document does not go into specific measures or laws that the government plans to pass to achieve such goals, and those are expected to be announced in the following months. Both Xataka and Expansion published articles with reactions from both startups and investors. Miguel Arias (Wayra) also posted about it here
• The city of Malaga wants to position itself as a prime destination for digital nomads and remote workers. In order to do that, it launched an initiative called Malaga WorkBay which, for now, aggregates info on the assets the city offers in order to encourage people to move
• An article in El Confidencial says that there are strong disagreements within the Spanish government with regards to labour regulation that will affect not only riders of food delivery companies, but also other segments of the market. The main topic being discussed is whether to consider digital platforms an employer or a tool

Interesting reads 🤓

• Miguel Carranza, co-founder and CTO of RevenueCat, wrote a blog post about the importance of any startup's first five employees
• Javi Santana, co-founder and CTO of Tinybird, wrote 'open source software and innovation within companies'
• David Bonilla (Manfred) wrote 'the map', about the use of tech challenges and tests in hiring processes
• Samuel Gil (JME) wrote a post about the book 'Anything you want', the story of Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby
• Didac Lee (TradeInn, Galdana) published an article to claim that Barcelona has a great opportunity to become the largest sports hub in the world
• Javier Meizoso, of Legalpin and Espadasymas, wrote about his experience being both a father and an entrepreneur

Podcasts 🎧

• K Fund interviewed Iker Marcaide to talk about his new projects at Zubi Labs
• Itnig interviewed Jordi Plana, CEO of Beezy
• En.digital interviewed Miguel Angel Anton, CEO of insurtech startup Elma
• Code On The Rocks interviewed Jorge Galindo (47 Degrees) and David Pardo (Corunet)