Google is looking for health, wellbeing and lifestyle startups for its Growth Academy program.

After the travel and e-commerce editions of its Growth Academy, Google for Startups just announced a new edition of this intensive program to support B2C companies that are using technology to bring innovation to the Health and Wellbeing sectors, and improve people’s lives.

Access a 4 weeks 100% tailored program to help you tackle your most pressing challenges and grow your business. Connect with more than 15 international Google experts and analysts in over 20 online sessions and specific mentoring meetings, offering the best of Google’s expertise and network to support you with market analysis and trends, internationalization strategies, cloud technology, UX and sales strategies.

Apply before April 23rd!

Startup funding news 💸

• In Glovo's €450m round, announced last week, Delivery Hero participated with €229m of its own, increasing its stake in the logistics startup to 37%
• Barcelona-based Abacum raised $7m to empower finance teams with real-time data and collaboration tools. The round was led by Creandum (who wrote about the deal here ) and included the participation of ourselves at K Fund and PROFounders Capital. We first backed Abacum about a year ago when the company was pre-product, and their development since then has been outstanding
• Madrid-based crypto grading app Atani raised $6.25m, led by JME. The round included participation from Conexo, Encomenda and Lanai
• Madrid-based fintech startup Ritmo raised €3m from JME and Banco Sabadell
• Barcelona-based health startup mediQuo raised €2.3m from Encomenda and Dozen
• Other rounds of funding: full&fast, Triple O Games, WakeUp And Smile, miResi

M&A activity 🎊

• London/Boston/Kansas City-based PSG acquired a majority stake in Madrid’s end-to-end business software provider Nalanda

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• El Español published a profile of Aquilino Peña, co-founder of Kibo Ventures. In the article, Aquilino says that Kibo is raising a €30m opportunity fund on top of its 3rd fund, to back existing Kibo portfolio companies
• Also related to Kibo, Views published an interview with Sofnia Fernandez, General Partner at the firm
• Banco Santander, via Mouro Capital, participated in the $70m round of open banking startup TrueLayer
• THCAP invested $750k in US startup BuildBetter
• Sebastian Fernandez of Samaipata published a blog post on 'when should startups raise money? 'Key milestones ahead of your Seed round'
• Barcelona Activa released the name of 10 startups participating in its deep tech program, featuring 6 healthtech startups
• Startups' Oasis interviewed Rocio Pillado, partner at Adara Ventures
• Pepe Agell (Chartboost) and Mar Hershenson (Pear VC) have put together an event to help Spanish startups pitch US-based VCs

Startup news 💡

• Sponsored
  Google is looking for health, wellbeing and lifestyle startups for its Growth Academy program. Apply before April 23rd!
• Tech.eu published a profile of Madrid-based edtech company Lingokids. The company tripled revenues in 2020, reaching €30m, and currently has more than 25m users
• According to Bloomberg, Cabify has hired an outsider to be its chief financial officer in a step toward a potential initial public offering (IPO). Antonio Espana is the new CFO, who joins from Redexis and was previously CFO of Prosegur
• Cinco Dias published a profile of Internxt, a Valencia-based cloud hosting company that has built a privacy-focused solution that aims to compete with the likes of Dropbox and Google Drive
• Supermarket chain Aldi to rely on Glovo for last mile delivery of goods. Also related to Glovo, Startups' Oasis published a list of 10 companies co-founded by former employees of the company, the Glovo mafia
• David Bonilla of Manfred looks back on the company's two-year history, which included the growth of Manfred as a recruitment platform and also an exit
• Jose Carlos Cortizo announced the launch of Mumbler, a product for podcasters that want to build subscription-based podcast businesses
• 20Minutos profiled Barcelona-based audio API startup Aflorithmic. The company allows businesses and apps to embed text-to-speech-to-audio into their solution to make audio more scalable and personal to each of their listeners
• According to this article, online reputation SaaS company RepScan has turned profitable in its first month of activity
• Second hand clothing marketplace Micolet announced that it's expanding to men and kids clothing
• Nuevo Sector interviewed David Baratech, co-founder and co-CEO of Yaba, a startup that buys, funds and gives support to the growth of business based on Amazon FBA
• Fintech startup Monei to integrate Google Pay in its payments platform, following the previous addition of PayPal and Bizum
• Traveler published a profile of fashion brand Tropicfeel and talked to its co-founder, Alberto Espinos, about the origins of the company
• After years of internal legal battles, one of Housers' co-founders has left the company. The startup says that it plans to raise €4m in funding
• Alex Ferreiro of DayOne interviewed Eloi Gomez of Jeff, to talk about the company's expansion model and their combination of both online and offline operations
• Startup profiles: Urbanitae

Big company news 🏦

• Design company Figma published a blog post about how Repsol rethinks the way the world interacts with energy
• Marimar Jimenez of Cinco Dias interviewed Mariangela Marseglia, Amazon's country manager in Spain and Italy. The interview mostly focuses on the following topics: labour conditions, the Google Tax, antitrust investigations in Europe involving Amazon and the evolution of Amazon in Spain in the past 10 years
• Also on the topic of labour conditions in the logistics sector, elDiario published an interview with Patrik Bergareche, Just Eat's Spanish country manager
• Inditex has seen a huge uplift in online sales, which grew by 77% last year and reached €6.6b. Business Insider looked at the company's strategy and the steps they've taken in the past few years to get to this point. In another article on Inditex, Business Insider explores the increasing number of partnerships by the Galician giant, including the selling of third party products such as Hawkers, We Are Knitters and other brands

From the trenches 👷🏽‍♀️

• Francisco Rodríguez, data scientist at Glovo, published 'Powering Glovo’s Machine Learning with Real-Time Data, part I: introduction', as well as part II on 'Real-Time Data Aggregators' and part III on 'Event-Driven Architecture'
• David Stanete, engineering manager at Creditas and previously of Mercadona Tech, wrote the importance of having a business driven mindset even in product management roles. He also published the article in Spanish here
• Gabriel Peral, site reliability engineer at CoverWallet, wrote a blog explaining the process of how they changed the way of having the services exposed in the domains vs. the sub domain, to having them embedded in the path of the URL

Interesting reads 🤓

• According to an analysis on the Spanish gaming industry, 59% of studios increased its revenues last year, while only 25% saw a decline in activity, which goes on to show the resilience of the gaming sector during the pandemic
• El Español published an article on the current state of recruiting and the HR sector in Spain, featuring HR people from Lingokids, Ironhack, Ontruck and Endeavor
• El Español wrote about a study on the characteristics of women-led and founded companies: smaller, more profitable and with less debt. The study has many more data points
• Xataka published an interesting article on the future of Spain's "parques and polígonos tecnológicos". In Spain we love real estate and there are these tech parks all over the place. With more remote or distributed companies, the future doesn't seem too bright for these parks
• According to the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, ecommerce in Spain grew by more than 50% in 2020
• VC firm Encomenda Smart Capital published an ebook on how to do B2B sales, titled The Sales Acceleration Formula

Podcasts 🎧

• MarsBased interviewed Ana Cidre, senior developer advocate engineer at Auth0. They also interviewed Michael Counihan, managing partner at Transcend Partners a tech M&A boutique based in Barcelona
• K Fund interviewed Pablo Ferrari and Jorge Lluch, co-founders of Process Labs and Abacum, respectively, to talk about their experience going through YC
• Experiencias Emprendedoras interviewed François Derbaix of Indexa Capital and Bewater Funds
• Itnig interviewed Carlos Trenchs of Aldea Ventures
• SeedRocket interviewed Sara Werner, co-founder of Cocunat
• Marketing4Ecommerce interviewed Vicent Marti, co-founder and CMO of streaming company Streamloots
• Pushcamp interviewed Rocio Colmenar, founder of ecommerce company Miniplanta
• Better Conversations interviewed Lorenzo Espinosa, Director of Data Operations and Product at Chattermill
• Jaime Sotomayor interviewed Miguel Arias (Wayra) to talk about how to sell to big corporations
• Tecnologeria interviewed Ignacio Castaño, principal engineer at Roblox, to talk about computer graphics in the gaming sector