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Startup funding news 💸

• Barcelona-based travel startup TravelPerk announced a $160m round, which consists of a mix of equity and debt. The round was led by London-based growth equity firm Greyhound Capital. The company says that it managed to grow its customer base 2x in 2020 (it now has 3,000+ businesses using its platform) and that it avoided making layoffs. According to La Informacion, in 2019 TravelPerk had sales of €130m and posted a loss of €24m
• London and Barcelona-based Arbolus raised $6m from Fuel Ventures and Plug and Play to apply ML to expert knowledge
• Barcelona-based MagicBell raised $1.9m to build a plug-and-play notification platform for product teams
• Murcia-based agritech startup Agrosingularity raised €1m
• Madrid-based Rocket-Design-as-a-Service company Ienai Space raised €1m from Inveready
• Gijon-based ticking startup Okticket raised €700k from Encomenda and Successful Ventures
• Other rounds of funding: Acqustic, Leadartis, Evis, Familiados, Landbot
• Startups looking for funding: Alterhome

M&A activity 🎊

• According to Onur Genç, CEO of BBVA, the Spanish bank will get a profit of €200m to €250m on its Coinbase investment

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• Seaya Ventures led a $6.5m round in Lisbon retail tech company Sensei
• Yisios Capital led a €51m round in Danish biotech company Adcendo
• The Venture City (TVC) announced that it has completed the first closing of its new €100m fund. The first closing reached €70m. Also, TVC published last week its VC report that covers investment activity in Q1 2021 across North America, Europe and Latam
• Spanish food giant Pascual launched its first accelerator program to collaborate with startups in the foodtech space
• Glovo and Lanzadera signed a partnership to promote foodtech companies and projects
• Kapita, the new investment firm launched by Dimas Gimeno (former president of El Corte Ingles) to invest in retail tech, hired Darío Villena (formerly if Swanlaab) as its investment director
• Faraday Venture Partners to start investing in Benelux, and later on in other European countries such as Poland and Italy

Startup news 💡

• As I've covered in the past, smartphone manufacturer BQ ceased operations a few months ago and went into liquidation. As a result of the process, more information is coming out about how the company operated and other internal issues. The assets of BQ are being valued at negative €28m in the liquidation process
• Sales tax automation platform Quaderno announced the launch of Quaderno Connect, a product that allows platforms and marketplaces to give their merchants the automatic sales tax solution they need to be successful
• Fintech startup Monei announced the integration of Apple Pay in its suite of products. It now offers support for Apple Pay, Bizum, PayPal and Google Pay
• 1.070 KM Hub is a new initiative that aims to better connect the startup and innovation ecosystems of several Spanish Mediterranean cities
• Expansion published an overview of the Basque startup program Bind 4.0, focusing on the companies that have participated in the program and how they bring collaboration closer between startups and corporates
• Barter Energy is a new company co-founded by Martin Varsavsky that plans to enter the business of manufacturing systems for electrical self-consumption
• Glovo says that it plans to launch 100 new dark stores across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Also, Glovo has left the CEOE because it believes the organisation has not taken into account Glovo's interest in the negotiation with the Spanish government of the rider law
• El Español interviewed and profiled Lola Priego, formerly of Facebook, Instagram and Amazon, and now co-founder of health tech startup Base. Base is an app that allows consumers to track your sleep/stress/immunity/energy with tests at-home or directly at the lab
• El Confidencial profiled Avalisto, a company in the real estate sector that helps landlords perform a better scoring of tenants by looking at a bunch of their personal information that's already available online. According to the article, the company did €1m in sales last year
• Startup profiles: Made of Genes, Mediquo

Startup financials & numbers 🔢

• Delivery Hero (DH) owns more than 35% of Glovo. DH is a public company, which means that it needs to disclose a ton of information about some of its main investments, which means that through their filings we have visibility of how Glovo's business is doing. According to La Informacion, Glovo almost doubled sales in 2020, to €400m, and significantly decreased its losses, from €190m in 2019 to €45m in 2020. The improvement in (un)profitability is mostly due to the sale of its Latam business to DH
• Business Insider profiled Deporvillage, the Catalan ecommerce company that reached sales of €120m last year and expects to get to €175m in 2021
• Talent agency Manfred disclosed its financials for March 2021: sales of €121k (+73% MoM) and invoicing of €124k (+134%)
• In an interview, Covermanager CEO José Antonio Pérez says that the company expects to increase sales by 2.2X this year. According to the CEO, the company had doubled sales for several consecutive years until the pandemic started. Covermanager is a bootstrapped company out of Sevilla that sells reservation software to hospitality businesses
• Roboadvisor Finizens says that it's currently adding 1,000 new clients per month to its platform. Finizens had 10k customers at the end of 2020 and says that it expects to reach 20k by the end of this year

From the trenches 👷🏽‍♀️

• Elizabeth Corbacho, product operations lead at Ontruck, published 'A year doing product operations at Ontruck', which has the goal of strengthening the relationship between their product-tech and business teams
• Tomas España, head of M&A Origination at Yaba, wrote a blog post to explain how they buy, finance and scale Amazon-based businesses

Bit2Me is a suite for buying, selling, exchanging, and managing cryptocurrencies and euros that currently has 49 cryptocurrencies listed. Its purpose is to facilitate access and support new users who are interested in this sector by offering them all the solutions to their crypto needs.

Big company news 🏦

• Jesus Martinez has a good analysis of MasMovil's M&A and business strategy. The telco has 10 different brands under its MasMovil umbrella and has refused to consolidate these brands, since they cater to different customer segments
• After June 15th, users that make more than 60 Bizum transactions per month will have to pay. The current limit was set at 150

Interesting reads 🤓

• Eduardo Manchon (Mailtrack) published an interesting op-ed about the difficult relationship between Spain's largest banks and innovation and technology. He calls it the "cockroach on the screen" effect. Philippe Gelis, co-founder of fintech startup Kantox, replied to Eduardo's tweet with more interesting facts about the topic
• Samuel Gil (JME) wrote about the differences between VC, venture debt and revenue-based financing. JME recently backed revenue-based financing company Ritmo
• Caroline Lagergren (Expand to Spain) published '6 soon-to-become unicorns from Spain, probably more undetected in Valencia, Bilbao and Malaga'
• Jordi Ordoñez, ecommerce specialist, published a blog post explaining 'what's often not explained about selling on Amazon'

Podcasts 🎧

• Jordi Altimira interviewed Ramon Martinez, CEO of Dentaltix
• Ion Cuervas interviewed Jaime Rodriguez de Santiago, founder of Kaizen and also head of Spain at Free Now
• Itnig interviewed Miquel Subirats, CEO and co-founder of StockAgile
• SeedRocket interviewed Bcome's co-founders Anna Cañadell and Alba Garcia
• Novicap interviewed Enrique Tombas, founder of Suma Capital