Sabemos que las finanzas son importantes para ti. El principal problema que tenemos es que a veces no podemos tomar las decisiones correctas en el momento oportuno.

En Lean Finance van un paso más allá. Son especialistas en finanzas y te ayudan a conocer en cada momento tus resultados. Con ellos tomarás mejores decisiones basadas en tiempo real, sin esperar a tu asesor y teniendo tus datos en el momento exacto. Gracias a su servicio de “Departamento de administración externalizada” con Holded, podrás preocuparte solo de tomar las decisiones correctas. Si aún no trabajas con Holded no te preocupes, ellos harán todo por ti.

Contacta con ellos aquí y te harán un diagnóstico de tus necesidades de forma gratuita.

Startup funding news 💸

• Barcelona-based next-gen orthodontics maker Impress raised $50m in Series A round
• Madrid-based blockchain startup eCustoms raised €846k
• Madrid-based health startup Optyfy raised €515k
• Valencia-based Jeff raised an undisclosed round of funding from Clean Ventures to help with its US expansion
• Other rounds of funding: Flaps, Stockagile, Sherpa.ai, Hyrise Academy

M&A activity 🎊

• In this newsletter, I tend to cover the stories entrepreneurs and startups that decide to build their companies from Spain. However, there's also a significant diaspora of Spanish founders that at some point of their careers decided to move to the US to launch their startups. This is the case of Eduardo Vilar (Returnly), Maria Alegre and Pepe Agell (Chartboost) and Iker Marcaide (Flywire), and all of them are -or will be soon- involved in significant M&A transactions. La Informacion wrote about their stories, which I believe are fantastic for the Spanish startup ecosystem, despite most of these companies having their headquarters in the US
• Expansion wrote an article about startups that merged with their closest competitors, featuring Gudog and others
• Glovo acquired Slovenian competitor Ehrana. Jobandtalent also acquired a competitor, Sweden-based Lema

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• Accel Partners launched last week its scout program. The idea is that VC firms give some money (in the case of Accel €200k per scout) to well-connected individuals across various geographies and sectors so that they can write angel checks. I'm including this here because one of Accel's scouts is Rika Christanto, COO of Madrid-based Ontruck. Accel also disclosed that one of the first of these scout-led investments was in Madrid-based health startup Idoven
• Nauta Capital published an interesting deep dive into Europe’s booming Open Source Market
• Spain’s market regulator CNMV announced that it will allow firms operating funds to make crypto investments, but only under certain conditions. Also last week, Spanish stock exchange Bolsas y Mercados Españoles (BME) announced that they will be introducing a regulatory sandbox for blockchain-based financing of small to medium-sized enterprises
• Wayra and Startupxplore announced a partnership that will promote co-investments as well as business development opportunities for Startupxplore-backed startups with Telefonica
• Enion Capital Partners launches a new €25m fund to invest in companies in the energy sector

Startup news 💡

• Sponsored
  If you're an early stage startup that wants to outsource the often tedious administrative and finance-related tasks, take a look at Lean Finance 's integration with Holded and their other services.
• elDiario published a must-read interview with Agustin Gomez, former co-founder and CEO of Wallapop. I've gotten to known Agustin a bit better in the past few years, and I have to say it's one of the best interviews he's given
• The Spanish government officially passed the Rider Law, that will force companies that rely on last mile delivery riders to hire them as full time employees instead of as contractors. El Pais has a breakdown of what the law implies. Companies affected, including the likes of Glovo and Deliveroo, have three months to upgrade riders to this new employment status
• In an interview, Bernardo Hernandez, CEO of Verse, provided some figures on the company's traction and also talked about the competition Bizum poses. Verse has almost 2m users, the average transaction is €20 and total transacted volume is close to €1b. In 2020, Square acquired Verse
• El Mundo interviewed Juan Urdiales, co-founder of Jobandtalent. Juan talks about the keys of Jobandtalent's success to date and he also provides some numbers on their traction. €271m in sales in 2019, more than 600 employees, 850 companies use the platform to look for temporary employees and he estimates that 80,000 have found a job using the app
• Cabify to expand its logistics service to four more cities. The company says that the service is growing at a 30% monthly rate
• More details about Dimas Gimeno's 'retail phygital' initiative (WOW) have come out, which you can read here and here
• El Confidencial wrote an article ($) about Kubik Data, a Barcelona-based startup that promises to help users monetise their data. The article claims that the company has spent €1.6m to date while unfulfilling customer's hopes
• Expansion published a long article ($) about Y Combinator and several Spanish startups that have participated in the accelerator program in recent times, featuring Abacum, Process Labs and Belvo. Both Abacum and Process Labs are K Fund portfolio companies
• El Pais profiled Galician startup Monkey Markets, a data company that helps other businesses export their goods and services in China
• Swipcar, a startup that has a car subscription service, says that it currently has 500 monthly subscribers
• Nocodehackers, a platform to learn about the no-code movement and how to use various tools to build products and services, to become part of the Minimumrun family
• elDiario had a story on Jeff and protests of some of its franchisees
• Startup profiles: Genially, Banzzu, Barkibu, Vegan Food Club

From the trenches 👷🏽‍♀️

• Antón Rodríguez, software engineer at New Relic, wrote an article about his thoughts on the Principal Software Engineer role
• Andres Dancausa, partner at The Venture City and previously co-founder of SofiaSquare, wrote 'OKRs – How to implement them effectively in your company'

Big company news 🏦

• Orange announced layoffs that will impact 485 people, or 15% of its staff in Spain
• Telefonica announced its results for the first quarter of 2021. Sales dropped by 9% compared to the same year-ago period, but profit grew by 118%
• Amadeus lost €95m in Q1 2020, as sales decreased by more than 50%
• Spanish regulator CNMC said, for the second time, that Google has a dominant position in the online advertising market but that it hasn't abused or taking advantage of its power
• Labour unions and employees of its distribution centres have approved Amazon's proposal to improve the labour conditions of its workers

Interesting reads 🤓

• Deloitte published a report on the last mile logistics sector. The report focuses on challenges and opportunities in last mile delivery, as well as new models and solutions, such as urban fulfillment centres and other areas
• Here's an interesting overview of mixx.io, the newsletter and podcast business run by Alex Barredo. Alex has more than 9,000 newsletter subscribers, 300,000 monthly podcast downloads and sales of €3,000 per month
• Interesting article by Manuel Zafra (and subsequent LinkedIn debate ) about how ecommerce brands could lower their dependency on Google and Facebook to acquire customers
• MujerHoy interviewed Pilar Manchon, Senior Director of Research Strategy at Google
• Caroline Lagergren of Expand To Spain published 'A power player in Europe's green transition - Spain is reclaiming its dominance from a decade ago'
• Talking about newsletters, Chus Navarro published a study about the newsletter sector, featuring yours truly and others. The study looks at open rates, monetisation strategies, most used tools, etc

Podcasts 🎧

• K Fund interviewed Manu Gamero, co-founder of Sensa, to talk about product and digital design
• Lanzadera interviewed Diego Ballesteros, CEO of Bewe. Diego has been pretty vocal in recent times about mental health in the startup sector, which is often a bit of a taboo
• En.digital interviewed Emilio Nicolas and Javier Lopez of Erasmusu
• Startupeable interviewed Alberto Arenaza, co-founder of Trascend Network, to talk about the future of edtech
• Masquestartups interviewed Irene Prieto of Ikea, to talk about product management
• Itnig interviewed Alex Puig to talk about blockchain and crypto
• The Objective interviewed Miguel Fernandez, CEO of fintech startup Capchase. Miguel also published some numbers on Capchase's evolution in the past few months
• Antonio Rull interviewed Ana Asuero, CPO of Bdeo
• Startasap interviewed Mariona Lara of Twoems Design
• Finanziaconnect interviewed Lucas de la Vega of Zubi Capital