LOOM es la marca de espacios de trabajo flexible y de coworking de MERLIN Properties, es uno de los gestores líderes a nivel nacional de espacios colaborativos centrado en las personas, sus necesidades y su experiencia, apostando por la flexibilidad, el tiempo de calidad, la productividad y el sentimiento de satisfacción en el trabajo.

La comunidad de LOOM ya supera las 180 empresas y se caracteriza por su heterogeneidad, dando cabida tanto a emprendedores, startups y corporates. Esto favorece las sinergias entre compañías y el conocimiento compartido, fundamental en las primeras etapas de una empresa para un crecimiento más rápido y la construcción de negocio escalables.

Con el objetivo de apoyar y fomentar el emprendimiento en España, LOOM acaba de lanzar LOOM for Startups, un paquete de ventajas para compañías de nueva creación o en fase de crecimiento que incluye entre otras muchas ventajas:

- Espacios gratis para eventos con inversores - Bonos de horas en salas de reuniones gratuitas - Descuentos del 40% en espacios de trabajo - Servicios bonificados de consultoría en financiación, protección de datos, seguridad de la información - Servicios bonificados de asesoría laboral, legal y mercantil

Prueba gratis LOOM for Startups completando el formulario que encontrarás aquí.

Startup funding news 💸

• Madrid-based dark kitchen startup Cuyna raised €1.5m
• Barcelona-based online multimedia platform Watchity raised €500k from Wayra and others
• Mehdi Yacoubi, co-founder of health monitoring startup Vital, announced on Twitter that it has raised pre-seed funding from JME and business angels such as Balajis, former CTO of Coinbase. Vital is a remote-first company with no apparent specific headquarters
• Zaragoza-based IoT company Libelium raised funding from Axon Partners
• Lanzadera published a guide of how to create a good investor deck. What I like about this guide is that it provides examples from real decks of companies that have gone through Lanzadera
• Conexo Ventures put out a press release to community that they've invested in Galgus (wifi optimisation tech provider) and Simple Cloud (global cloud-based workspace as a service)
• Other rounds of funding: Vitaance, HarBest Market

M&A activity 🎊

• Barcelona-based Wallbox, a company that sells electric vehicle chargers and other related products and services, announced plans to float on the NYSE via a SPAC. The transaction will give Wallbox a valuation of $1.5b and the company expects to raise $330m, thus becoming one more Spanish unicorn along with Glovo, Cabify, idealista and Flywire. Iberdrola is one of Wallbox's largest shareholders, and the company had also previously raised funding from the likes of Seaya Ventures and Cathay. According to data published by Wallbox (PDF here ), the company posted $24m in sales in 2020 and a loss of $10m. That's a 62X multiple on last year's revenues. Wallbox expects to reach sales of more than $700m in 2024 and of $1.1b in 2025, which implies a 1.3X multiple on forward revenues. For more info on Wallbox's history, here's a profile published last week by La Informacion. Congrats all around! To the Wallbox founding team, to the more than 500 employees and to the investors, especially Madrid-based Seaya!
• Also last week, Flex announced the acquisition of online mattress ecommerce company Marmota. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Marmota was owned by the venture builder Antai and Atresmedia, who in conjunction owned 78% of the company. Marmota €2.3m worth of mattresses in 2019
• Indra announced the acquisition of digital marketing agency Flat 101. Terms of the deal were not disclosed and I couldn't find any data on Flat 101's scale. The only number I've seen mentioned is that Flat has 150 employees

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• Klima Energy Transition Fund is a new €80m fund that results from the partnership between Alantra and Enagás that targets targets innovative companies accelerating the energy transition in some of the following segments: low carbon gases, smart power grids, energy storage, sustainable transportation, among others
• La Razon published Uniq Ventures, a Barcelona-based venture builder firm that exclusively focuses on launching and growing fintech projects
• Galician VC firm Vigo Activo announced that it has sold its stake in A Coruña-based edtech company Netex for €3.6m, representing a €2.9m profit for the firm
• Nauta Capital re-invested in Hamburg-based airfocus, a modular ‘product management’ tool that raised $5m in Series A round
• Telefonica took part in a $11m funding round by Israeli cloud-based mobile network Monogoto, as the Spain-headquartered operator seeks to boost its play in global deployments of private LTE and 5G networks
• Mundi Ventures participated in London-based insurtech company Urban Jungle's €9m round
• Adara Ventures co-led a £2.5m in London-based AI startup Intelex Vision

Startup news 💡

• Sponsored
  LOOM for Startups is a new package of services from LOOM and for companies that are looking for funding. Find more details here.
• More content continues to be published about Malaga's tech hub. Last week I read this piece that goes back almost 30 years to understand what Malaga has implemented to reach today's status. The article is paywalled, but Bernardo Quintero (Virustotal/Google) shared on Twitter an interesting visualization with the timeline of events. Also on Malaga, elDiario published this other article, which focuses on Vodafone and Google's plans in the city. It's been a while since I last visited Malaga and I'd like to do so soon, but while reading about the city I was happily surprised to find out that Malaga's major (Francisco de la Torre ) has been in power since 2000 and that he's also a former engineer. Glad to see that political stability and a strategy has paid off
• Cabify is rolling out a pilot multi-modal subscription model to 40,000 users in Madrid, with plans to expand to its other markets throughout Spain and Latin America. Cabify Go! is a subscription service with prices that range between €7 and €20 that provide discounts across Cabify's family of transportation products (cars, escooters, last-mile delivery, etc)
• Wuolah, the Sevilla-based startup that makes it easy for students to share university notes and 'apuntes', continues to be in the news. This time it's related to the fact that some university professors are complaining about the fact that students (and the company) are making money with notes that are provided by professors during lectures. Professors would like to get a cut of those transactions, since they believe that it's actually "their materials" that are being circulated around. I love this! I had a terrible experience at university, in which most professors seemed like they didn't care much about the quality of classes, so the fact that someone has created a business around this terrible experience is music to my ears. Javier Pastor of Xataka also wrote about this here
• Expansion published an overview of several Spanish startups that have launched fintech products for Gen Z users. The article features startups such as Libeen, OpSeeker, Trivu and Goin (K Fund portfolio co.)
• Vitaance is a new insurtech startup spun out of Antai Venture Builder. The company focuses on the life insurance market
• El Español interviewed Miguel Carranza, co-founder of RevenueCat, to talk about the company's history, Miguel's experience in the US and RevenueCat's most recent round of $40m
• Startup profiles:
• Gravity Wave: sustainability
• Pislow: marketplace to rent fashion clothes
• Optyfy: on-demand health services
• Getwith: a talent agency that has also developed Rviewer, a software tool to pre-validate developers in recruitment processes
• Gibobs allbanks: fintech
• Suscrip: product to manage online subscriptions

Big company news 🏦

• El Corte Ingles (ECI) lost €2.9b last year, the first unprofitable year in its history. The silver lining for ECI was ecommerce, as online sales for the retail giant grew by 132% compared to the previous year, reaching €1.8b in sales and accounting for 17% of total sales. I don't know ECI that much, so it's hard for me to say if this is good, amazing or simply meh. I do have to say that I've personally bought stuff from ECI in recent times and the ecommerce experience is still far from other online-first companies, including obviously Amazon. Here's more info on what ECI is doing in terms of ecommerce
• El Mundo published a long profile on Inditex and its CEO Pablo Isla. The article is titled 'the decade of Inditex big digital revolution' and focuses on what Inditex has done to adapt to an online-first world, including its ecommerce strategy
• Amazon to invest $3b to open data centres in Spain in 2022. The investment includes capital expenditure, the construction of the centres, imports of equipment and operating expenses such as the salaries of the 1,300 employees the company will hire there. Cinco Dias has more info here

Interesting reads 🤓

• Chema Roldán, CTO and co-founder of Genially, published an interesting post about the tech challenges they've had to overcome and how their code base and product has evolved in the past few years
• Cris Busquets, lead product designer at Holaluz and also founder of UIFromMars, wrote about how they do design critiques at Holaluz. Design critiques are sessions aimed at providing honest feedback on design projects
• Caroline Lagergren of Expand to Spain published 'Creative recount of Spanish unicorns: 5 (Cabify, Glovo, Idealista, Flywire, Wallbox)¡
• Tinybird interviewed Ramiro Aznar, geospatial data engineer at Planet: 'Analyzing 3 million satellite images daily'

Podcasts 🎧

• Product Hackers interviewed Aquilino Peña of Kibo Ventures
• K Fund interviewed Carlos Otermin, COO of Lazada
• Novicap interviewed Rafael Juan, CEO of Vicky Foods
• MarsBased interviewed Bernat Llana and Laura Gascón to talk about company shutdowns and the case of Antfluence
• Upbizor interviewed Pere Monras, CEO of fintech startup Nemuru
• SeedRocket interviewed Juan Rubio, co-founder and CEO of Genially
• Itnig interviewed Jiaqi Pan, co-founder of Landbot