Con el objetivo de apoyar más y mejor a las startups españolas, ha nacido AWS Floor11, una nueva comunidad virtual de AWS.

A través de Floor11 podrás obtener formación gratuita y acceso directo a asesoría de expertos técnicos y de negocio de AWS, para discutir desde cómo construir tu MVP hasta estrategias de Go-to-market para acelerar el crecimiento de tu startup.

En AWS Floor11 también podrás unirte a la comunidad startup, que ofrece recursos y eventos exclusivos con personalidades del ecosistema y, cuando sea posible, eventos de networking entre los miembros de la comunidad. Explora AWS Floor11 y descubre cómo AWS puede apoyarte a lo largo del viaje de tu startup.

Startup funding news 💸

• ENISA announced that it has €98m of fresh money to lend to startups. More details here
• Securitize, the crypto startup co-founded by Spaniard Carlos Domingo that is developing a blockchain platform for investors to buy and sell shares in closely held companies and other assets, raised $48m in a fundraising round co-led by Morgan Stanley and Blockchain Capital. The company wrote about the milestone here
• Barcelona-based Heura Foods raised €16m, led by Impact Fooding. Sifted wrote a profile of the company here
• A Coruña-based edtech company Netex raised €6.5m from Inveready. The company says that it plans to acquire British company Virtual College with part of those proceeds
• Madrid-based cleaning startup LavanApp raised €700k
• Startups looking for funding: GameSquare, Trainingym

M&A activity 🎊

• elDiario interviewed Francisco Polo (High Commissioner for Spain Entrepreneurial Nation) to talk about the government's plans to promote entrepreneurship in Spain and make life easier for startups, founders and investor.s Honestly, there's been soooo many interviews about this topic but so little concrete measures put in place, that I'm very skeptical about the ability of the current government to do something in favour of the startup ecosystem. Lots of plans, little action. On top of that and to make things worse, the government extended until the end of this year the ability to prohibit acquisitions and funding rounds of companies in "strategic sectors" (when more than 10% of equity is involved) when the investor is from outside Spain, which can be a total disaster for startups. David Miranda has a good thread about the topic here. Jesus Martinez of La Informacion also wrote about this topic
• Grupo Sociedad de Tasación acquired asset verification startup Visualeo

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• Seaya Ventures announced that it has already raised €137m for its third fund. In an article in Cinco Dias, they say that the first goal they had was to raise €125m, but given interest in the third fund, they're contemplating increasing the size of the fund and do a final closing at €150m. Seaya says that it has already made 8 investments out of this fund, with only 2 of those being Spanish companies
• Nina Capital announced a first closing of €18m on its upcoming €40m new fund. Nina Capital invests in companies operating at the intersection of health and technology. The fund is based in Barcelona but they invest globally
• Startups' Oasis interviewed Edgar Vicente, co-founder of investment firm Enzo Ventures. The fund is also backed by British VC firm PROFounders Capital
• GoHub Ventures launched an initiative to invest up to €3m in startups solving water-related problems
• Adara Ventures invested in InteleXVision, a UK-based early-stage company that is disrupting the professional surveillance industry by enabling real-time video monitoring at scale
• Spanish/Israeli fund Cardumen Capital led a $13m round in Israeli IoT company CoreTigo

Startup news 💡

• Sponsored
  ¿Vas a 4YFN? ¡El equipo de AWS startups también! Podrás encontrarlos en el Hall 2, Stand 2D14 donde su equipo de negocio y técnico estará disponible durante toda la conferencia para conversar sobre cualquier duda que tengas, desde tu MVP hasta cómo optimizar tu arquitectura en la nube. No puedes perderte tampoco el AWS CEOs Fireside Chat, donde las CEO de Fintonic, CEO y presidenta de Holaluz y la CEO de Red Points nos contarán sobre el liderazgo en tiempos de constante cambio.
• Indexa Capital announced that it has surpassed €1b in assets under management. Huge milestone and congrats to François, Unai and the rest of the team! They've done this in about 5 years and having raised a small amount of funding (€3.5m) from the likes of Cabiedes & Partners, Viriditas, All Iron and others
• Xataka interviewed Pepita Marin and published a long profile of We Are Knitters. The article is titled "from a €10k investment to sales of €100k per day" and also touches on some interesting topics within entrepreneurship, such as the relevance of money and family support when it comes to launching your own company
• Another relevant profile published last week was this one of Jobandtalent, including interviews with co-founders Felipe Navio and Juan Urdiales. They talk about the KPIs they track to make sure the business is on the right track, the 2016 pivot they did and the incredible results since then, with sales of more than €500m last year, the goal of surpassing €1b this year and going from around 280 employees to the more than 700 today
• Cohort-based education platform Microverse announced the introduction of its 2.0 version, a "redesign their entire learning model to provide graduation and employment predictability" to students, in the words of CEO Ariel Camus
• Bit2me launched Bit2me Pay, a service similar to Bizum that allows users to send crypto to one another with just a smartphone or email address
• Business Insider published a list of 17 edtech startups that people should keep an eye on, according to investors and founders
• GoStudent is an Austrian startup that recently raised €205m that aims to build the largest platform for online teaching. In an article in Business Insider, its country manager in Spain, Leyre Nieto, says that Spain is already the third largest market for the company and that they already have 50 employees in Spain
• Pricing optimisation startup Optimus Price published a report on consumer spending trends during the pandemic
• Startup's Oasis interviewed Paul Barroso, co-founder of one-stop crypto trading platform Atani
• Expansion has been publishing some interesting articles (mostly company profiles and industry overviews). Most of these articles are behind a paywall and I can't read them properly in order to recommend them (or not), but I thought I'd share them anyway from now on, just in case you're a subscriber and want to take a look. This week they published an overview of tech companies operating in the sports sector, an article on tech startups that are building relevant things outside of Madrid and Barcelona and this one on the amount of funding raised by Spanish startups to date in 2021 (screenshot here )
• Startup profiles: Osigris, MyHixel, Sailwiz, Ec2ce

Big company news 🏦

• Business Insider interviewed Isaac Vitini, head of HR at ING Spain, to talk about the company's plans with regards to remote work. A few months ago, ING was one of the first Spanish corporates to announce that it was going to adopt a remote-first work environment
• La Informacion wrote about the pricing battle happening in the telco sector, as companies try to gain market share from each other with aggressive offers

Interesting reads 🤓

• Analia Plaza of elDiario published a profile of Ludita (Isabel Inés Casasnovas): "The pioneer that designed the guts of the Spanish internet"
• Albert Llobet (bizdev and finance at YABA) published "Why acquiring Amazon FBAs just makes sense"
• Javi Santana (Tinybird) shared his thoughts on Kafka after using it for a few months, "always from a practical point of view"
• David Zambrana (Coverwallet) wrote about how they set up the Cypress test framework to massively multiply the number of verifications they do on their apps while lowering their hands-on-it time in doing so
• The Verge published an interesting article about how certain communities are using Twitch to promote the use of languages such as euskera or galego: "The Twitch streamers fighting to keep minority languages alive"

Podcasts 🎧

• Novicap interviewed François Derbaix, co-founder of Indexa Capital and Bewater Funds, among other things
• Scaleup Valley interviewed Jorge Poyatos, co-founder of Seedtag
• Jordi Altimira interviewed Jorge Darriba, co-founder of Bloobirds
• Fran Carreras interviewed Cristina Carrascosa of ATH21
• Itnig interviewed the co-founders of Capchase