AWS's mission is to help startups succeed.

For this, they have designed AWS Startup Academy in Spanish and English, a program to support the launch, scale and growth of startups together with AWS. In their sessions, they will focus on topics that are relevant to startups, either technical or business, to help them find the tools they need in order to take their business or project to the next level.

Sessions will be delivered by a mix of ecosystem players, AWS experts and customers who have had experience in the topics. You can attend the AWS Startup Academy in English or in Spanish.

Startup funding news 💸

• Madrid and London-based embedded finance startup Toqio raised €8m in seed funding led by Seaya Ventures and Speedinvest, with SIX FinTech Ventures participating
• Madrid-based Tinybird, a startup that helps data teams deliver real-time answers at scale through analytical API endpoints built in minutes, not weeks, raised $3m from Crane VC and the founders of GitHub, Auth0, Vercel, Algolia, Collibra and Hybris
• Madrid-based Corify Care raised €2.35m led by Clave Capital. Corify goal is to change the paradigm of treatment of atrial fibrillation patients by allowing personalised treatments
• Barcelona-based ecommerce startup Tropicfeel raised €2m via Bolsa Social. Tropicfeel had sales of €8.4m in the past 12 months, an increase of 80% year-on-year
• Pamplona-based maintenance tech startup MainRail Solutions raised €1.1m
• Ibiza-based foodtech Ketonico raised €1.1m
• Madrid-based AI-powered, crowdsourced market research platform Promos raised $1m
• Barcelona-based automotive startup Cafler raised €800k, led by Encomenda and Banc Sabadell
• Other rounds of funding: Reental, Cleb, Hobeen

M&A activity 🎊

• PE firm EQT to sell Valencia-based biotech company Igenomix to Vitrolife for an enterprise value of €1.25b. EQT paid around €500m for Igenomix just two years ago. Igenomix is a global leader in molecular genetic diagnostics for reproductive medicine and rare diseases, assisting approximately 90k patients per year through a diversified portfolio of in vitro fertilization and rare diseases genetic testing services
• TravelPerk acquired UK-based Click Travel. This is TravelPerk's third acquisition in the past few months, following the acquisition of Albatross and NexTravel. This deal deepens TravelPerk’s UK and European business, adding Click Travel’s 2k+ SME clients to its customer base of more than 5k
• In the past few weeks, Deporvillage and Holded have been acquired for more than €300m combined. These are much needed exits in the Spanish startup ecosystem and hopefully more and bigger ones will take place in the near future (especially *bigger* ones). Jesus Martinez of La Informacion added some context to these transactions, in a year in which VC funding in Spain is set to break all previous records
• Norwegian company Signicat acquired Madrid-based identity verification platform Electronic IDentification. Terms of the deal were not disclosed

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• Mouro Capital (Banco Santander) led a €16m round raised by Austria-based logistics ecommerce platform Byrd. Mouro also led a $16m round in Latam logistics startup Nowports

Startup news 💡

• Sponsored
  AWS Startup Academy is not only for startups that are just beginning their journey to the cloud, but it is also very useful for those who are native to the cloud looking to become more familiar with AWS services and products. You can attend the AWS Startup Academy in English or in Spanish.
• The Spanish government finally announced concrete measures to make life easier for entrepreneurs, startups and investors, in the so-called 'Startup Law'. The law includes measures to attract digital nomads through a special visa, reducing income tax for non-residents that move to Spain to launch their startups from 25% to 15%, lowering corporate tax to 15% for startups and other fiscal incentives that affect business angels and stock options. On the one hand, these are probably the first measures ever implemented by a Spanish government to promote entrepreneurship and startup creation; on the other hand, some of these measures have limited applicability (corporate tax for startups) and people expected a more favourable regime in terms of stock options and other areas. These three articles are a good starting point to understand last week's announcements. Here's another interesting article in Expansion ($) with the reaction of several entrepreneurs and investors. And finally, this is also a good Twitter thread about the topic, by David Miranda
• La Voz de Galicia profiled Vigo-based Alice Biometrics, a SaaS startup in the identity verification space. According to the article, Alice has reached more than €1m in sales since its founding date
• Foodtech startup Wetaca to launch a subscription service that will lower the cost of each regular order. The company also disclosed that it reached €7.4m in sales in 2020 (almost 2X year-on-year) and that it expects to reach €12m this year. Wetaca serves, on average, 7,000 orders per week
• Diego Arroyo, co-founder of stock-less fashion startup laagam, disclosed in a tweet that they reached €150k in sales in June with less than €6k spent on marketing
• According to an analysis by Cinco Dias, Indexa Capital is the only Spanish roboadvisor that has turned a profit to date. All others continue to lose money
• Kantox and Silicon Valley Bank expanded partnership to US clients. Through this expansion, SVB’s corporate clients across the US will now be able to leverage Kantox’s Kantox Dynamic Hedging solution to automate the management of their currency risk
• El Pais wrote about one of the first acquisitions completed by Amazon FBA aggregator Yaba: Banbaloo, a Terrasa-based ecommerce company that sells products for kids. According to El Pais, the transaction was worth €1m
• The Recursive published a profile of women fertility startup Woom. In the article they claim that so far Woom, which functions in two languages, English and Spanish, has attracted 1.5m registered users from 9 markets. 200k of them are active at the moment
• Bolt, an Estonian company that competes with Uber and Cabify, launched in Spain with a fleet of more than 500 cars. The only way to compete in this market is on price, and Bolt plans to offer prices of 50% less than competitors
• ManoMano is a French online marketplace for DIY, home improvement, and gardening products. The company announced last week a round of funding of €300m and plans to double down on the Spanish market, both in terms of business and talent. ManoMano already has 130 employees in Barcelona and plans to hire 100 more in the near future
• Bewater Funds updated its list of Spanish capital efficient startups, adding to the list companies such as Travelgenio, Covermanager, MarsBased, Meller and others
• Home renovation startup Aqui Tu Reforma says that they expect to reach €3.5m in sales this year
• Algorithmic management of gig workers has landed Glovo-owned, on-demand Italian delivery firm Foodinho in trouble in Italy where the country’s data protection authority issued a €2.6m penalty
• Startup profiles:
• Jotelulu: an IT consulting and services company that transforms traditional IT companies into cloud service providers
• Lingokids: the language learning platform for kids
• Libeen: rent to buy real estate platform

Interesting reads 🤓

• Spanish news site elDiario disclosed its 2020 financials: 61k subscribers, €9.6m in sales and a profit of €2.1m
• Hugo Cornejo, former VP of Design at Monzo, recently lef the company to co-found London-based logistics startup Packfleet. The company announced last week a £1m pre-seed round led by Entrée Capital and General Catalyst
• Why Barcelona-based ecommerce fashion startup Brava Fabrics says email is their most profitable marketing channel

Podcasts 🎧

• Lunes Inspiradores interviewed Joel Vicient, co-founder of Captio
• K Fund interviewed Matias Wolowski, co-founder of Auth0
• Jesus Monleon talked in a podcast about the lessons he learned as a business angel in Holded
• Itnig interviewed Diogo Cunha and Karan Anand, co-founders of Katoo