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Startup funding news 💸

• Expansion published an overview of the Spanish funding and M&A markets in the first few months of 2021. The number of funding rounds and investment volume has broken all previous records. This is not specific to Spain, as the same has happened in most markets, including the US and Europe
• Barcelona-based flower marketplace Colvin raised a €45m Series C led by Eurazeo
• Barcelona-based proptech Psquared raised €40m
• Barcelona-based travel startup Exoticca raised $30m, led by Mangrove and 14W. Exoticca is a K Fund portfolio company. We've seen first hand what Exoticca has gone through in the past 18 months due to the pandemic, and how they've navigated the situation to reach this point in time. We wrote about it here, and we honestly think that what they've achieved is incredible
• Madrid-based employee benefits platform Cobee raised €14m in a Series A round, led by Balderton, who wrote about the investment here
• Madrid-based revenue-based growth capital provider Ritmo raised €13.8m, led by JME
• Bilbao-based VR company Ludus raised €2m, led by Inveready
• Sevilla-based energy company Solum raised €750k from Fondo Bolsa Social, Capital Energy and Wayra
• Madrid-based hospitality company Gstock raised €600k
• Other rounds of funding: MissCar, Plexigrid, icloudCompliance

M&A activity 🎊

• Madrid-based car subscription service Bipi officially announced that it has been acquired by RCI Bank and Services, the finance arm of Renault. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a couple of weeks ago, several media outlets said that the acquisition price was €100m. Kibo Ventures wrote about the investment here
• Telefónica announced plans to acquire UK company Cancom for €400m to build up a leader in cloud and digital services in Europe

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• BBVA participated in the $224m round of embedded finance provider Solarisbank. BBVA was already an investor in the company
• Mundi Ventures participated in the €11m round of US insurtech company Agentero
• Swedish fund Vostok sold its 2.4% stake in Wallapop for €10m in early 2021

Startup news 💡

• Deliveroo unveiled plans to pull out of Spain in wake of ‘rider law’. The company said that remaining in Spain would require too much investment compared with its other markets, given the fact that Spain only accounts for 2% of Deliveroo's total transaction volume. La Informacion has more details here. El Confidencial published an analysis of the overall situation here
• Also on the foodtech and last mile delivery front, Glovo announced plans to hire up to 2,000 riders as employees, to comply with Spain's rider law. The company says that it will also give more flexibility to 8,000 additional riders that will continue to operate as freelancers
• Spain's Supreme Court accepted an appeal made by Cabify to look into the 1-to-30 taxi and VTC restriction imposed by the Spanish government a few months ago, which affected the operations of Cabify, Uber and others
• Solar energy company Solarmente announced that it's participating in Y Combinator's current summer batch. If I'm not mistaken, this brings the total number of Spanish companies in the current batch to three: Solarmente, Payflow and Arengu
• "The new Spanish unicorn is not a social network, it's a global leader in fertility services": that's the headline used by El Confidencial to profile Igenomix, the Valencia-based biotech firm that recently got acquired for more than €1.2b
• PCComponentes plans to enter new ecommerce verticals to diversify its PC hardware-centric business. The company said that it plans to invest €20m in these new verticals
• Aitor Garcia, co-founder of StageHQ, wrote a post-mortem about the shut down of Stage, a service that helped small and big events organizers sell tickets online without hassle
• Startup profiles:
• Cheerfy: restaurant ordering and payment systems
• Countercraft: cybersecurity
• Alice Biometrics: online identity verification

Big company news 🏦

• Netflix Spain had sales of more than €11m last year, more than a 50% increase compared to the previous year

Interesting reads 🤓

• El Español interviewed startup lawyer David Miranda to talk about the Spanish startup law and its shortcomings
• Felix Lopez, senior software engineering manager at Eventbrite, wrote 'Common problems in the management of teams'
• Marilin Gonzalo of Newtral wrote 'How much could a Chief Data Officer help in the management of public data in Spain'

Podcasts 🎧

• SeedRocket interviewed Marek Fodor, partner at the firm and also previously co-founder of Atrapalo. I thought this was a very interesting interview, especially the part where Marek talks about the importance of branding
• Itnig interviewed Jesus Monleon (SeedRocket, 4Founders Capital, Trendier) to talk about his experience as a founder and operator, as well as recent exits in Holded and Deporvillage