People stand at the heart of business strategy and execution, and the management of talent has become the burning issue of business leaders, especially in scale up contexts.

Remora Talent Advisory is a senior level executive boutique search firm, dedicated to building the new leaders of tomorrow for the new European Tech scene and some of the most established global brands.

They work with:

- Major Scale-Ups and Unicorns in the European scene: Afterpay, FreeNow, Jobteaser, OnTruck, AramisAuto, TheFork, Voodoo, Webhelp. - Private Equity Tech focused players : Apax, Ardian, Capza, Daphni, Eurazeo (Idinvest), MundiVentures, Permira, PointNine Capital, Three Hills Capital. - Luxury Brands accelerating their Digital Transformation: LVMH, Estée Lauder, Hermès, Tiffany.

If you want to get in touch with them, Sébastien Sanz is their Partner in charge of Southern Europe and can be reached at ssanz@remora-talent.com

Startup funding news 💸

• According to El Referente, Spanish startups raised a combined €25m in August
• Barcelona-based HR SaaS startup Factorial raised $80m. The round was led by Tiger Global, the hedge fund turned VC investor, and joined by previous backers K Fund, CRV, Creandum and Point Nine. We recorded a podcast with CEO and co-founder Jordi Romero last week, which you can listen to here, and Jordi goes into quite a bit of detail about the round (why raise now, why Tiger, what does the future hold for Factorial, and other interesting topics)
• Madrid-based The Beemine Lab, developers of CBD products, raised €900k from Faraday, Keith Ventures and others
• Barcelona-based last mile logistics company Ecoscooting raised €500k

M&A activity 🎊

• Automattic, the company behind Wordpress.com, acquired Madrid-based Frontity, developers of a server-side framework for headless WordPress sites using React. Frontity is a K Fund portfolio co. and Automattic was already an investor in Frontity. The company also wrote about the deal here. Congrats to Pablo Postigo, Luis Herranz and the rest of the team! And also congrats -and thanks- to business angels Walter Kobylanski and Diego Mariño for sharing with us the investment opportunity a few years ago
• Marketing agency MioGroup, which recently went public on the BME Growth stock exchange, announced the acquisition of Dendary, another Spanish agency focused on Amazon. Dendary was co-founded by Aitor Grandes, former CEO of 24Symbols (book subscription service)

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• Fernando Dal Re of The Venture City published a post on Crunchbase News about 'Why early-stage founders should be wary of big VC checks '. This is an interesting topic that founders raising money should think about
• Seaya Ventures announced a new investment. It participated in Chile-based Xepelin's $30m equity round. The company wants to give Latin American’s SMEs better access to financial services
• ABC published an interview with Jorge Dobon, co-founder of Demium

Startup news 💡

• El Pais profiled Galicia-based cloud hosting company Dinahosting. The bootstrapped company has more than 150k clients and in 2019 had sales of €11m and posted a profit of €1.4m
• Talking about cloud hosting Spanish companies, Endeavor published an interesting interview with the founders of Gigas. They talk about the first few years of the company, how they raised money when cloud was still not a thing, their IPO and their current strategy, which includes expanding both geographically and in terms of products/services. Dealflow.es is hosted on Gigas! Gigas also announced last week that sales in the first half of 2021 grew to €22.7m
• La Vanguardia profiled SolarMente, a Barcelona-based startup in the renewable and solar energy space. The company participated in Y Combinator's last batch, which just ended
• Cinco Dias published a profile of chatbot builder SaaS company Landbot. The article says that Landbot currently sits at €300k in MRR and expects to reach €450k by the end of the year
• El Español profiled Grupo Mox, the Granada-based last mile delivery company. Mox has been featured several times in the Spanish press for two main reasons: it's always worked with riders that have a contractual relationship with the company, and also because Mox has experienced significant growth in sales and traction in the past few months. The company currently delivers 20k orders per day
• EU-Startups published a list of 10 early-stage Madrid-based startups that have caught their attention in 2021. I'm not a big believer in this type of list-posts, but they always work super well when I link to them. I'm sure this will also be one of the most clicked links this week
• Startup profiles:
• Codecontract: blockchain technology applied to different verticals
• LoboApp: on-demand veterinary services
• Woffu: HR SaaS

Interesting reads 🤓

• Emprendedores published a long interview with Chema Alonso of Telefonica. The interview goes into a bit of detail about Chema's landing at Telefonica after selling his startup to the telco, how he thinks about open innovation and also his opinion on why more startups are not acquired by Spanish multinationals

Podcasts 🎧

• Outliers interviewed Sonia Fernandez, partner at Kibo Ventures
• Life On Mars interviewed Marc Torres, CPO at Finteca
• Itnig interviewed Eduard Castañeda, co-founder of Wallbox
• Product Hackers published an episode about 13 pricing strategies