As a marketing leader, do you experience suspicious spikes in ad performance? Are you monitoring for illegitimate clicks and leads in your marketing funnel?

Ad fraud is rightly the growing concern amongst CMOs, performance marketers and media specialists in their path to reach their growth objectives.

Opticks' mission is precisely to allow advertisers to grow to their fullest potential by providing them fraud detection and prevention solutions.

- Uncover fraudulent partners and sources - Make informed decisions about ad investments - Reinvest savings from fraudulent clicks and leads into real growth acquisitions

Leading ecommerce and leadgen advertisers worldwide, like Huawei, already use Opticks to prevent advertising fraud. On average, our clients reduce CAC by 5% and increase Return on Ad Spend by 6%.

If you’d like to find out how we can do the same for you, book a demo with us. Let’s beat ad fraud together!

Startup funding news 💸

• Devo (2011), a Boston-area startup with Madrid origins focused on log management and cybersecurity, announced that it has closed a $250m round of funding. The new capital values Devo at $1.5b. Devo was born in Madrid and continues to have a large engineering and product office in Spain, with more than 220 employees (50% of total). Kibo Ventures is an investor in Devo. El Confidencial talked to Devo co-founder and CTO Pedro Castillo
• Barcelona-based live shopping startup Onsite.live raised €2.5m
• Barcelona-based Fleksy (2015) raised $1.6m to expand its keyboard SDK biz after 10x growth. The round was led by Inveready
• Other rounds of funding: Re-aviva, Venped, Newe, Audifono, Malferida, Usyncro, Serenmind, Bûmerang

M&A activity 🎊

• US gaming giant Activision Blizzard acquired Barcelona-based mobile gaming studio Digital Legends. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. VC firm Bullnet owned 44% of DL at the time of exit, while Inveready had a 10% stake. La Informacion has a good breakdown of DL's financials and the impact of covid
• US healthtech startup RubiconMD got acquired by Oak Street Health for $190m. RubiconMD was co-founded by Spaniard and former Telefonica executive Carlos Reines. Mundi Ventures was an investor in RubiconMD

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• Antai Venture Builder raised €11.8m to launch 12 new companies in Europe and Latam
• Cardumen Capital to launch a new €80m fund to invest in Israeli startups
• According to Sifted, UK-based VC firm Hedosophia has a scout program and one of its members is Oscar Pierre, CEO of Glovo
• Cinco Dias interviewed Laura Gonzalez-Estefani, co-founder of VC firm The Venture City. TVC currently manages two funds, of €52 and €75m, respectively
• Kibo Ventures participated in the $200m Series D round of e-scooter company Tier
• Valencia Plaza interviewed Javier Megias of Fundacion Bankinter, and also co-founder of Startupxplore

Startup news 💡

• Sponsored
  Business Insider published a profile of Opticks, a Barcelona-based startup that offers an anti ad-fraud solution for advertisers of all sizes
• Uber and Spanish startup Wallbox, a provider of electric vehicle charging and energy management solutions, announced a strategic partnership to simplify the transition to EVs for Bay Area ride share drivers using Uber
• Real estate iBuyer Housfy says that it has reached break even and expects to do €14m in revenues this year, up 140% compared to last year. The proptech company claims to have completed more than 5,000 transactions to date for a total value of €1.7b
• More financial results, this time from HolaLuz. The energy company had sales of almost €187m in the first six months of 2021 (up 52%). EBITDA was negative, of €700k
• Tiendeo expects to close 2021 with €13m in sales
• Hipertextual published a long and negative profile of edtech startup Nannyfy. The articles focuses on the troubles and malpractice of the startup
• Glovo announced what it’s calling “The Couriers Pledge”, an initiative which commits its business to setting a new and “fairer” social rights standard for its gigging couriers. Here's more info in Spanish
• Freepik says that it has surpassed one of its main competitors, Shutterstock, in number of paid subscribers
• Cabify announced plans to hire as many as 200 employees (half of those will be engineers). The company offers a high degree of flexibility for these new jobs: some will be based in Madrid and allow for remote work, while others will be based at Cabify's offices in Barcelona, Sevilla, Málaga, Valencia and A Coruña
• Pablo Rabanal, CEO and co-founder of legaltech Reclamador, announced plans to buy litigation portfolios from law firms to speed up cases
• Emprendedores interviewed the founders of foodtech startup Wetaca. The company says that it currently has almost 6,000 weekly orders and has been positively affected by the pandemic
• Blue Banana says that it has become the first Spanish carbon neutral fashion brand
• Startup profiles:
• Mimic Seafood: foodtech
• Cuyna: dark kitchens
• Mint57: travel
• Idoven: biotech
• ClimateTrade: sustainability
• Boopos: fintech

Big company news 🏦

• Spain is amongst the countries where Facebook expects to ramp up hiring engineers in the next few years. The company said that it plans to hire as many as 10,000 employees in Europe in the next five years
• The Spanish government wants to invest €22m in an initiative to develop the first quantum computer of Southern Europe
• Huawei opened a tech hub in Madrid, where it plans to hire 160 employees

Interesting reads 🤓

• Miguel García-San Román, head of sales at Ontruck, published a guide on how to drive marketing to deliver the best leads into the sales pipeline: "Turn on your outbound demand gen machine in 7 steps"
• Daniel Cañueto, data scientist at Glovo, published "How our real-time Machine Learning models minimize the risk of payments in cash"
• Ignacio Javierre, co-founder of fintech startup Hubuc, published "Embedded finance and B2B payments: the revolution we've been waiting for"
• Simon Muñoz, principal PM at Voicemod, published "Overengineering can kill your startup"

Podcasts 🎧

• Masquestartups recorded a podcast on the story of Rooral.co, interviewing co-founders Ana Amrein and Juan Barbed
• Chus Navarro interviewed Maximo Gavete of Devengo and Honos
• Finanzia Connect published a series of interviews and audio guide on how to create an investor deck, featuring Lourdes Alvarez (JME), Rocio Pillado (Adara) and other investors
• K Fund interviewed Carlos Gomez, co-founder of 7r Ventures
• Itnig interviewed Alfonso de la Nuez, co-founder of UserZoom
• MarsBased interviewed Thomas Petit