El Valle de la Muerte en las startups: kit de supervivencia para superarlo con éxito

Hay un momento crítico que toda startup debe superar: el periodo que transcurre desde que nace hasta que comienza a generar ingresos por sí misma.

Son muchas las empresas que se quedan en el camino porque les falta un factor vital: el Growth, una metodología para crecer de forma rápida, exponencial y al menor coste.

Este método te permite entender muy rápidamente lo que funciona y lo que no, para que encuentres cuanto antes las palancas que activan el crecimiento de tu proyecto.

Si tienes una startup y quieres superar el Valle de la Muerte y que tu modelo de negocio sea viable y rentable; fórmate en Growth y prepárate para crecer gracias a la metodología que usan las empresas más tops del mercado.

Además, estás en el mejor momento para hacerlo, porque el Black Friday te ofrece la oportunidad de aprender e implementar la metodología Growth en tu startup al mejor precio con un curso 100% accionable.

Startup funding news 💸

• Barcelona-based Amazon FBA aggregator Yaba is closing in on a €60m round, including €15m in equity and €45m in debt
• Madrid-based eSports company EGoGames raised €5m, led by Green Mont Fund, GTAK Capital and The Kerving Group
• Barcelona-based proptech startup Zazume raised €2.5m from Nordstar and Picus Capital. Zazume was co-founded by Jeroen Merchiers, former country manager of Airbnb in Spain and Portugal
• Madrid-based logistics startup IF Last Mile raised €1.5m, led by K Fund
• Barcelona-based logistics startup Amphora raised €1m, led by JME
• Barcelona-based Deep Detection raised €1m to launch PhotonAI technology into the defect detection market
• Bilbao-based data protection startup Nymiz raised funding from Kalonia Venture Partners
• Other rounds of funding: Prospera Biotech, Ziknes (€150k)

M&A activity 🎊

• UK company Cazoo acquired Spanish car lease broker Swipcar for €30m in cash and stock. Swicap was founded in 2018 and had revenues of €2.8m in 2020. Demium owned 12% of the company at the time of exit, which represents a 25X multiple for them. Inveready had invested €1.5m into the company in 2020 with its venture debt facility. Congrats to co-founders Blas Gil, Julio Ribes, Pablo Pascual and the rest of the team. ArcanoBlueBull advised Swipcar on the transaction
• The history of Cazoo is also interesting. The British company was founded in 2018 and took only about two years to float on the Nasdaq via SPAC. It's now valued at $6.7b. Its CEO, Alex Chesterman, was previously also involved in LoveFilm (acquired by Amazon for £200m) and Zoopla (acquired for £2.2b)
• Two Bilbao-based gaming studios were acquired by British company Sandbox & Co: Tellmewow and Edujoy. Terms of the deal were not disclosed
• Barcelona-based travel startup Escapada Rural got acquired by Hometogo. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Jesus Monleon wrote a blog post about the history of the company and its SeedRocket roots
• Atresmedia acquired motor news site Diariomotor. Terms of the deal were not disclosed
• British company Atida acquired Murcia-based ecommerce company Dosfarma

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• 4Founders Capital announced the launch of a new €50m fund, €20m more than the €30m they planned to initially raise
• Ramon Blanco of Bewater Funds and Indexa Capital published an analysis of venture debt as a source of funding and assesses whether it's too expensive or not
• Iker Marcaide, founder of Flywire and now at Zubi Labs, was interviewed to talk about what he's currently doing at Zubi, the evolution of Valencia's ecosystem and other topics
• Jose Miguel Herrero of Big Sur Ventures was also interviewed, to talk about the fund's trajectory
• BBVA and Anthemis invested in Dublin-based startup Greenspark, which has developed a solution that allows large companies and SMEs to offset their environmental impact
• El Referente published a list of 100 active business angels in Spain

Startup news 💡

• Fundacion Bankinter published a report on the impact of tech scaleups in the Spanish economy
• Iberdrola to remain on the board of Wallbox as long as the tech giant maintains a 3% stake in the startup
• Besoccer, the sports site which makes money with ads and with its SaaS product, says that it expects to be valued at €150m in 2023. How did the company get to this number? They expect to close €8m in sales this year and get to €20m in 2023. They believe that the company will then be valued at 8X revenues
• La Informacion published a profile of Andrea Barber, co-founder and CEO of RatedPower, a company that helps others efficiently build solar plants. RatedPower grew bootstrapped for several years until it recently raised €5m from Seaya
• El Confidencial published a profile of Clicars, the car selling company. They closed their last fiscal year with €206m in sales
• Capchase and US fintech startup Mercury partnered to offer non-dilutive revenue financing to Mercury’s customers
• Real estate crowdfunding platform Urbanitae signed a partnership with neobank MyInvestor to allow customers of the latter to invest directly in projects launched on Urbanitae
• TravelPerk has seen a spike in transatlantic travel following the easing of entry requirements into the US. Flight bookings increased by 200%, with 80% booked by companies with European headquarters in Germany, Switzerland, the UK, France and Spain
• For the second quarter of the fiscal year 2022, eDreams Odigeo reported bookings 22% above 2019 levels
• Belvo launched Recurring expenses, a new data enrichment product that allows financial innovators to automatically identify consumers’ recurrent expenses for subscription services
• How Glovo is expanding to second and third tier cities in Spain, mostly relying on riders that are freelancers
• Deliveroo confirmed that it will be shutting down its operations in Spain on November 29th. This will affect Deliveroo's 130 employees in the country, as well as the 3,800 riders that currently worked for the company
• London-based open banking startup Yapily announced a $51m round and also plans to launch and expand its Spanish presence
• Startup profiles:
• Kubbo: logistics
• Kronte: eSports and gaming

Big company news 🏦

• The Spanish government announced a few months ago plans to tax the activity of instant messaging platforms such as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger or Google's. This was part of changes to Spain's Telecomms Law, which aimed to tax these companies with €1 per €1k in revenue from these services. Fortunately, the plan is off the table. It did not make any sense
• MasMovil continues to make inroads in the alarm business. It announced plans to offer cheaper-than-the-competition home alarm systems
• El Corte Ingles says that online sales will represent 15% of all sales this year. This is down from 17% last year -due to retail sales being considerably lower as a result of the pandemic-, but on aggregate online sales have increased
• Bizum says that person-to-person payments in the first half of 2021 surpassed the total for 2020
• Amazon has opened in Spain its first distribution centre in Europe dedicated solely to next day deliveries
• Transportation company Free Now has a new CEO in Spain, Isabel García Frontera

Interesting reads 🤓

• Samuel Gil (JME) published a new C-level entry, focused on the CMO role

Podcasts 🎧

• Startasap interviewed Ignasi Giralt, global growth marketing manager at Revolut
• K Fund interviewed Pere Valles, CEO of Exoticca
• Itnig interviewed Joaquin Cuenca, co-founder of Freepik
• Product Hackers interviewed Victor Sanchez, co-founder of SyncRTC