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Startup funding news 💸

• Catalan health startups raised a combined €110m in 2021, vs €124m in 2020
• El Referente published a list of Spain's 9 tech unicorns
• Madrid and NY-based fintech startup Capchase raised $55m in fresh funding. I did not know that Adam Bain, the former COO of Twitter, sits on the board of the company
• Barcelona-based fintech startup Payflow raised $9.1m from Seaya, Cathay, YC and others. Payflow offers salary-advance solutions to companies. El Confidencial wrote about the salary-advance space here
• Barcelona-based oncology company Peptomyc raised €8.6m
• Madrid-based online gaming startup Nware raised €1.1m from Draper B1 and Archipiélago Next
• Barcelona-based Haddock announced that it has entered Y Combinator's most recent batch and raised €1m
• Valencia-based eCharger manufacturer V2C raised €1m from Clave Capital, Easo Ventures and others
• Barcelona-based logistics startup Kanguro raised €1m via Sociosinversores.com
• Madrid-based logistics startup Revoolt raised €850k from Global Social Impact Investments
• Madrid-based hr bot factory raised €650k from Dozen and Draper B1
• Other rounds of funding: Aritium

M&A activity 🎊

• Indexa Capital said that it's more interested in a potential IPO than selling to a bigger player. Indexa currently has €1.4b of assets under management and more than 50k customers. As a customer of Indexa, this is something that I've thought about several times: from the point of view of its customers, it would suck to see the company get acquired by a bigger player that might increase/change fees, etc, especially given it's a long-term investment play for regular people + More details about Glovo's acquisition by Delivery Hero. Glovo's shareholders will be paid in DH stock, which means that the total compensation to receive will depend on DH's stock performance. DH, as many other tech companies in recent days and weeks, is down 25% in just the past month. According to La Informacion, some of Glovo's shareholders are trying to find ways to limit the potential loss (or less profit) they'll receive in the transaction. Also last week it was announced that Glovo acquired Italian competitor Socialfood
• Microsoft to acquire gaming studio Activision Blizzard for €60b. It's too early to tell, but this could have an impact on Activision's activity in Spain. The company shut down its Spanish office in December 2021 (it only had about 10 to 20 employees here). Activision owns King, the gaming studio that's behind hit game Candy Crash, and King has a big office in Barcelona with more than 600 employees. Activsion also acquired last year Barcelona-based studio Digital Lends, which has 100 employees
• Galician company Disashop acquired a 20% stake in UK payments firm PayPoint, valued at €600m in the UK stock market
• Tech consulting firm Sngular acquired Corunet for €10.2m
• Indra acquired Ecuador-based payments company Credimatic
• Logistics startup GOI acquired Lidertrans and Servimas

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• Sponsored
  This week's newsletter is sponsored by Clockwork. If you run a VC fund or investment firm and you want to improve both your internal operations and the way you collaborate with your startups, you should take a look at Clockwork's platform.
• According to La Informacion, at the time of exit, Seaya Ventures had a 3% stake in Glovo. This means that at a €2.3b valuation, its stake would be valued at €70m. Seaya apparently had already sold about €5m worth of shares in Glovo in prior transactions. Combined, Glovo alone could return 80% of Seaya's €100m fund. This is the same fund that also invested in Wallbox (which went pubic via a SPAC on the Nasdaq and is currently valued at $2b), as well as Spotahome, Clicars and Clarity
• 2021 activity numbers from two investment firms: Wayra backed 49 companies for a combined €6.7m and Demium incubated 68 startups and invested €7.2m
• Global Social Impact is a new firm that aims to raise €50m in capital to back social impact startups
• Roca, the well-known brand that sells toilets and other bathroom related products, announced plans to launch its own venture arm, with €25m to invest in startups
• Unitatea is a new Valencia-based firm launched by various entrepreneurs and backed by other startup people that aims to invest €750k in the next few months and years in about 15 to 20 startups
• Parlem Telecom and Inveready to launch an accelerator for telco related businesses

Startup news 💡

• Protocol wrote about Valencia-based voice modification software provider Voicemod. In my opinion, the company has been flying under the radar for a lot of people in the Spanish startup ecosystem, but it's been head-down building several interesting products in the voice space for quite a while, as well as a solid business. Voicemod recently launched a B2B product in the form of SDKs and APIs that integrate with third party software and hardware, as well as machine learning to create synthetic voices from scratch
• Spain announced new rules for how social media influencers and others can advertise cryptocurrency assets. Starting next month, CNMV will require people and companies to notify it at least 10 days before running campaigns for crypto assets. The rules apply to influencers with more than 100k subscribers. More info here
• Cabify Mafia: here's an article on six companies founded by former employees of Cabify. Featuring FuelYourBrands, Invopop, Carbono and others
• Barcelona and Mexico City-based fintech startup Belvo published a report on the state of open banking in Latin America in 2022
• Transportation and logistics startup Trucksters closed 2021 with €5m in revenues, up 300% compared to the previous year. The company expects to reach €30m in sales this year. Trucksters is a digital transport operator that provides a long-distance FTL trucking service through a relay model based on Optimization & AI
• Shoe ecommerce brand The Hoff Brand reached €17m in sales in 2021, up by 210%
• According to documents accessed by La Vanguardia, Glovo has more than 300 legal cases around the world, from labour disputes to data protection issues. Not surprising to me, given Glovo's business and sector
• Ecommerce fashion brand laagam launched its first NFT
• Dimas Gimeno's company WOW plans to launch its hybrid marketplace model soon
• Ecommerce fashion brand Blue Banana had sales of €7.4m in 2021, up by 84%
• EU-Startups published a list of 10 "super promising" Spanish startups to keep an eye on in 2022 and beyond
• Startup profiles:
• Wallbox: electric vehicle products and services
• Idoven: heart healthtech

Big company news 🏦

• Spotify could be the main sponsor of FC Barcelona next season
• Mastercard to open a tourism innovation hub in Madrid
• Santander's payments division, PagoNxt, hired Dean Nash, former general counsel at UK startup Wise
• TaskRabbit, the startup acquired by Ikea a few years ago to put in touch consumers with people who can help them build furniture, hasn't gained much traction in Spain

Interesting reads 🤓

• Dario Villena of Kapita Ventures sparked an interesting thread on Twitter about how to find and hire a good Chief Marketing Officer
• Fran Ortiz, Software Engineer at Audiense, published "Using the DevOps second way to improve the product development process"
• Glovo's Engineering blog continues to put out interesting content. Three recent pieces on Cluster-randomized experiments, machine learning bias and how they do and use simulations
• Marta del Amo of El Español wrote an interesting op-ed about the supposed ease of use of fintech services for the elderly

Podcasts 🎧

• Startasap interviewed Jeroen Merchiers, former country manager of Airbnb in Spain and now co-founder of proptech startup Zazume
• Nacion Innovacion interviewed Carlos Blanco of Encomenda
• 2GO interviewed Diogo Cunha, co-founder of Katoo (K Fund portfolio co.). Katoo is a SaaS product for restaurants and its providers
• Fundadores interviewed Lluís Cañadell, co-founder of Treinta, a Spanish/Colombian startup building fintech products for the Latam market
• K Fund interviewed Daniel Seijo and Eduardo Ortiz, co-founders of fintech startup Fuell
• Product Hackers interviewed Jose Burgos, co-founder of Fresh People