Discover your own private marketplace. Protect your identity and your inbox.

NODO makes it easy with:

🎁 A curated marketplace that learns and tailors itself based on your feedback, not on a cookie-based profile of you. 👝 A smart wallet for all of your trusted brands, sellers, and subscriptions - allowing you to enjoy the benefits of a cross-brand loyalty program. 🥷 An end to your personal data sale, shielding your identity and profile from advertisers and data brokers. 📪 An email account that you never have to check. NODOMail™ filters you incoming brand messages on the fly, forwarding the stuff that matters to your primary inbox. 🔗 A bridge to your favorite web3 wallet, so that you can take your benefits elsewhere.

Join NODO today.

NODO is a PrivacyCloud initiative.

Startup funding news 💸

• Barcelona-based Typeform raised $135M at a $935M valuation to grow usage of its “conversational data collection platform”. Official announcement here. The company also disclosed that it currently has $70M in ARR and 125K paying customers. I think it's amazing that the company has gotten to this size with an estimated ARPA of $560K per customer, per year. The round is led by investment firm Sofina, with participation from existing and new investors. Pietro Bezza, managing partner of Connect Ventures, which led Typeform's seed round, wrote about the success of the company, which he attributes to "an opinionated product combined with an opinionated product-led growth engine"
• Barcelona-based aggregator YABA raised $85M to back digital brands that sell via Amazon. The investment was led by US VC firm Crossbeam Venture Partners and alternative asset manager Tikehau Capital. The company has acquired 12 companies in its first year with an aggregate turnover of more than $20M
• Madrid and US-based revenue-based financing startup Capchase raised an $80M Series B. The new round was led by 01 Advisors and also included the participation of new investor Seaya Ventures. The company says that it has worked with nearly 3,000 companies in the U.S. and Europe—making over $2B in funding available
• Madrid-based recruitment startup Circular announced that it had raised $10M from LocalGlobe, Point Nine and Kibo Ventures. The previous link includes an interview with co-founders Pedro Torrecillas and Teo Ruiz. The company shared its pitch deck here, and here's a profile on the company
• Barcelona-based coffee subscription service Incapto raised €3.5M, led by JME. More about Incapto here
• Barcelona-based cash-to-goods startup Baluwo raised €2M, led by Creas
• Donostia-based Linq, provider of inspection software, raised €1.2M, led by Clave Capital
• Navarra-based Abanza raised €1.2M
• Madrid-based Caletay, the Amazon ecommerce aggregator co-founded by Dimas Gimeno, raised funding from Stoneshield Investment Funds
• Startups looking for funding: PrivacyCloud

M&A activity 🎊

• Madrid-based short-term rental data company Transparent was acquired by OTA Insight. At K Fund we led the company's seed round in 2017. Terms of the deal were not disclosed
• Joshua Novick, Managing Partner at Bondo Advisors, was interviewed on Novobrief about the current state of the M&A market: “This year will see an incredible amount of activity in M&A as VC funds push for exits”

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• Eduardo Solis of Swanlaab published a profile on the topic of scouts. Scouts are often operators that work part time for investment firms. These firms give scouts money and freedom to make early stage investments, with the goal of tapping into the network of well-connected operators. Funds such as Sequoia, EQT, Accel, Hedosophia and others have scouts in Spain
• At K Fund we announced the hiring of Isabel Salgueiro, our first hire in Portugal. Isabel previously worked at Cherry Ventures and Shilling. Isabel’s addition to the team while based in Lisbon, is part of our efforts to build a bigger footprint outside of Spain
• Alberto Gomez (Adara) and Javier Megias (Bankinter) talked about the impact on valuations that the trifecta formed by the way, supply chain disruptions and contraction in the public markets could have on late stage private companies. Alberto also believes that companies in the cybersecurity and energy sectors could benefit in this scenario
• Interview with Juan Revuelta of Swanlaab, to talk about the VC firm's history and evolution
• Telefónica’s innovation hub Wayra and sports-related startup incubator and accelerator SportBoost (Iker Casillas) have announced a collaboration to jointly invest in sport-tech-related companies

Startup news 💡

• Sponsored
  Spain and US-based PrivacyCloud has created a web3-ready, B2X marketplace that connects privacy-aware individuals with advertisers, publishers, and retailers betting on a cookieless, privacy-first future. It counts Samsung, Vodafone, ING, and Mapfre among its customers and is currently raising a Seed B funding round (BBVA led its Seed A round in 2019).
• In its heydays, BQ was considered the largest Spanish gadget manufacturer. However, the company did not last very long and shut down a few years ago. Xataka talked to former employees about the company, its growth and its demise: "In 2017 we already knew it was all going to end like this"
• Fever recently announced a new round of funding at north of $1B valuation, becoming a unicorn. El Pais published a profile of the company and part of its history. Although not a lot of financial and/or performance data is available, the article says that in 2019, the company had sales of €19M
• Carlos Gomez of 7r Ventures wrote a post explaining the launch of Vivla, a new company in the fractional home ownership space
• Ecommerce company Mundimoto expects to reach €100M in sales this year. The company announced a €20M round a few days ago
• Ancla, the initiative to raise awareness about mental health in startups led by Diego Ballesteros, announced the launch of "Healthy Minds para Emprendedores de Alto Impacto", a series of workshops and sessions aimed at startup founders
• Uber has sent an official complaint to the Spanish government to alert them that Glovo, according to the US company, continues to rely on freelancer riders despite regulation that says that riders ought to be employees of the platform companies
• High gas prices are pushing more and more users towards using Blablacar to share expenses. The company saw a record number of signups and trips in the past few weeks
• Startup profiles:
• Vesto: fintech and investment platform
• Earth Rover: agritech
• Yumminn: foodtech and fintech

Big company news 🏦

• Amazon announced the opening of a hardware development centre in Madrid, as part of its Lab126 initiative. The lab could employ as many as 100 people
• Facebook wants to open a data centre in Talavera de la Reina, which could employ up to 250 people
• HP also plans to open a development and innovation centre, but in Valencia
• Repsol and Telefonica announced a joint venture to advance self-consumption of solar energy
• Orange and MasMovil want to merge in what would become a €20B deal. If the transaction goes through, Meinrad Spenger, currently CEO of MasMovil would become CEO of the resulting entity. Here's a profile of Spenger in the context of this deal. What kind of impact could this have on the employees of both companies?
• Spanish competition watchdog CNMC believes that Telefonica has a dominant position in the paid TV market since the acquisition of Canal+ several years ago. As a result of this, Telefonica faces additional regulatory pressure. Telefonica now argues that if the CNMC were to take into account platforms such as Netflix, HBO and others, it wouldn't have such a dominant position in the market

Interesting reads 🤓

• Sponsored
  TODO sponsored (#TODO) news list element
• Ignacio Arriaga, co-founder of Acumbamail, published an interesting thread about content marketing. He explains what worked for them and what didn't, and how they combined both long form content with shorter pieces to tackle different needs
• Newsletter Views published an interview with Ander Michelena, co-founder of All Iron Ventures and previously of Ticketbis (acquired by StubHub). He goes into quite a bit of detail about the history and acquisition of Ticketbis, as well as the origins and current strategy of All Iron
• Caroline Lagergren of Expand To Spain wrote "Unicornesses to-be; Spanish unicorn candidates with female tech founders"
• El Confidencial interviewed Elena García de Alcaraz, managing director of design agency Fjord, to talk about responsible design, circular design and other topics
• Amalia Ruiz Pemartin published an analysis of the CEOs of 400 Spanish startups that have raised funding in the past few years, looking at their gender, money raised, professional experience, location, education and more

Podcasts 🎧

• Product Hackers interviewed David Martin, co-founder of Tradeinn
• ASCRI started a new podcast and in the first episode they interviewed Aquilino Peña of Kibo Ventures. Aquilino was also interviewed in Emprendedores
• Life On Mars interviewed Guillem Vila, co-founder of Ocado
• K Fund interviewed Marcello Valerio and Galo de Reyna, co-founders of logistics company IF
• Itnig interviewed David Moreno, co-founder of Hawkers