No hay un día idéntico a otro, ¿verdad? Pues con los gastos de trabajo pasa un poco lo mismo: los hay de todo tipo. Y no siempre se pueden pagar con tarjeta.

Por eso esta semana queremos destacar Pocket, la funcionalidad creada por Pleo para gestionar todos esos gastos que las tarjetas no pueden cubrir. Desde los costes de kilometraje a los reembolsos cuando la plantilla ha tenido que adelantar dinero de su bolsillo.

¿Todavía no conoces Pleo ? Pues solo estás a un click de hacerlo y cambiar tu gestión de gastos para siempre.

Startup funding news 💸

• Pitchbook published a post with some numbers and analysis of the development of Southern Europe's VC ecosystem
• Barcelona-based proptech 011h raised €25M, led by Redalpine and with the participation of Seaya. 011h, founded by Lucas Carne (Privalia) specializes in sustainable building development. More on the round and company here
• Barcelona-based FlexiDAO raised €6.1M to enable 24/7 clean energy
• Madrid-based health tech startup Devon Labs raised €4.5M from Inveready
• Barcelona-based crypto company Rungie raised €1.5M, led by us at K Fund. My colleague Victor Navarro wrote about the deal here
• Santiago-based biotech company Libera Bio raised a €1.3M seed round from a series of funds and business angels, including Iñaki Berenguer, ROSP, Xesgalicia and others
• Other rounds of funding: Nomade Vans,
• Startups looking for funding: Audifono,

M&A activity 🎊

• The acquisition of Glovo by Delivery Hero was finally approved. Given the performance of Delivery Hero in the stock market and the fact that this is an all-stock deal, Glovo's closing price was around €800M, below the amount it raised in the private markets. Shareholders of Glovo could wait to sell their Delivery Hero shares to cash out, with the expectation of a stock market rebound. Also last week, the European Commission did a surprise inspection of certain Delivery Hero and Glovo offices to understand if both companies performed antitrust actions
• Deporvillage was acquired by British JD Sports for more than €100M in June of last year. Now the new owner will pay an extra €22M as part of an earnout. The startup founders still have a 20% stake in the business, which should be acquired by JD from 2024 onwards
• Reddit acquired Madrid-based natural language processing company MeaningCloud
• A group led by Hugo Arevalo and Tamara Falco acquired ecommerce company Miniplanta
• Indra bought civil and military simulation company Simumak
• Poland company Livekid acquired Spanish competitor Dinantia in all-cash, several million dollar deal, more acquisitions on the horizon
• Telco group Aire Networks acquired Spanish company Stackscale

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• Suma Capital and Repsol announced the launch of a new climate tech and sustainability fund called SC Net Zero Tech Ventures. The goal of the firms is to raise €150M
• El Confidencial published a profile of Nacho Vilela, co-founder of Junipero and Almanac, investment vehicles that back pre-IPO companies in the private markets. Junipero has returned significant money to its investors
• Samaipata led a $1.7M round in London-based SymTerra, a communications platform for the construction project supply chain
• Telefónica backed British company Raylo with £6.5M to scale subscription payment platform
• Business Insider published a list of Spanish funds that also invest in non-Spanish companies

Startup news 💡

• Sponsored
  Expense management company Pleo has a new product for expenses that you couldn't pay with your card. It's called Pocket, and it's quite useful for certain transactions in which you had you use cash or you simply didn't have a debit card available. You should check it out here
• Spanish crypto exchange 2gether has shut down and left 100k accounts in limbo. The company, who already suffered a hack several years ago, has not provided much info to its customers: on its website there's a message that reads "Web under maintenance you will soon receive 2gether novelties" and the company has even deleted its Twitter profile. Some of 2gether customers received a message that says that the company is shutting down due to "lack of resources and the crypto winter"
• What lawmakers and government institutions are doing in Cataluña to stop businesses such as Cabify or Uber from operating in their cities is just bad. The latest is a series of random and stupid regulations to limit the number of VTC cars in Barcelona, such as requiring cars to be at least 4.9 meters to be able to be on the road
• Wired published an article about the struggles of Gorillas and other last mile q-commerce startups. The article goes into quite a bit of detail about the economics of Gorillas and the cost reduction measures it has had to implement across Europe, including in Spain
• Alfonso de la Nuez, co-founder of UserZoom, announced that he's no longer CEO of the company and that he will move to a new role as Chief Visionary Officer. You can't come up with a better name for a role!
• Location intelligence company Geoblink launched in the Netherlands and Germany. Proptech Aqui Tu Reforma also announced expansion plans, starting with Mexico
• Remote hiring and payroll platform Deel to o fficially launch in Spain. The company already has more than 50 employees in the country, according to LinkedIn
• Startup profiles:
• Reveni: fintech solution for reverse logistics

Big company news 🏦

• David Bonilla (Manfred) published a summary of what's happened at Indra in the past few months and its takeover by a government-supported group
• Another week, another company that announces the opening of a significant office in Malaga: EY
• Snap to open an office in Spain

Interesting reads 🤓

• La Vanguardia interviewed Elisenda Bou, co-founder of Vilynx and acquired by Apple, to encourage more women to study STEM degrees and join technical related jobs and fields
• According to a report by DigitalES, there are more than 120k technical job openings in Spain at the moment, and not enough supply of developers and engineers to fill them. Here's another article on the job market, this time focused on the availability of data-related jobs
• Ignacio Arriaga, co-founder of Acumbamail, published a post on SaaS pricing

Podcasts 🎧

• Product Hackers interviewed Maria Gonzalez, co-founder of Tucuvi
• Early Days interviewed Avi Meir, co-founder of TravelPerk
• Marketing4Ecommerce interviewed Jeroen Merchiers, co-founder of proptech Zazume
• Itnig interviewed Josep Talavera, co-founder of Mundimoto
• Novicap interviewed Laura Lozano, co-founder of Chargy
• SeedRocket interviewed Guillem Viladomat, co-founder of Durcal