Hemos diseñado AWS Startup Academy: Onboarding Bootcamp para Startups.

El primer día de inmersión híbrido de AWS donde los asistentes podrán participar de forma virtual y física. Será la primera parada para startups nuevas y en crecimiento, que estén iniciando su camino con AWS y quieran acelerarlo.

Cubriremos los programas de AWS Startups que puedes aprovechar, como AWS Activate, programas de créditos, soporte de negocio y consultoría técnica. También haremos un recorrido sobre los principales servicios que puedes utilizar y cómo abordarlos en tu startup.

Más info aquí.

Startup funding news 💸

• Valencia-based Jeff, which helps entrepreneurs start and run their businesses, raised €83m, backed by Stelac, DX Ventures, Clean Ventures, and Prism. Eloi Gomez, CEO, was interviewed by Valencia Plaza to chat about the company's current situation, plans to concentrate on its main laundry business and other topics
• Madrid-based Penpot, the open source platform for designers and their coders, raised $12m as users jump to 250k. Penpot is the open source alternative to Penpot. The round was led by Decibel, the VC firm affiliated with Cisco, who also led its previous round
• Valladolid-based mLean, developers of continuous improvement software, raised €3m from Caixa Capital risc
• Barcelona-based EV charger developer Vega Chargers raised €2.5m
• Other rounds of funding: Nyxell, CazaTuPlaza, Wetako, Lateua

M&A activity 🎊

• Italian company TeamSystem acquired the email business unit of Growens, which includes Spanish bootstrapped startup Acumbamail. Acumbamail was previously acquired by Growens in 2015. TeamSystem paid €70m for the business unit. Congrats to Iñaki Arriaga and team. Iñaki also writes a weekly newsletter at Disaaster.io, which I often link to
• Blackstone and Rivean announced in December the acquisition of Dutch energy company Esdec Solar. Now it's been announced that Esdec has acquired Valencia-based Sunfer Energy. Sunfer is a company dedicated exclusively to the design, calculation and manufacture of structural solutions for the photovoltaic market

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• French VC firm Elaia Partners published an article explaining why they're so bullish on Spain as a startup ecosystem. Elaia has backed local startups such as Holded, Marfeel, Nuclia, PricingHub, Geoblink, The Hotels Network, among others
• Seaya Andromeda participated in the $17m Series A round of Recycleye

Startup news 💡

• Sponsored
  En el AWS Startup Academy: Onboarding Bootcamp para Startups híbrido no nos quedaremos solo con teoría. El bootcamp será una una primera interacción práctica, no solo con nuestros pilares centrales de la infra (computación, redes y almacenamiento), sino también resaltaremos otras tecnologías clave que acelerarán la innovación y los procesos para pasar de MVP a producción de manera ágil. Más info aquí.
• Glovo announced layoffs that will affect 6.5% of its workforce, or 250 employees. Oscar Pierre, CEO, wrote about the decision here. The majority affected are based in Spain, in the areas of business development, recruiting and big data. Two weeks ago it was disclosed that Glovo increased its revenues by 65%, to €595M, but its losses also ballooned to €495M (up from a loss of €51M in 2021). Also last week, food chain Rodilla announced that it would stop working with Glovo due to the labour conditions of its riders
• Investment management giant Hamilton Lane has opened the first of three tokenized funds through a partnership with Securitize, the crypto company co-founded by Carlos Domingo
• Freepik announced the launch of Wepik, a product that they described as "the first non-professional editor to use artificial intelligence to create images"
• El Español talked to Devo's Sergio Bellido, VP of Product Management, about the current state of cybersecurity, areas in which the company sees opportunities and its prospects for the near future
• Retail and online furniture and decor store KaveHome announced that it grew revenues by 34% compared to 2021, and reached €153m. The company also said that it bought out its investors, acquiring the 30% stake owned by PE firm Tresmares Capital in the company
• Data observability and QA tool for analytics startup Trackingplan published a post with a summary of how the company has evolved in the past few months, from joining YC to evolving into a QA tool for your analytics
• Latitude, a startup that allows you to build low-code data apps in minutes, announced the launch of an AI SQL Assistant using OpenAI’s GPT-3 models to suggest SQL queries in real-time, based on your prompts and right from your data workspace. More info here
• N26 is looking for a Spanish country manager
• UpBizor said that it has helped Spanish startups receive as much as €75m of non-dilutive funding in 2022, up 50% compared to the previous years
• Startup profiles:
• Buscoresi: proptech
• EveryDay: habit tracker app, bootstrapped

Big company news 🏦

• Spaniard Javier Olivan, COO of Meta (Facebook) to move back to Spain and work remotely from here. He'll earn €1m in base salary, plus variable salary and stock options. La Informacion has quite a bit of details about the move, as well as his investment activity. Javier Olivan is an investor in fintech startup Goin, a K Fund portfolio company
• Microsoft announced that Spanish employees will be affected by the company's recently announced layoffs. Microsoft plans to lay off 10,000 people

Interesting reads 🤓

• On Bloomberg: Spanish-speaking streamers are the hottest thing on Twitch. Spanish is the fastest-growing language on Twitch, but Latin America’s influencer economy is still in early stages of development
• Samuel Gil, of JME, published "All you need is...?" on generative AI
• Ivan Landabaso, also of JME, wrote an overview of the Spanish generative AI market in Spain, including a map of some of the most notable companies in the space
• How can Spain uncover the profitability of impact investment?
• Chema Molina, co-founder of Frenetic, wrote "How to become an Efficient Engineer"

Podcasts 🎧

• Historias de Crecimiento interviewed Juan Such, co-founder of Rankia
• Minimalism interviewed Marta Frenna, CEO of Grey Hounders
• Startasap interviewed Victor Ramirez and Aitor Rodriguez of Vermú and Buscoresi
• Itnig interviewed Sergi Font and Gonzalo Noy, co-founders of Dogfy Diet