Bcas raised €7m. SlidesCarnival acquired by Canva. New €100m Mundi fund.
March 13, 2023 • Issue #361
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Startup funding news 💸
- Madrid-based fintech company Bcas raised €7m in debt and equity, led by Zubi Capital
- Barcelona-based Aqui Tu Reforma raised €2.5m, led by Roca Group Ventures
- Pamplona-based elderly care platform Familiados raised €1m, led by Grupo Larrión
- Madrid-based hr bot factory raised €1m, led by DraperB1
- Other rounds of funding: Wilgo, Wavic
M&A activity 🎊
- Jimena Catalina, founder of Slidescarnival, a website to download Google Slide templates and other visual assets, announced that she has sold the company to Canva, the Australian startup valued at $40b in 2021. Slidescarnival started as a side project for Jimena, and in 2019 she was making $200,000 per year with just 4 hours of work per week
- Palma-based travel company TravelCompositor was acquired by Parisian company Travelsoft. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but in a press release the company said that its investors, Caixa Capital Risc, Didac Lee and Hotusa Ventures will receive a return of 12 to 15x. Manuel Aragones, co-founder of the company, wrote about the deal here
- Jose Maria Hernanz, principal at JME, published an overview of the Spanish tech IPO market, to "throw some light on the activity of early stage Spanish companies in the public equity markets in the past c10 years"
Investor & accelerator news 🚀
- Alma Mundi Futuretail is a new €100m fund launched by Mundi's Javier Santiso to invest in software and hardware companies operating in the retail space. The fund, which has now begun it's fundraising process, aims to invest in 15 to 30 startups
- Biotech fund Columbus Venture Partners to open an office in Boston, its first outside of Spain. CVP currently manages three funds, of €41m, €70m and its last one of €120m, launched in 2021
- Jose del Barrio, co-founder of VC firm Samaipata, said that the firm expects to heavily invest in generative AI companies in the next few months
- RedRiverWest, a French VC that specializes in investing in post Series A companies and help them launch in the US, hired Gonzalo Torres as is its first Spanish venture partner, to cover Spain for the firm. Gonzalo currently serves as country lead of Shopify
- Madrid-based foodtech accelerator Eatable Adventures announced that it has invested €15m in FoodSeed, the national Agrifoodtech programme in Italy, along with CDP Venture Capital Sgr, Fondazione Cariverona, and UniCredit
Startup news 💡
- I had a long bullet point here with some content on the Silicon Valley Bank situation, but as of this morning, it seems as if all SVB depositors will be “fully” protected, and their money will be available on March 13th. It is still unknown what will happen to SVB UK, the British branch of the bank
- I thought this was an interesting read, published by Emanuele Cardelli, technical lead at Glovo: "Inside Glovo’s deliveries optimization ". The article focuses on the work of the Matching team, whose goal "is to solve the assignment problem, which consists in deciding, for each order, who is the best courier to handle it, with the goal of improving the efficiency of the system while respecting the business constraints"
- Fullstep, a Madrid-based procurement solutions provider specialized in sourcing process optimization and software, said that it did €17m in sales in 2022, almost 2X vs. 2021
- This article focuses on Fever 's content strategy, which includes a series of social media accounts (mostly on TikTok and Instagram) that have more than 16m followers combined and generate 30m monthly page views. The accounts, which cover specific cities, serve as a sort of City Guide and generate traffic to Fever's own properties
- Edu Riera, co-founder of edtech platform Zrive, published in a series of tweets the slides he used to pitch the project for the first time about a year ago. Zrive describes itself as a project that "strives to create a space where individuals can gain skills, accelerate their careers and build a network, outside traditional educational institutions."
- I had never seen a company with two CTOs, but Chema Molina, co-founder of magnetics company Frenetics, explains in this post why the company has got two CTOs, one for the software part of the company and another one for the magnetics part, to "lead the new research in modeling losses in magnetics and new technologies (materials, applications…)"
- Fishing app WeFish to shut down after failing to complete a new funding round. Alberto Manuel Lopez Martinez, CEO of the company, wrote about it here. Another company that shut down last week is Barcelona-based gaming studio Lince Works
- Representatives of Spanish VC firms Nina Capital and Iris Ventures spoke to Sifted about European fertility companies to keep an eye on
- According to Pitchbook data, women account for only 20% of management and C-level positions at Spanish unicorns
- Business Insider talked to various edtech startups to try to understand how ChatGPT might impact their businesses, featuring Balio, Videocation, Kotokan and others
- Startup profiles:
- Telum Therapeutics: biotech
Big company news 🏦
- Eva Sirera, head of innovation at fashion brand Desigual, talked in this interview about the relationship the firm has with startups and the different initiatives it currently has
- BBVA Spark, the bank's arm that specializes in products and services for startups, is now available in Colombia
Interesting reads 🤓
- Valencia Innovation District, a project led by association Startup Valencia, received the good news of a 35 year concession to occupy a large building of more than 5000 square meters that will house startups, investors and other ecosystem players
- Lord Draugr published a 14 minute video on the "strange history of Tuenti"
- Iñaki Arriaga, co-founder of Acumbamail, published "how to deal with feedback in a SaaS company"
Podcasts 🎧
- Product Hackers interviewed Borja Prieto, head of marketing in Southern Europe at Factorial
- Novicap interviewed Marta Giró, CFO of Freshly Cosmetics
- Historias de Crecimiento interviewed Ivan Navas, CEO of Doofinder
- Nude Project interviewed the founders of ecommerce and fashion brands Hoff and PdPaola
- Destino Digital interviewed K Fund 's Miguel Arias
- K Fund interviewed Iñaki Arriaga, co-founder of Acumbamail
- Itnig interviewed Borja Vazquez, co-founder of Scalpers