AWS Startup Academy is around the corner!

Starting September 27th, we are thrilled to invite you to a series of sessions with our AWS startup experts. Registrations are now open, do not miss your chance to get a spot!

We will start with a virtual technical session to learn around scalability, as well as we review basic concepts and how AWS can reduce your required coding time to create applications.

Then, the Statups Hackathon will follow, where we will apply innovation during an in-person day in our Madrid AWS office. You will work backwards from your customer’s needs and learn how to use MVP with AWS Amplify to accelerate your applications in AWS.

Last but not least, are you interested in how to build a winning pitch deck? Join us on October 19 to hear from Aleix Casals. He will share best practices and how to tell your story in a way that is successful both for you and your startup.

Startup funding news 💸

• Fundacion Bankinter published its startup investment report for the first half of 2023. Quick summary, more deals but less total investment volume, which usually means a decrease in late stage deals
• Barcelona-based last mile logistics company Paack raised €40m, with "significant involvement" by Infravía Capital, in equity and debt. The company posted a loss of €61m last year, 4 or 5 times bigger than in 2021
• Barcelona-based EV charging company Vega Chargers raised €5m from Orbis
• Donostia-based health tech startup Dive Medical raised €1.1m
• Startups looking for funding: Email5
• Other rounds of funding: Kream,

M&A activity 🎊

• Spanish travel tech startup Civitfun acquired Italian counterpart Group Reservation System (GRS)

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• Galdana Ventures' take on AI and generative AI
• My Kfund colleagues Isabel Salgueiro and Silvia Sancho published "The Role of Iberia in Feeding Europe"

Startup news 💡

• Sponsored
  AWS Startup Academy is around the corner. Starting September 27th, AWS is thrilled to invite you to a series of sessions with their AWS startup experts. Registrations are now open, do not miss your chance to get a spot. Full list of events here.
• Unai Asenjo, co-founder of Indexa Capital, talked in an interview about the process of going public on the BME Growth. “Going public has almost taken the same amount of time as founding the company”
• Profile of Smartick, the edtech bootstrapped company that has more than 25,000 customers around the world
• More than 20 employees of Freshly Cosmetics spoke to a newspaper about labor issues with regards to stress and mental health. Freshly has raised almost €20m to date. The article focuses on complaints that took place between 2019 and 2021. Also last week, Freshly's co-founder and CMO Mireia Trepat was interviewed in the Product Hackers podcast
• Profile of travel startup GrowPro. The company did €20m in sales last year and expects to hit €50m in 2023. GrowPro is a Kfund portfolio company
• Vital, a habit-building social network for activities with friends, launched on Product Hunt. The product is designed to encourage daily physical activity. Vital raised funding early on from JME
• CRM company Forcemanager has introduced several AI-powered products and features in the past few months. The last one is DanaiAI, a chat that allows customers to interact simply via chat with their CRM data
• Travel startup Waynabox has reached €1m in monthly sales and expects to hit €10m for 2023
• According to Capchase, early-stage SaaS startups grow the same with or without VC dollars
• Asset tokenization firm Securitize has issued the first tokenized equities under the EU’s pilot regime for digital assets. The tokens issued via the smart contract network Avalanche represent equity in Spanish real estate investment trust Mancipi Partners, supervised under the test environment of Spain’s CNMV
• Startup profiles:
• Hotelbeds: travel tech
• Bdeo: insurtech
• Fabbric: fashion
• 011h: proptech and sustainability

Big company news 🏦

• Atom Bank, a UK neobank partially owned by BBVA, delivered its first annual underlying operating profit of £4m. A big part of this was a 62% growth in revenue, which far outstripped the 17% rise in operating costs. The company has 224k customers

Interesting reads 🤓

• Javier Vidal is an engineer who works at Meta and who spent the past three years of his career at Meta in California. Javier recently moved back to Spain and openly talked to El Confidencial about his experience, which he summarized in this tweet: "Para un europeo: insegura (armas), desigual (homeless), aburrida (suburbs), contaminante (pickups). Lo mejor: el salario. Mientras tus compañeros devuelven la deuda de estudios y ahorran para su pensión, tú los ahorras todo. Genial para una temporada."
• Simon Muñoz, platform product manager at Voicemod, published "El desafío de ser Product Manager en una industria inmadura"
• Iñaki Arriaga, co-founder of Acumbamail, wrote a thread about the two main topics of discussion in the Spanish tech ecosystem in the past few weeks: remote work and the role of product management
• Maciej Gawłowski, senior software engineer at Glovo, published "How to deliver new features successfully as a Software Engineer? (Part 2)"

Podcasts 🎧

• Itnig interviewed Andrea Inglés, co-founder of Illumo Robotics