Hay despedidas que no duelen. A diferencia de las del aeropuerto ✈️, decirle adiós a todos esos procesos manuales que te roban tiempo, dinero y hasta el ánimo no duele en absoluto. Es más, sienta de maravilla. Porque automatizar procesos y digitalizar tareas da bastante gusto.

De eso de automatizar y digitalizar procesos en Pleo sabemos un poquito (mucho). Básicamente porque llevamos años desarrollando la solución de gestión de gastos n.º 1 en Europa. Nos dimos cuenta de que absolutamente a nadie le gustan las tareas manuales y decidimos hacerle a todo mundo la vida más fácil. Ahora las notas de gasto, las facturas, los presupuestos y todo lo que viene después, se gestiona desde un único lugar. Y ese lugar es Pleo ✨

Pero bueno, siendo honestos, no hemos podido automatizarlo todo. Era prácticamente imposible. Así que, para serte todavía más útiles hemos recogido en un ebook la lista definitiva de herramientas que necesitas para despedirte de todo tipo de procesos manuales. Porque sabemos que cuantas menos horas pases tecleando y rellenando hojas de Excel, mejor.

Si quieres conocer todas esas herramientas que no pueden faltar en tu día a día, descarga el ebook gratis aquí.

Startup funding news 💸

• Gipuzkoa-based ScrapAd, an online marketplace of recycled materials, raised €5m, co-led by Indi Partners and Bergé y Cía
• Barcelona-based restaurant tech startup Last.app raised €5m, led by Nauta
• Barcelona-based biotech startup A4Cell raised €3m, from BeAble Capital
• Barcelona-based health startup Methinks raised €2.5m from the European Innovation Council Fund (EIC). Methinks vision is "to provide universal and timely medical assistance to enable life-saving treatments worldwide, starting with strokes"
• Other rounds of funding: FOSSA Systems, Boldest, TaxiCoin, Praefy
• Startups looking for funding: OK,Z

M&A activity 🎊

• Cloud and hosting provider Gigas acquired Alterlinks and entered into a strategic alliance with Lyntia to further its business in Portugal. The deals help Gigas increase its presence and business in the country. More details available here
• Indra acquired fintech and payments company Pecunpay

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• Cardumen Capital, the Spanish fund that invests in Israeli deep tech startups, announced a final closing of its second fund 30% above its target size, at €105m
• Tritemius to launch a €50m fund focused on web3 projects
• Antonio Gimenez, formerly general partner at Seaya, to join Alantra to co-lead its Venture Capital division with Ana Segurado (formerly of Telefonica)
• Profile of Gonzalo Tradacete, co-founder of investment firm Faraday Venture Partners
• Pablo Isla, former CEO of Inditex, to join investment firm Cinven as "Global Senior Advisor". Cinven invests in a wide variety of businesses, including technology ones (Masmovil, Hotelbeds)

Startup news 💡

• FX software company Ebury hired investment bank Perella Weinberg Partners to launch an IPO of the business as soon as 2025. Banco Santander owns 67% of the startup, which was valued at more than $1b in its last transaction (2022). To date, Santander has invested more than €600m into the company. Eburys' CEO Juan Lobato gave several interviews in Spanish and international press last week. Here's an interview with El Economista. In its last fiscal year, Ebusy posted positive EBITDA of €18m and sales of €233m (+85% YoY). It has 1,700 employees, mostly in Spain and London
• Holaluz to perform an ERE (RIF) that will affect 27% of its employees, or 200 people. In the first half of 2023, Holaluz posted a loss of €20.9m, vs. a €5.5m profit in the year-ago period. You can read the company's filing on the subject here and here. The company says that the weak performance to date is due to "high interest rates and a false impression of price moderation due to subsidisation, along with the ability of oil and gas companies to offer energy well below the market price, have slowed down residential customers' decision-making to invest in solar installations"
• Borja Sole, founder of Buo, explained in a blog post why they decided to shut down the company despite having a term sheet from a VC for a €2m investment. Buo was a platform to connect brands and consumers for the acquisition of surplus stock of food and other products. The post is worth reading and can be summarized in the fact that Buo was not able to find product-market fit, which happens to the vast majority of companies out there. Thanks for the transparency, Borja!
• Visma is a Norwegian company that has been quite active in Spain in recent years, acquiring Holded, Woffu, Declarando and Quaderno. In an interview with its CEO, Merete Hverven, she says that the four businesses combined will generate €25m in ARR in 2023
• Juan de Antonio, co-founder and CEO of Cabify, said in an interview when asked about Rakuten's intention of selling its stake (or part of) in Cabify: "Nos enfrentamos a renovaciones de nuestro accionariado; hemos pasado por esto varias veces y es normal pero no nos afecta a nuestro día a día. (...) Ellos están atendiendo a sus prioridades pero en nada tiene que ver con lo bien o mal que le va a Cabify. Nuestra gobernanza nos aísla de este tipo de decisiones". Rakuten owns around 47% of the ride hailing startup
• Delivery Hero to provision as much as €45m until further notice to compensate for potential fines to Glovo and its labour relationship with riders. Delivery Hero had previously provisioned €400m for the 2021-2023 period
• To be completely honest, I have not had the time to read this article that appeared last week about legal issues between various Spanish spacetech companies, featuring Zero 2 Infinity and Halo Space. But here's the link and the clickbaity headline: "Querella al exjefe de Arthur D. Little España y varios directivos por 'sabotear' una 'startup'"
• Danish startup Monta, that specializes in EV charging infrastructure, announced the opening of a development centre in Barcelona, where it plans to hire 80 people

Big company news 🏦

• Indra has spent €225m in the first half of 2023 in M&A transactions and in the acquisition of minority stakes of companies. Most of the deals were in companies in the defense sector
• Uber Direct, the company's last mile logistics service, is now available in Spain
• Supermarket chain Dia said that online sales account for 4% of its sales
• Forgepoint Capital and Banco Santander participated in the $17m Series A round of Boston-based cybersecurity startup Lynx
• Construction company ACS to spend €100m to build its first data centre
• Disney+, like other video streaming platforms that operate in Spain, will have to pay a fee of 5% of the revenues it generates here to the Spanish government and state, to "help finance the European TV and movie industry". I find this crazy, but I might not fully understand the rationale behind this tax

¡Aún puedes presentarte a los Premios EmprendeXXI!, la iniciativa de CaixaBank y Enisa para acompañar y reconocer a las startups más innovadoras y con mayor potencial de crecimiento en España y Portugal, que en esta edición repartirán cerca de €800k en premios, acciones de acompañamiento y visibilidad. ¿Quieres ser una de las 34 startups premiadas en esta edición? Apúntate hasta el 12 de diciembre y conviértete en un #Referente4Tomorrow optando a premios en metálico, formación, acceso a inversión y networking global.

Interesting reads 🤓

• How Tinybird uses Tinybird for real-time marketing
• Simon Muñoz, platform PM at Voicemod, published "El modelo de liderazgo monohilo de Amazon"
• Iago Lastra published "Testing en el FrontEnd: ¿Testing en el FrontEnd? Todo lo necesario para introducirse en el mundo del testing en frontend."
• Ignacio Arriaga, co-founder of Acumbamail, wrote "Cómo vender software whitelabel" and also published "Por qué el hypergrowth hace que el software sea un mal negocio"
• Samuel Gil, JME, published "Pitches que seducen a inversores"
• David Bonilla, Manfred, wrote "Saber despedir (bien)"

Podcasts 🎧

• Kfund interviewed Eduardo Navarro, president of Crescenta and Urbanitae
• Itnig interviewed Héctor Mata and Jaime Castillo, the founders of Shakers
• Oji Udezue, Chief Product Officer at Typeform, participated in a roundtable at OpenAI's dev day to talk about "the surprising things that they focused on to build and launch successful Al products "