Startup funding news 💸

• Apartment meta-search engine Hundredrooms closed a €4 million round led by Seaya Ventures
• Travel startup Trappit raised €2 million from Swanlaab, Sabadell Venture Capital and other investors
• BNEXT raised €300,000 on Crowdcube
• ApetEat, a food delivery startup that caters to businesses, raised€200,000 from undisclosed investors
• Chinese auto giant SAIC Motor has invested an undisclosed sum in machine learning startup BigML. BigML is headquartered in Portland, Oregon, but 50% of its employees are in Valencia

Startup exits 🎊

• Spanish mobile marketing startup Mobusi acquired Madrid-based Upplication. Upplication is a SaaS product to easily create and publish mobile apps. Terms of the deal were not disclosed
• El Español looks into Just Eat’s financials and the process of combining La Nevera Roja’s business since the acquisition was closed several months ago. 70% of La Nevera Roja’s employees have lost their jobs

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• Wayra’s boss, Mariano Amartino, to leave the company. Mariano wrote himself about the move on his blog
• Webcapitalriesgo has a new report out: ‘Maturity of Venture Capital in Spain. 2017′. Relevant facts and details of over 60 outstanding deals from the 90´s to the present (in Spanish and English )
• Kibo Ventures’ Sonia Fernández explains why they’ve invested in Vilynx
• Samuel Gil (JME Ventures): How to assign stock options in early-stage startups
• Startup accelerator NUMA Barcelona held its first demo day in Madrid
• The Spanish Venture Capital scene, a niche powered by international investors, writes Kippel01
• Kippel01 interviewed Carlos Guerrero, lawyer and founding partner of Sitka Capital
• Lanzadera is looking for startups for its 5th accelerator batch
• El Referente interviewed agritech accelerator Orizont

Startup news 💡

• Kippel01 looks into Cabify’s financials. The urban transportation company reached €5 million in revenue in Spain in 2015, up from €1.9 million in the previous year
• Sintetia interviewed the founders of biotech startup Neoalgae
• La Vanguardia to have a seat on RocketROI’s board, replacing ADTZ’s Juan Domínguez
• Teressa Studios, the Madrid-based videogame developer that has just won SWSX’s gaming pitch competition
• El Referente has an interview with Jose Luis Martinez, CEO and co-founder of Hundredrooms
• ChipiApp is a an app that allows users to compare transportation services (Cabify, Car2go, Uber) on the go
• How Panini is adapting its traditional business of football collectible cards (cromos) to a digital and mobile world
• UberEats, Deliberry, Glovo and DelSuper talked about the current state of online food delivery in Spain
• El Español published an interesting article that looks into the secondary market of VTC licenses in Spain, which can now cost as much as €60,000, and how Uber and Cabify are participating in it
• Spanish startup Entrenarme has launched in the UK and is planning to expand to the US
• Startup profiles: Epinium (customer reviews), Bluelife Battery (energy), Sedome (home care marketplace), eCooltra (urban transportation)

Big company news 🏢

• Telefonica’s Digital Chief, Mariano de Beer, talked about the company’s ‘fourth platform’, Aura, at an event in Madrid. He didn’t give any more interesting details about the initiative and the company has still not officially explained how they plan to monetise the platform
• Bolsamania published a summary of the first 12 months of Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete as CEO and president of Telefonica
• Tesla is looking to hire 12 more people in Spain, mostly at technical ad operational positions associated with the delivery of cars and maintenance
• From Atresmedia to Real Madrid: who controls digital television in Spain?
• Yahoo’s sale to Verizon could mean problems for the company’s business agreement with Atresmedia in Spain
• Grupo Rodilla reaches €100 million in annual sales and will soon start to deliver food via Deliveroo and Glovo
• Remember Vodafone’s historic agreement with Telefonica to use the company’s fibre infrastructure? It seems as if Orange also has a similar agreement with the Spanish telco
• La Liga, the Spanish professional football league, has hired former Facebook and Netflix directors to lead its digital strategy
• Alibaba has yet to open an office in Spain, but the Chinese company is building a team to lead AliExpress’ operations in the country
• Telefonica to become an official sponsor of Real Madrid. Expansion says that the deal could be as high as €15 to €20 million in two years
• Spanish bank EVO has hired Javier Rodriguez Zapatero, former Google country manager in Spain, as an independent board member
• BBVA joins Hyperledger blockchain project
• Less than 30% of telco’s employees are women
• El Confidencial says that Rakuten is preparing to get rid of the brand ‘Wuaki.tv’ and will be known as Rakuten.tv
• Samsung, CaixaBank, Visa and Arval will open an innovation hub for the fintech industry in Barcelona
• Car2go has now more than 150,000 users in Madrid

Tech and policy 💂🏼

• Airbnb wants Galicia’s regional government to also allow hosts on its platform to legally share rooms in their apartments. The US company is also making this request in Madrid and Barcelona
• Palma de Mallorca will prohibit all vacation rental properties after the summer, affecting Airbnb, Homeaway and similar platforms
• Spain has no plans to restrict the use of tablets and laptops during flights, according to La Vanguardia. The UK and the US have banned the used of such devices in flights coming from certain Middle Eastern countries
• The legal battle between Cabify and taxi associations has resumed
• Uber has hired the lawyer that forced the company to close its UberPop service in Spain in 2014 and who previously had strong ties to taxi clients
• Madrid’s bet on car sharing platforms such as Car2go or Emov continues. Now these companies are asking the local government to install electric vehicle chargers on the streets

Interesting reads 🤓

• Spanish police forces that fight cybercrime complain that they don’t have enough resources and that they don’t receive enough support from their superiors
• Madrid was the Spanish region which attracted a higher number of companies (overall, not just digital/tech ones) in 2016, with a net balance of +407. Cataluña posted the worst balance in the country, with -279
• Vernon: A guide for understanding Product Managers through their skills
• Lucas Krauel: The Spanish surgeon that 3D prints tumours to fight youth cancer
• Expansión: Successful Spanish entrepreneurs that most people pay attention to
• The top 8 super geeky things about Barcelona
• Iker Marcaide, former CEO and co-founder of Flywire (peerTransfer), presented its latest project: La Pinada. An eco-friendly neighbourhood in Valencia
• The Spanish IT market grew by 3% in 2016, reaching €23 billion
• €6 million and 2,000 clients affected: Spanish website Planetatv is being investigated for fraud
• El Español reached an agreement with publications Omicrono and El Androide Libre to power its tech section

Podcasts of the week 🎧

• MasQueStartups talked to Carlos Hernández, founder and CEO of Quaderno
• K Fund talked to Diego Mariño about product management