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Startup funding news 💸

• Boat rental marketplace BoatBureau raised €500,000 from Sabadell VC and Nero Ventures
• Music startup Newmusicnow raised €360,000
• According to El Referente, Fotawa is closing a new round of funding via Fellow Funders

Startup exits 🎊

• Mauricio Prieto (eDreams) published a very interesting analysis of Spanish tech exits

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

• El Español interviewed Oskar Mielczarek de la Miel, manager of Rakuten Capital, the venture arm of Rakuten that has invested in the likes of Cabify and Glovo
• Marketing4commerce interviewed Iñaki Arrola, general partner at K Fund. The firm also announced this week the launch their Operating Partners platform
• Kibo Ventures held an event at Stanford’s GSB to promote Spanish entrepreneurship. Sonia Fernandez, partner at the firm, also wrote an article last week explaining a bit more how they work and what kind of companies they’re looking for
• Israeli equity crowdfunding platform OurCrowd expands global operations with new office in Spain
• Grupo Intercom to shut down its venture arm in order to launch a new vehicle in the near future
• Nuclio Venture Builder held its third Nuclio Weekend
• InnoCells is a new hub launched by Banco Sabadell to cater to tech companies
• SeedRocket announced the name of the companies that will participate in its Madrid Campus that will take place in November

Startup news 💡

• According to El Español, Cabify is having trouble raising a previously rumoured large funding round, of up to €500 million
• Fintech startup Kantox grew its revenues by 30% in 2016. A slower pace compared to the previous year, when the company’s top line had tripled
• Spotahome’s country manager in Italy will also lead the company’s operations in Spain
• Reclamador announced two new major milestones: €20 million generated in compensations and 150,000 clients
• World Tech Makers coding bootcamp arrives in Barcelona
• El Mundo has a profile of Blinkfire Analytics, the Valencia-based startup that has attracted investment from Twitter’s former CEO Dick Costolo, among others
• Glovo to increase their tech team by 50 engineers in Barcelona
• Ficosa: the Spanish tech company that produces part of the Battery Management System (BMS) used by Tesla in its cars
• British fintech startup and mobile banking platform Revolut has launched in Spain
• French ticketing platform Weezevent launched in Spain

Big (local) company news 🏢

• Telefonica named Sergio Oslé as the company’s new head of video. Oslé will help define Movistar’s strategy to compete against Netflix, HBO and other OTT services
• Telefonica sold 24,8% of Telxius to KKR for €790 million. The company posted a €2.4b profit in the first nine months of 2016, 9.6% more than in the year ago period
• Kippel01 wrote an interesting article about Inditex’s digital strategy
• Joan Roig, founder of Mercadona, is now more bullish than before about the company’s online strategy

Big (foreign) company news 🏦

• Chinese giant Xiaomi to officially launch in Spain. Xataka has six questions about the company’s entrance our market
• Amazon opened a new logistics centre in Barcelona’s ‘Zona Franca’
• Alibaba’s Spanish manager says that more than 71 stores or brands are currently active on the platform
• El Español looked into MondoDB’s business in Spain. The company just went public in the US

Tech and policy 💂🏼

• VozPopuli took a look at the working conditions of gig economy workers
• Spanish transparency agency UCO claims that Indra paid the PP party more than €600,000 in ilegal payments

Interesting reads 🤓

• Startup Genome published a new report: The Barcelona Startup Ecosystem Report
• Vozpopuli published an analysis of the energy market, featuring startups such as Lucera or HolaLuz
• Xataka talked to a bunch of Spanish artists and entrepreneurs that rely on Patreon to monetise content
• Critical profile of Xavier Verdaguer in Merca2
• Spaces is a new player in the coworking sector in Spain. Similar to WeWork, the Dutch company recently opened its first space in Madrid. Vozpopuli has the details
• There was a time when mobile phones were actually manufactured in Spain. Xataka wrote a profile of Malaga-based Vitelcom/TSM. In its heydays, the company manufactured 5 million phones per year and had sales of €700 million
• Tomás Santoro of SumaCRM wrote about the company’s values and how they try to establish them
• Eduardo Manchón (Panoramio, Mailtrack) published an interesting tweetstore about “real innovation”
• Andrés Torrubia finished fourth in a global AI competition
• Iñaki Arrola (K Fund): ’In a startup is almost always better not to have advisors, unles…’
• The European version of Israel Mobile Summit is coming to Madrid. VozPopuli interviewed the conference’s founder Ofir Leitner

Podcasts of the week 🎧

• MasQueStartups interviewed Marcos de la Cueva, co-founder and CEO of invoicing startup Billin

And last but not least…

CTO’s Summit is a must-attend event for Spanish CTOs and developers. There are still tickets left (but not many!) and if you have 10 spare minutes, please help them by filling in their survey.