The mobile and secondhand marketplace sector has one less competitor. Selltag, the startup co-founded by Ruben Colomer, Juan Luis Hortelano, Walter Kobylanski and CEO Javier Escribano, disappeared last week from both the iOS and Android app stores and it is not coming back.

Escribano left the company in mid September and, despite the fact that the company’s original team and investors tried to keep it alive, it is shutting down for good.

Selltag had raised €325,000 from various backers, including Valencia-based accelerator Plug and Play Spain, Vitamina K, Civeta, Danka Capital and business angel Carlos Domingo.

User engagement and retention

The company was originally co-founded by Colomer, Hortelano and Kobylanski in 2012. Then, Selltag was a web-based marketplace for used items, but two years later it changed its focus to adopt a mobile first strategy under the new leadership of Escribano, who joined the company as both co-founder and CEO in March 2014, a few months after leaving TouristEye following its acquisition by Lonely Planet.

In a phone conversation with Novobrief, Escribano said that the company’s main problem was user engagement and retention. “In every marketplace you have the chicken-and-egg problem with buyers and sellers. We tried to capture them both organically and via paid marketing, but it wasn’t enough. Getting sellers was somewhat easy, but buyers much more complicated”, he explained.

Escribano also talked about how capital intensive the mobile marketplace sector has become. “You need a lot of capital to achieve a high level of matching between buyers and sellers. Wallapop has done it very well and Letgo has enough money to try to get there”. Wallapop has raised more than $140 million in venture funding and Letgo launched its app over the summer with strong financial support from Nasper ($100 million).

In the process of raising a new round of funding

Selltag was in the middle of a financing round that would have allowed it to continue operating and growing. “We were close to raising a new round, but I decided not to continue with the project because I considered that our traction and metrics were not good enough”, Escribano said.

Selltag had more than 250,000 downloads and 55,000 registered users.

The company’s investors said that they did not see Escribano’s departure coming and that it was a bit of a surprise. “Javier did a good job with the fundraising process, but his decision came at a moment where we didn’t have many options left”, Ruben Colomer noted.

Colomer added that he strongly believed in the power of Telotransporto, a feature the company launched in July that served it to differentiate from competitors like Wallapop and Letgo. While the latter are exclusively focused on local and street-level transactions, with Telotransporto Selltag wanted to cater to users who were willing to sell products to people in other Spanish cities. The service cost €4,99 and Selltag promised to deliver products in less than 24 hours.

“It was not a perfect product, but potential investors showed interest in the model and saw it as a way of separating ourselves from competitors”, he said.

Following Escribano’s departure, Selltag’s co-founders tried to continue with the project, but the company’s cash position and sudden changes were too much to overcome. “They probably think that I was too pessimistic about the future of Selltag, but I think they were too optimistic”, Escribano said.

To sell, to continue or to shut down

“In September we got together and we discussed what to do. We talked and we all agreed that it was worth continuing with the project. We had three options: shut down, sell our assets or push forward. We tried the latter but it was not the right time to do so”, Colomer added.

Novobrief also understands that the company was close to selling its assets, allowing investors to get their money back and a small profit, but the deal fell through.

“Javier thought that it was too difficult to continue and that the metrics were lower than expected. He left and we tried to find a solution, but we couldn’t. I can only respect Javier’s decision”, Iñaki Arrola from Vitamina K commented. “It’s better to shut down on time than to continue at any cost”.

Photo | BarnImages

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Number of transactions on Ticketea since 2010

Spanish ticketing company Ticketea has hit a big milestone. The company founded by Javier Andres in 2010 has just reached €100 million in gross sales. “We’re pleased we’ve got to this stage and expectations for the remaining of the year are very positive”, Javier said in a phone conversation.

The company currently has offices in six European cities and claims that more than 70,000 events have been created on its platform and customers from 145 countries have purchased tickets through the site.

Following a €3 million investment from Seaya Ventures in 2013, the company has been in a relative acquisition spree as of late, buying Telemaco Sistemas, Telentrada and most recently Germany’s TodayTickets. And it is precisely in Germany, the UK and other international markets where Ticketea sees a big growth opportunity.

International expansion and other areas of growth

“To start our expansion we launched in two of the most complicated markets out there, the UK and Germany”, Javier says. “Things are going well and in less than a year these two countries will represent 10% of our sales”. Ticketea’s CEO says that this expansion has only started and that in coming months they plan to, once again, study the launch of their services in Latam, where Seaya has a lot of experience with other portfolio companies such as SinDelantalMX, Cabify or ComparaGuru.

Ticketea makes money by charging a small commission (usually of 10%) on each sale, which means that €100 million in sales equals to approximately €10 million in net revenue. Creating new events on its platform is free, and the company only charges clients when these decide to run paid events. The five year old platform houses all kinds of events, but in recent years its music and theatre business has increased significantly.

And the company is now looking for more areas of growth, outside and inside Spain.

Ticketea’s first mockup, from 2009

Javier explains that Ticketea wants to become much more than just a site where their own customers buy tickets, and to achieve that they’re planning on building what he describes as a ticketing marketplace. “Think about what Amazon does, allowing others to leverage their infrastructure and reach to sell their own products. We want to do something similar within our industry”, he explains.

This means that third parties who are interested in integrating their inventory with Ticketea will be able to do so, thus taking advantage of the company’s reach, database of clients and brand. This move would push Ticketea towards also becoming a sort of aggregator of ticketing services.

“In this business it’s hard to just be an aggregator, because commissions are very low. However, if you combine this with a proper ticketing business like ours, good things can happen”, Javier adds confidently.

It’s all about monetising the platform that Ticketea has built over the past few years.

Could selling last minute tickets be another area of growth? He’s not so sure about it. “I think last minute ticketing is a great future within a bigger business, but not a product per se. It’s interesting for the end user, but I don’t think it’s enough to build a big company around it due to low margins”.

Besides expanding internationally and becoming a marketplace of sorts, the company claims to also see an opportunity in integrating secondary and primary markets. “The barriers that separate these two markets are becoming thinner by the day”, he says. The idea is that once an event is sold out, companies can offer visitors the possibility of buying tickets through secondary ticketing platforms such as Viagogo or Ticketbis. Ticketmaster already does this with Seatwave.

“We don’t see ourselves entering the secondary market, but we’re interested in exploring the possibility of integrating someone else’s secondary inventory”, he adds.

A red hot industry

These are interesting times in the ticketing business, with big rounds of funding and acquisitions happening almost every month. London-based Songkick merged with CrowdSurge in June and raised a $16 million round, Pandora acquired Ticketfly for $450 million and Seatgeek received a $62 million investment. In Spain, Entradas.com got bought by Germany’s CTS Eventim in 2014.

“There’s a lot of momentum in the sector”, Javier says. “Our focus right now is on growing internationally and opening new areas of business. Spain is already profitable for us, but we have a long way to go”.

Does exploring these growth opportunities mean that the company will be raising funds soon? “Not necessarily. We don’t want to close any doors and we’re looking at various ways to push the gas pedal”, he notes.

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Our third case study from Madrid’s Google Launchpad is about Lurtis Rules, an artificial intelligence 3D assets creation startup.

In this report, we discuss the challenges of selling disruptive technologies with a specific focus on professional and enterprise solutions. We explore the different paths and also provide various references that might help other entrepreneurs and startups find their own sales strategy.

Sales is a key aspect of all businesses —especially for those focused on B2B clients— so read on, and share your experiences, anecdotes and thoughts on the topic on social media and the comments section.

All previous reports can be found here.

Disclaimer:

These case studies do not aim to provide a definitive guide for solving a problem, but rather to provide a glimpse into how taking a week to rethink your startup with the help of highly qualified mentors can offer companies a fresh perspective on their struggles and missed opportunities. This was a paid project and Google covered the expenses associated with the production of these reports.

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The origins of UserZoom go way back. Xperience Consulting was one of the first UX and usability consulting firms in Spain, founded right after the burst of the dotcom bubble by Alfonso de la Nuez, Javier Darriba and Xavier Mestres.

Javier and Xavi had met while both were doing and MBA at Esade, and the connection with Alfonso would be later formed while the three lived in Madrid working for Proxicom.

As an increasing number of companies and consumers were going online, they thought that building a great user experience would end up being a key aspect for businesses. That’s how Xperience Consulting was born.

“What we did back then was to improve company’s websites in any way possible”, Javier Darriba tells Novobrief in a phone conversation. “We had an international focus from day one, and we had the privilege of working with clients like Yahoo!, Motorola or Banco Santander when everything was just starting”.

At the time, most UX testing procedures took place inside usability labs. These laboratories are still used today to bring together 10 to 15 people for them to test websites and for consulting companies to track their behaviour. “The user comes to the room, they sit down in front of a computer for a little while and you ask them to perform various activities”, Javier explains.

Consultants often sit in a different room and through one-way mirrors they follow what the user does: how they navigate through sites, what they click on, what sections of websites don’t receive any attention, etc. “This is how UX testing was done for many years and this is how we started”, Darriba says.

Pushing UX labs forward: automating UX testing

Xperience Consulting continued operating this way throughout the first part of the decade, but the three co-founders quickly saw that, as in many other technology and societal aspects, software was quickly changing the status quo.

“What we saw is that this way of doing things didn’t make much sense from a business point of view and it was too time consuming”, notes Darriba. “Companies and consulting firms were making expensive business decisions based on 10 users and we thought there should be a better way of doing this”.

The objective was clear: to automate UX testing and bringing UX labs to the web.

The company had started experimenting with the automation of these processes since 2002 or 2003, when they had built rudimentary software that did the job but was not ready for consumers or clients. It wasn’t until 2007 that they considered they had built what the market needed: UserZoom.

“We were not engineers nor did we have a technical background, so we decided to outsource the first version of the software and gave the company that developed it a small stake in UserZoom”.

The company raised a small round of funding with local business angels and in 2008 they received a €1.5 million investment from Barcelona-based VC firm ACTIVE Venture Partners, which allowed the company to establish a bigger presence in the US and to fully focus on the North American market, which today accounts for the company’s most revenue, followed by the UK and Germany.

One objective: to be leaders in the US

Darriba talks openly about UserZoom’s main objective: to conquer and be one of the biggest players in the US, where they compete with companies like UserTesting or Clicktale.

“What differentiates us from others is that we have found a fine balance between qualitative and quantitative testing”, he explains. This means that, although UserZoom continues to offer clients the possibility of replicating UX lab testing remotely (the qualitative part), they’ve also paid a high degree of attention to the quantitative side of things; for example, to be able to run tests with more than 100,000 users.

Darriba, however, says that their main competitor is not a company in particular, but that more companies get to understand the importance of UX.

UserZoom was born in 2007, around the same time that the first version of the iPhone was launched. And we all know how the device ended up changing many industries and creating new business opportunities. The same has happened in the UX and design world, as thousands of consumer and enterprise apps have inundated the market over the past few years.

This represents a big challenge for a lot of businesses, as they see mobile traffic increase exponentially but conversation rates drop in comparison to the desktop.

“Companies had been studying desktop behaviour for the past 4 or 5 years and, all of a sudden, they see that mobile is in many cases the platform of the present and future. It’s like starting all over again”, Darriba explains.

While UserZoom’s set of tools continue to be mostly focused on the desktop, the company has developed specific software for smartphones and tablets. “In terms of the development of the tools it’s a totally different world compared to the desktop”, he says. “And it’s key to differentiate between mobile web and apps”. UserZoom’s software packages start at $19,000 per year.

Growth, growth, growth

The last time UserZoom talked publicly about its financials was in 2013, when Alfonso de la Nuez said in an interview that they expected to reach $7 million in revenue that year. At the time, 60% of the company’s business came from the US and Spain represented just 10%.

Darriba says that they can’t disclose their financials anymore, in part due to the $34 million investment round the company has just raised from TC Growth Partners, StepStone Group LP and Trident Capital.

“All I can say is that we’re in a market that’s growing at incredible rates, double digits year-on-year. This means that for us to become leaders, we need to grow even faster than the market itself. The good thing is that, in this sector, once you have a client on board, retention ratios are very high”, he adds.

That’s in part why, after almost a decade of self-financing, the company has gone fundraising again. “It’s impossible to achieve the growth we’re aiming for with just our own cash”, he says.

With almost 150 employees in six offices around the world and clients like Twitter, Amazon, Alibaba or the New York Times, it’s now time for UserZoom to push the gas pedal. “We deeply believe in our strategy. Now it’s time to add fuel to the fire”.

Note: If you’re interested in the topic, read Christopher Grant’s piece on the evolution of UX in Spain.

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Jesus Martínez of El Español published a very interesting profile of Amuda Goueli this past weekend. The Egypt-born but Madrid-based entrepreneur is the co-founder of Destinia, one of the biggest and most recognisable travel brands in Spain. And also a company that to date has raised zero in funding and grown bootstrapped.

In the article, Amuda admits that he receives calls from investors and potential acquirers every month, but he has yet to make a move and sell the company or receive outside investment from VCs or corporates.

As he told us in an article we published on Spanish bootstrapped startups earlier this year: “I’ve always defended the idea that when you start a business, you can’t be only thinking about getting rich. If you do that, when you face adversity -and you certainly will- you’ll just give up and start something else”.

In the El Español profile he admits that one of the first companies to approach Destinia to discuss an acquisition or investment was eDreams in 2005. However, Amuda claims that they didn’t do a good job to convince him and his co-founder: “They had a very good site for flights, but they were having a tough time entering the hotels sector and they wanted to integrate our system”.

In the article, Amuda lists the conditions that he wanted to impose on the deal which led it to fell through.

• No layoffs at Destinia
• Establishing long term goals and not immediate ones for the company
• Independence in the day-to-day operations of the company
• No specific requirements of EBITDA growth and no profit-sharing in the following two years after the deal

Considering how toxic eDreams was in other previous deals, it’s safe to say that Amuda and Destinia won their first fight. This is what François Derbaix had to say about eDreams as a corporate investor and how their investment in Really Late Booking played out:

“I can honestly say I don’t like to invest with corporates. The Really Late Booking experience was a disaster for both the entrepreneurs and the investors. It was a total destruction of value on eDreams part. They had veto rights to block any deal and interests that were not aligned with the entrepreneur, and a startup should not accept those kind of terms from investors.

Very few wanted to invest in Really Late Booking because there were no drag-along provisions and Odigeo could block a possible exit. What this causes is that startups end up becoming terrible targets for other investors, destroying a lot of value.”

Hats off to them for remaining a fully independent company up until now. Go read Amuda’s full profile, it’s well worth it.

Photo | ivanacoi

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Mobile World Capital, the public Catalan initiative that aims to expose Barcelona as a startup and entrepreneurship hub, is taking its participation in the local scene to a new level. The MWC foundation announced last week the launch of mVenturesBCN, an investment and accelerator entity that will invest up to €15 million in the launch of 110 startups over the next three years.

mVenturesBCN, which is not yet a proper investment firm (Sociedad de Capital Riesgo or SCR in Spain), will receive support from the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism, Barcelona’s city council, the Generalitat of Catalonia and Fira Barcelona. These supporters will provide the first €8 million.

It appears as if mVenturesBCN will be fully focused on attracting top talent to Barcelona in various ways.

First, through three international accelerator programs that will set up shop in the Catalan capital over the next few months. In various statements, mVenturesBCN does not say who the partners will be. These three programs and the resulting joint ventures with mVenturesBCN will be responsible for accelerating 90 startups over the next three years.

These Spanish and international companies will have be based in Barcelona throughout the program and, although they won’t have to remain in the city when it finishes, they’ll probably be encouraged to do so.

The other main aspect about mVenturesBCN will be what they call ‘technological transfer program’, which will work with universities and research centres to convert technology assets into business realities. According to a post on MWC, this program aims to create 20 digitally-based companies, “arising from the development of research lines at universities and R&D centres during the following three years”.

Given the fact that MWC puts together every year one of the biggest startup events in Spain, 4YFN, it seems pretty clear that mVenturesBCN’s startups will also have access to all the investors and corporates that come to Barcelona for the conference.

Alex Valls, director of 4YFN, will lead mVenturesBCN.

The fact that the public sector gets involved in the funding of startups is nothing new to Spanish entrepreneurs, but the fact that they’re doing it with the collaboration of international accelerators (will TechStars be one of them?) and universities, makes it unique and interesting at the same time.

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Technology is just starting to affect traditional education systems that have been in place for decades. It’s often said that disruption in established industries flows bottom-up, and startups and young technology companies are starting to propose new approaches that take advantage of technology to offer new experiences to kids.

myABCKit is one example of this. The startup founded by Karina Ibarra wants to make it easier for every child to have access to what the company refers to as an “exceptional and unique learning experience”. This means an education that is formed by three key principles and which follows Montessori’s approach: individual learning, personalised teaching and learning analytics.

The origins of myABCKit can be found in ABCKit and ABCKit for 5, two of Karina’s pet projects that were launched between 2011 and 2013. “The first app was a reaction to my own needs, as there were no apps available for my kids to learn and following Montessori’s methodology”, she says in a phone conversation. “Most apps did not have the pedagogical focus that I was looking for”. Apple liked the app and project and chose it as one of the best apps of the year and the fifth best in the education category of the App Store.

ABCKit for 5, which was launched in 2013, was aimed at an older generation of kids to help them draw their first letters and words.

myABCKit: personalised learning made in Barcelona

myABCKit is what Karina describes as her “biggest bet yet”. A play-based educational tool for kids that includes literacy exercises to learn how to write and also to learn new languages. The level and content of the different exercises adjusts automatically to the kids development, and teachers are able to personalise the content with images, words, phrases, etc.

“The algorithms we’ve developed adapt the content to the students, and this also helps teachers and schools adapt their materials”, she explains.

Teachers and schools are, in fact, key in the future of myABCKit. “When we explain to teachers and schools that they will be able to customise the learning experiences they offer, they show a lot of interest”, she says. Teachers will be able to use their own voices, word packages and other content for their students. Karina says that in the future they might open a marketplace for other schools to take advantage of materials that have already been created by the community. “However, we have to do this carefully since these materiales will probably include personal voices, photos of kids, etc”, she adds.

Schools will also be fundamental in the monetisation of the content, as they will pay for licenses that will then be passed on to parents. The company says that prices vary depending on the number of subjects.

myABCKit is already being tested in various schools in the metropolitan area of Barcelona and they expect to reach more students in coming months.

There is fierce competition in the space, with companies such as Duolingo, Montessorium, Toca Boca or even Madrid-based Monkimun offering similar experiences. However, the opportunity seems gigantic given the fact that education has changed very little over the past few decades.

“In late 2014 I realised that I wanted to dedicate the majority of my time to improve education. ABCKit and ABCKit for 5 were our pet projects, myABCKit is our most serious bet”, she concludes before hanging up.

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The internet makes it easy to increase the efficiency of expensive goods, such as a home, a car or… a boat. Nautal is not the first startup to approach the latter market -to make it easy to rent a boat for a limited period of time- but it has become the biggest boat renting platform in Spain.

Founded by Octavi Uyà, Roger Llovet, Eduardo Robsy and Eduard Llovet, the company has been in business since June 2013 and it seems as if lately things are starting to click for the Barcelona-based startup.

According to its CEO, Uyà, Nautal recently reached €1 million in sales since its inception in 2013. The company’s growth rate also seems to be accelerating, as sales in the first 10 months of 2015 have already hit €1 million. Nautal keeps a 20% commission on each rental, which means that its 2015 revenues currently stand at approximately €200,000.

Uyà says that the reasons behind this increase in sales are the expansion of its offerings, which now include all kinds of boats as well as luxurious yachts, and the launch of Nautal in the Caribbean and Australia. The latter makes a lot of sense for a business that is highly seasonal.

The company says that it’s also looking at the US market, where it would face the competition of established players such as Boatbound. Uyà, however, seems confident that they can take on bigger companies and expand quicker. “The decision to go to the US was made in part as a result of seeing that we’re in a strong position compared to Boatbound and others”, Uyà said in a phone conversation.

According to Nautal, Boatbound has raised €3.8 million and had sales of €557,000 in 2014, with projections to surpass €1 million in 2015 for the first time. Nautal, on the other hand, is close to reaching the latter figure having just raised €463,000. The startup is backed by 101Startups, Caixa Capital Risc and business angel Albert Armengol (Doctoralia).

Incrediblue, which is also another competitor based in London, has raised over $2.61 million to date.

Nautal says that the average rental on its platform is worth between €500 to €7,500, depending on the type of boat, and that Baleares, Barcelona and Alicante are its main areas of operations.

The company hopes that an eventual launch in the US and more capital from investors will allow it to compete head-to-head with other established players. Time will tell.

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Odilo is a Murcia-based technology startup that has ketp a low profile within the Spanish startup ecosystem. While most of the attention is focused in cities like Madrid or Barcelona, certain companies that are born in smaller and less hyped areas are building what look to be like strong businesses with an international mindset from day one.

Odilo is a example of this. The company works with libraries and educational institutions in Spain, Latam and the US to power their content lending systems with Spanish made technology. A not-so-sexy industry when compared to others, but a solution that seems to be fulfilling the needs of libraries at both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

To know more about Odilo, which raised $2.8 million in 2014 from Active VP, we recently sat down with its CEO and co-founder Rodrigo Rodríguez. This is an edited version of our conversation.

What’s the story behind Odilo? After various years at Telefonica and BT, why did you choose this industry?

Prior to starting Odilo I had worked in the cloud computing industry and I had previous knowledge of the technology most libraries use.

When we saw that ebook readers were becoming popular, we knew this would bring new opportunities to the book industry but mainly to libraries and the education sector, transforming these industries by creating new ways to access digital content. 

Our idea was then crafted around creating a service that could allow any institution to easily offer digital content to their users. Based on my experience in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market we decided that the best way to do it would be to create the concept of Content-as-a-Service (CaaS), where we could follow a similar path to Amazon’s with Amazon Web Services but applied to digital content of any kind.

At first sight, it seems as if Odilo has various products. Some aimed at libraries and educational institutions and some others for publishers. What is it like to combine all of these products and its various business models?

All of our solutions are based on our core CaaS model in which we offer our technology and we establish partnerships with content providers of all types.

This core service/technology is the underpinning of all of our products and we build other layers and new functionalities of the service on top of it, to adapt to and serve the needs of other sectors such the leisure market, K-12 schools, universities, public libraries, special and corporate libraries, etc. 

We also have several companies licensing our technology to create their own products on top of it. This way we can be flexible enough to commercialize our services in different markets and territories while at the same time keeping our focus on our core service.

You’ve followed an interesting model that is often seen in Europe, where startups decide to keep the tech talent in a low cost region (in your case Murcia, Spain) while moving sales and marketing operations to bigger cities like Madrid or even the US. What has it been like to build the company out of Murcia?

I am from Cartagena (Murcia) and our city has a good university and a very good quality of life, so I thought this would be a great place to build a technology company. We have an agreement with the University in Cartagena whereby professors recommend their best students to work with us. This would be something very difficult to do in bigger cities with more companies competing to attract quality talent.

We are also able to convince technical talent to move from other parts of Spain to Cartagena to fill other roles within the company. Last year, we had to set up an office in Madrid for our new sales and marketing teams as most of our customers are based there. At the same time, we also set up an office in the US and Mexico to better connect with international publishers and customers.

If I’m not mistaken, your team is quite distributed: you are in Miami, your COO is in Madrid and the CTO in Murcia. What are the main challenges of working this way? What’s your experience been like at building a distributed team while being ‘small’ (less than 50 employees)?

We also have a North America & Australia COO in Colorado so I that can spend more time in Madrid, but it is quite a challenge for us to manage such a diverse and distributed team of 46 people from 6 nationalities.

My idea was to bring the best possible talent to the company independently of their nationality and location. We use technology and team collaboration tools and methodologies to be as efficient as possible, but based on our experience the key aspect about this is that everyone understands and shares our vision and company culture so they can be independent in their responsibilities and not lose agility.

Also important in regards to work culture is the fact that everyone has a deep sense of commitment and shows a trustworthy attitude. From our experience thus far, distributed teams can work very well if all the team members completely trust each other and keep things really simple.

According to the the Spanish official registry, in 2013 Odilo had sales of between €300 to €600k and more than €1 million in 2014. That year you also raised $2.8 million from ACTIVE VP. How’s the business side of things going?

Odilo was founded as a bootstrap company and so we tried to be profitable from the the very beginning, combining R&D initiatives with customer projects. We have been consistently growing every year and at the same time incorporating new products and partner agreements. 2015 has been a great year for us: we signed our biggest contracts this year and that will lead us to increase the number of users that can receive content through our platforms from 9 to 107 million people by early next year. 

What’s the sale process like? Is it hard to convince large institutions like libraries or universities of what you bring to the table or are they aware of the necessity of improving their current (and I’m guessing old) systems for their own and readers’ benefit?

Institutions know that their users and students demand to have access to content at any time and from any place, and that they need to include digital content as part of their services to be relevant in the future. 

Our work is not so much to convince them to adopt the technology, but to help them with this transition from physical to digital and so our challenge is to speed up the digital lending adoption process. In the US, more than 90% of libraries and the majority of schools offer digital lending to their patrons and students; and the market has been growing exponentially. However, in Spanish speaking countries we are 5 years behind but we estimate that the market will grow at the same pace like the US market did. 

With significant presence in Spain and Latam, is the US the next big frontier for the company? How is the US market different from those in Spain and Latam? Are libraries and customers there more forward thinking and understand your value proposition better or has that been the case in all other markets where you are currently active?

Yes, we have a unique value proposition for the US market with a business model that has been very well accepted in that market with some success cases in libraries and schools.

Since digital lending penetration is so high in the US, our focus is on demonstrating the benefits of CaaS as a great way for institutions to offer great collections of digital content and only pay for what their users and students actually use. In this case, our sales strategy is focused on key differentiators of our business model and technology, while in Spain and Latam our focus is to speed up technology adoption as we are strong market leaders there.

What are Odilo’s short term goals and where would you like to see the company in 3 to 5 years?

Our short term goals are to increase our market share in the US. We want to build a strong sales team in the US for this and we want to maintain our leadership position in Spanish speaking countries as institutions gradually increase their budgets for digital content.

We also want to increase the number of companies that use our CaaS platform for creating their own products to serve different verticals. In the midterm, institutions of all kinds will offer access to digital content to their users, employees and students the same way they currently offer WiFi access. To do this they will follow a CaaS model and we want Odilo to be the company leading this transformation.

The post The story of Odilo, the Murcia-based startup that powers content lending systems for libraries and universities appeared first on Novobrief.

Javier Serer, Jordi Ber and Martín Caleau at the company’s headquarters

If you live in Spain, Italy or in any of the major Latin American countries, there’s a good chance that if you’ve had to hire a contractor, designer or architect for your house, you’ve relied on Habitissimo to do so.

The Palma de Mallorca-based company founded in 2009 has quietly become one of the biggest marketplaces for these kind of services, connecting pre-screened contractors and users who need someone to fix almost anything at their homes. “We are market leaders in Spain, Latam and in Italy we’re number two”, says its CEO and co-founder Jordi Ber in a conversation with Novobrief.

To find the origins of Habitissimo we have to go back 10 years. “In 2005 or 2006 I had to fix a few things at home and the person I hired did a terrible job”, Jordi explains. “After that experience I thought that there should be a better way of improving the system, of bringing more transparency to the sector and making life easier for both sides of the marketplace”.

An idea in 2005 that was executed in 2009

The idea Ber had just had was put on hold for almost three years, while he worked on launching Construmatica under the Grupo Intercom umbrella and until he found Argentinian entrepreneur Martin Caleau, who would end up becoming CTO and co-founder of the company.

With a small team in place, in January of 2009 Habitissimo participated in SeedRocket’s second accelerator program in Barcelona and came victorious, pocketing a €20,000 investment and receiving the necessary support to launch the first version of the website in April of 2009.

A few months later Habitissimo raised more capital from Cabiedes & Partners. In total, the company has received about €550,000 from Cabiedes, Faraday, Mola.com and others. “I think we’ve been extremely capital efficient and we haven’t need much funding to grow and become market leaders in certain areas”, Ber explains. “Habitissimo has been an almost bootstrapped startup and from the very beginning we set on the idea of raising as little capital as possible, mostly to validate and achieve certain milestones”.

The last time the company raised capital was in 2012 and Ber says that they’re not planning on bringing more investors on board or increasing its coffers. Correctly, he points out that “there’s a lot of pressure in the industry to simply raise capital, as if that was the end goal of entrepreneurship, instead of building profitable companies. When you do that, your company becomes the investors’ business model, and we don’t want that to happen. We’d rather have clients than investors”.

Luis Martín Cabiedes, one of the early backers of Habitissimo, told Novobrief that “excellent companies make money and they reinvest it in their future”. “Habitissimo is a perfect example of this”, he added.

Ber, Caleau and the rest of the founding team own 70% of the company’s shares. Cabiedes owns about 20% and the rest is in the hands of other investors and business angels.

“There’s a lot of pressure in the industry to simply raise capital, as if that was the end goal of entrepreneurship, instead of building profitable companies”

Contrary to how most marketplaces operate, Habitissimo doesn’t charge a fee per booking arranged through its platform. Instead, contractors pay the company €10 per month to appear on the website and an additional fee each time they want to look at work requests from potential clients.

Jordi Ber says that the company has been profitable for more than three years and had revenue of €5 million in 2014, with an EBITDA margin of more than 50%. These numbers, Ber says, are set to increase in 2015 as the company expects to reach €8 million in revenue. “Our strategy is to reinvest as much as possible because we think there’s still a lot of room to grow”.

Spain represents 50% of the company’s business, with Brazil and Italy being the two other main markets. “The idea has always been to launch in markets where we believed we could become category leaders”, Ber says. “We believe that when you’re building a marketplace this is key. We need to have a winner takes all attitude”.

Habitissimo was almost sold for 25 to 30 million euros to Schibsted

Habitissimo’s positive financial performance and growth has not gone unnoticed by potential acquirers. According to various sources, the company was almost sold a few weeks ago for 25 to 30 million euros, which would make Ber, Caleau and other members of the team millionaires and provide a significant financial return after more than 7 years of hard work.

We’ve been unable to track down the name of the acquirer, but these same sources claim that the deal fell through three days before it was set to close, with only a handful of signatures remaining. Schibsted the acquirer back-pedalled and the exit was never completed.

Asked about this, Ber said that the company doesn’t comment on rumours. “We’re constantly in conversations with potential investors and acquirers, we like to keep our doors open”, he added.

Given Habitissimo’s growth and strong financial position at both sides of the ocean, it seems as a given that an exit will eventually come. When or who will buy the company is a totally different question.

The post How Habitissimo built one of Spain’s largest marketplaces and almost got acquired for €30M appeared first on Novobrief.

“Throughout the history of technology we’ve seen these transitional points where new platforms emerge that become the primary interface for user interaction. When you wake up in the morning, what you used to do was to go to a computer and use a browser to navigate the web. These days what you do is turn on your phone and access content through the apps that are in your home screen; a hierarchy of apps and field of icons.

Increasingly, the notifications screen, what is often described as an alert structure, is giving people a direct path into apps or specific things. This means that apps are reorganised based on time and not categories. For many, this is the first way in which they are touching content and services on their devices.

The mobile platform is still in a period of flux and there’s still room for change.”

John Borthwick, co-founder of Betaworks (Chartbeat, Giphy, bitly) and an investor in companies like IFTTT, Tweetdeck or Tumblr, has been quite obsessed over the past few months with one thing: notifications. As he explained in a recent Recode Decode episode (transcription above) and throughout a one-day conference exclusively focused on notifications, he clearly believes that these smartphone alerts are becoming a new interface for content and information consumption.

He’s not the only one to believe in this. Companies of different nature like Buzzfeed, Slack or Digg also consider that notifications are the next frontier. And so do Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, which has resulted in the launch of Notify, an app that allows users to setup notifications for content they care about that will be pushed to their lock screens automatically.

Reinventing notifications from Alicante

Far from Silicon Valley or New York, in the small city of Alicante, José Luis Pérez González and Oleg Kozynenko started working on an idea in April of 2014 that also had notifications as its main pillar.

“We’d been working together for almost four years on our first startup, Guiomatic.com, and in April of last year we were starting to think about what to do next”, Josele, as most people call him, told Novobrief in an interview. “We both are geeks and have a technical background, so we already had set up lots of alerts on our phones to get notified when our servers didn’t work properly and also for other banal stuff like sports scores and things like that”.

Oleg and Josele showed these primary alert systems to their friends and colleagues and saw that they made sense. “Once we showed it to other people we realised we were onto something”, he says. “Wouldn’t it be great to get notified about the things you really care about and have complete control over what gets pushed to your phone?”.

They ran various surveys and tests with a bigger pool of users and asked them simple questions such as ‘what would you like to get notified on today? Baseball scores, an episode of your favourite tv show or something else’. “People understood the concept very quickly and had lots of suggestions”, he remembers. As a result of these experiments they decided to launch an early version of an app that included 20 types of notifications and test it with friends. “The reception was amazing”.

This was April 2014 and the first baby steps of Hooks Alerts. The final and first proper version of the app would be launched in March 2015.

“A very American type of product”

Hooks is an app for Android and iOS that allows any type of user to easily set up alerts to get notified about stuff that they care about, be it high scoring posts on Hacker News, NBA results, new interesting restaurants or new app reviews on the App Store. The user simply has to browse through the channels available and select the relevant data that they want to receive on a timely basis.

Think of IFTT (If This Then That) but with a mobile first mindset.

Hooks is the team’s first app ever -Oleg and Josele were joined by CTO Miguel Ángel Ortuño in September 2014- and one that has received lots of attention from the press, developers, users and also Apple, which has featured the app as ‘new best app’ on the App Store on multiple occasions.

Hooks is featured again as the Best New App by Apple! Get Hooks for #free now! https://t.co/d3PrDEOngs #startups pic.twitter.com/mNmvE3tyDj

— Hooks Alerts (@hooksalerts) octubre 2, 2015

“It’s a very American type of product and 70% of our users are based in the US”, Josele explains. “We knew from day one that we had to be more relevant in the US and that’s why we applied to various startup accelerators in the country”.

The first one they applied to was TechStars Chicago and in less than a month they’d been accepted.

“TechStars was great in many ways, but mostly to better understand what we were doing and what we were up to”, he says. “Product implications, who is it really targeted at, how are people going to use it, etc. These are relevant questions that we had yet to ask ourselves”.

Having finished the three month program, the team is now back in Alicante and planning to move to Madrid and grow its 5-person team after receiving financial support from business angel Yago Arbeloa and also TechStars. With no business model in place and no plans to focus on monetisation just yet, Josele says that they’re currently raising a new round of funding with both US and Spain-based investors.

The immediate future of Hooks and the ‘notification as a platform’ sector

In less than 8 months the app has been downloaded 300,000 times on both Android and iOS and currently has 120,000 monthly active users. According to the startup, Hooks sends 1.2 million daily notifications to users (150 million in total since March) and these have set up more than 2 million alerts.

As for the future of Hooks, Josele says that they want to make the product “more social”. By this he means making it easier for users with similar interests to connect with each other and exchange information. “If I’m interested in the NBA and in Game of Thrones and you are too, why not allow you to connect and chat?”, he asks himself.

Besides these early efforts to build a community, the team is also focused on building and improving its developer API, which will allow developers and users to add custom channels to Hooks, notifications to Slack or integrate real-time content inside their apps.

“We believe we’re currently covering about 80% of use cases, but we can’t get to all of them and we believe getting support from the community is a better way to achieve this”, Josele explains. “We’re going to allow devs and normal, non-technical users, to add alerts to the system and to share them with their friends and contacts”. Hooks says that so far more than 500 alerts have been created through its API and more than 5,000 developers have registered to get access to it. “One of the reasons IFTTT was so successful has to do with their community of users, and we want to focus on that too”, he adds.

Hooks and the notification as a platform space has now been joined by Facebook, which Josele and the rest of the team consider positive in the short term. “It’s great news for us, because it will help transform notifications into a mainstream idea. The launch of Notify is something that we were looking forward to: it validates what we’ve been working on for more than a year and it gives us the opportunity to acquire even more users”, he concludes. “We’re really excited and we strongly believe that the importance of controlled notifications will only increase in the near future”.

The post Hooks, the Spanish startup that welcomes Facebook to the notifications as a platform space appeared first on Novobrief.

From left to right: Miguel Vicente, Gerard Olive, Oscar Pierre & Sacha Michaud

We’ve previously written about Glovo, the Barcelona-based startup that following Postmates’ model has created a platform for consumers to request the physical delivery of products in less than an hour in large Spanish cities.

When we first covered Glovo the startup had been in operations for less than a year and had yet to launch in Madrid. Now it’s available not only in the Spanish capital, but also in Valencia and seems to be growing at a healthy pace: according to the company, deliveries have been growing 50% month-on-month in recent times.

To know more about how things are going for the startup, we recently interviewed co-founder Sacha Michaud about the current state of Glovo and what the future holds for the young company.

First of all, you recently announced that Wallapop co-founders Gerard Olive and Miguel Vicente would be joining Glovo and integrating Just Bell’s technology. What will they bring to the table and what will their role be?

From the very beginning, Oscar (Glovo’s other co-founder) and I saw that the involvement of Gerard and Miguel in this project could be very productive for us. They have a very international mindset and we know that they clearly believe growth is a key component in the life of a startup. Look at what they helped achieve at Wallapop.

We also believe that Glovo needs to grow fast. Very fast. If we don’t move and grow fast we have nothing to do.

This is a very interesting sector for all kinds of players, which are trying to come to market from different points of view. There’s Postmates in the US, but also giants like Amazon, Uber or Google that are slowly but surely entering this space.

Gerard and Miguel will help us a lot in achieving this. They won’t be in our offices every day, they will serve as non executive directors, but we talk to them constantly.

First it was Barcelona and now Glovo is also active in Madrid and Valencia. What’s Glovo’s current status? How is the company doing?

It’s going very well and we’re growing pretty rapidly (50% MoM). Madrid has been growing at much faster rates than Barcelona over the same period of time since we launched in both cities, and we recently opened shop in Valencia as well.

And when I saw that we’re growing fast I mean on all fronts. The number of glovers -the people who pick up and deliver the goods- is also growing at similar rates compared to deliveries and this is key in the market we are.

Couriers are super important if we want to grow our platform in a healthy way. We can’t make one side of the marketplace grow much faster than the other if we want to grow the right way. If we do this right, we’ll have a much more scalable business model than some of our competitors.

The more liquidity on both sides of the market, the better it works. Network effects are key here: the more users on the platform, the more useful the platform becomes for new users.

Since glovers are so important, has acquiring new ones been hard for so far?

Not really, we’re seeing that there’s a lot of people out there looking for this type of jobs, which can provide extra income and are flexible enough to do it on a part time basis.

We have a large waiting list of glovers who want to work with us.

And let’s be honest, the fact that the Spanish economy is not in its the best shape ever also helps us.

Lately there’s been a lot of talk about the fiscal situation of these type of workers and the requirements they need to meet to be fully legal under various laws. What’s the case with glovers?

We’re not worried about that and we believe we meet all requirements under Spanish law. All of our glovers are autónomos (legal independent workers or freelancers) and they simply invoice us for their work. We force them to work like this if they want to partner with Glovo.

Glovo charges a delivery fee of €5.50 to consumers and glovers get to keep 70 to 80% of this fee. Given these circumstances, how scalable is this model? Is it just a matter of being very big in order to make money or what’s the formula behind it?

We firmly believe this is a scalable and profitable model in the long run. We don’t think the majority of our income will come from the delivery fees; don’t get me wrong, these fees are important to cover business needs, pay glovers and build a healthy marketplace, but our intention is to work with premium partners and make most of our income there.

Postmates is a good example of this. They recently announced that before the end of the year they’ll reach 1 million monthly deliveries and more than $60 million in annual sales, with positive margins. There’s money to be made in this market.

As I said before, delivery fees are important but we believe there’s a great opportunity in working with premium partners and ecommerce businesses. We’re already working with some that are integrating our API to offer consumers the possibility of having goods delivered to them in less than an hour in certain Spanish cities.

If you think about, in a way we’re already indirectly working with more than 1,000 retail stores when we send our glovers to pick up stuff there. But, until very recently we haven’t held talks with these stores, we haven’t had a formal relationship with them. This is the next step in our growth, to talk and establish partnerships with them. We think we can both benefit from each other.

Of the 1,000 physical stores we’ve worked with, 90% don’t offer the possibility of delivering goods to consumers. This is fantastic opportunity for us. We add value, there’s incremental revenue to be generated and we can charge businesses for the services we provide to them.

Glovo has only raised €140,000 to date and it seems as if you’re clearly focused on growing fast. Are you currently raising more capital and do you plan on launching Glovo outside of Spain?

Yes to both questions, we’re closing a new and larger round of funding and we expect to announce it over the next few weeks. Spain is a big enough market to try things and learn. Once we think we’re ready, we’ll quickly launch Glovo in other European cities.

The post Sacha Michaud talks about the future of Glovo: growth, logistics and business opportunities appeared first on Novobrief.

Carme Artigas (right) and Jaume Agut (left)

Telefonica has acquired Synergic Partners, a Catalan big data consulting firm specialised in the analysis of large chunks of information in the areas of customer insight, fraud prevention, risk and compliance and M&A.

Synergic will be integrated in Telefónica’s global BI&BD (Business Intelligence & Big Data) department and the company says that it will “become a key contributor to the development of projects both in Spain as well as in the rest of Europe and Latin America”.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Both companies claim in a statement that Synergic Partners will continue to operate independently and to serve its current clients, including Telefonica, BBVA, Santander or Iberia.

Synergic was co-founded by Carme Artigas and Jaume Agut in 2007. It currently has more than 70 employees and in 2014 it reached €3.1 million in sales and a profit of €409,000.

In 2007, Spanish bank Caja Navarra bought a 25% stake in Synergic Partners. At the time, the consulting firm said it planned to reach €12 million in revenue in 2011. Either those expectations were too high or the business has not performed as well in recent times given last year’s sales.

Eduardo Navarro, Telefonica’s Commercial Digital Managing Director and one of the company’s largest individual shareholders, said in a statement that “Synergic’s integration will allow us to enhance our analytical ability to anticipate the needs of our customers and offer them the personalised services being requested faster”.

Sources close to Telefonica have told Novobrief that Elena Gil Lizasoain, the Global BI & Big Data Director at Telefonica, has been one of the main supporters of the deal. According to LinkedIn, Telefonica has more than 2,000 employees working in big data roles all around the world.

Among large Spanish multinationals, Telefonica has been one of the most active companies when it comes to acquiring smaller startups that complement its main business lines and operations. Previous acquisitions include social-network-now-turned-MVNO Tuenti, eyeOS, Tokbox or cloud computing startup Acens.

The post Telefonica acquires Spanish big data consulting firm Synergic Partners appeared first on Novobrief.

In white, European countries where Uber says it is not currently active.

Uber is making significant changes in its Spanish strategy.

The company started operating in Spain a little over a year ago with UberPOP, a service which allows anyone (professional driver or not) to move people around in their own cars. The service has been suspended in multiple countries all around Europe and in Spain it was shut down in late 2014 due to pressure from traditional taxi drivers and Spanish authorities.

Although the company now claims that Spain is one of the only European countries where Uber has no presence, it should also be noted that in other countries it offers services different from UberPOP which are deemed legal under those countries’ legislation. If Uber decided to operate in Spain following a VTC model (vehículo con conductor or black cars) it totally could… but up until now it hasn’t decided to do so.

Up until now is the key phrase here, because the company is now saying that it will soon start operating in Spain with VTC licenses, like competitor Cabify has been doing for years. This VTC model is now coming under pressure from taxi drivers as well, as they consider these services (and pretty much any kind) as unfair competition.

In an interview with El Español the company declined to give specifics on when it will start working again in Spain. In the same interview, Uber’s boss in Spain, Carles Lloret, also recognises that the company “tried to do too much and too fast” in the country.

To try to change Uber’s perception amongst consumers, politicians and the transportation industry, the company has launched a #MovimientoUber campaign to try to change the laws that regulate VTC services. As of right now, VTC licences are limited by law and there can only be 1 per 30 traditional taxi licenses.

As part of this announcement Uber is also shutting down its meal delivery service UberEats in Barcelona.

Too little to late to build a new brand and image in Spain?

The post Uber recognises mistakes in its Spanish strategy, considers move to VTC model, shuts down UberEats appeared first on Novobrief.

By the time mobile marketplace app Letgo announced that it had raised $100 million from Naspers in September, Wallapop had amassed a war chest of almost $150 million, had millions of downloads in various European countries and was already present in the US.

Both from Barcelona, Wallapop and Letgo are the two most well funded mobile shopping startups in the world, something that has not been seen before when it comes to Spain’s role in the technology landscape. OfferUp, its Seattle-based competitor, has raised $90 million according to Crunchbase.

The two Spanish companies share a lot of common traits and the idea and functionalities they offer are pretty similar: a marketplace of buyers and sellers and a wide catalogue of secondhand products that are arranged based on the user’s location, promoting in-person transactions instead of the shipping of items to different countries of cities.

Both companies share another significant characteristic too: the US as their main target market.

As Agustin Gomez, Wallapop’s CEO, once told me: “The US is the key market for us, and that’s the one we really want to win in”. Enrique Linares, co-founder of Letgo, also admitted to having the same objective in a recent email conversation with Novobrief: “The US market is fascinating and unique. It’s a very sophisticated market, with high quality expectations. But it’s also a very interesting market due to the willingness of its users to try new things. It’s honest and receptive”.

With significant cash in the bank (or not anymore depending on the burn rates of each startup, which some sources say is between $5 to $10 million per month), both Wallapop and Letgo have entered into a competitive fight against each other and against OfferUp to conquer a market of more than 350 million avid consumers and shoppers.

Both companies are spending significant sums of capital in mobile ad campaigns and in TV ads that are shown on American TV on prime time, which has translated in a significant surge of app downloads and an uplift in the iOS App Store rankings.

What’s interesting is that, despite Letgo entering the competition later than both Wallapop and OfferUp, it seems to be increasing at significant pace.

Wallapop, Letgo and OfferUp in the US iOS App Store

The graph below shows iOS App Store rankings for the US over the past two months (since the beginning of September) in the overall and lifestyle categories.

Both Wallapop and Letgo’s surge in the US rankings has been impressive, and while the latter was third in place for various weeks, since mid-October it’s increased its position notably, reaching the top-100 for various consecutive days in the overall category.

In recent days, however, Wallapop has once again positioned itself inside the top-100 while Letgo has dropped significantly. OfferUp, on the other hand, has remained quite stable over the past few months.

In the lifestyle category things look quite different, as Letgo has been in the top-5 since late October and Wallapop has ranked below 20. OfferUp continues to remain where it has been for months.

On November 6th Apple moved all three apps to the shopping category, probably in preparation of the holiday season and in an effort to promote certain types of apps that fit this time of the year better than others.

The sample is too small to draw conclusions in this category, but OfferUp is the only of the three to be able to be in the top-10, while Wallapop and Letgo both rank significantly lower.

These type of rankings are not conclusive, but they do represent an interesting way to follow the development of this sector over time. We’ve only used App Annie’s iOS ranking data due to the US being an iPhone-driven market.

Disrupting eBay, Craigslist and others

eBay and Craigslist represent the to-be-disrupted companies in the space, as consumers are increasingly looking to buy and sell products in their vicinity using their smartphones instead of hundreds of miles away. This would mean that apps like Wallapop, Letgo or OfferUp must reach critical mass in urban areas, where this type of exchanges are possible.

When asked about what makes Letgo different from its competition, Enrique Linares offered two responses that, while not totally convincing or conclusive, seem relevant: the brand Letgo, which means to get rid of stuff you don’t want, and the experience of the team behind the startup, which for many years worked at classifieds juggernaut OLX and served 240 million of users.

“The category of ‘next generation and app only classifieds’ is not yet mature. The space is large and nobody has positioned itself as clear market leaders”, Linares said.

The team’s experience with OLX could be important, or as we’ve seen in technology history many times before, the disruptor comes from a different sector and brings new ideas to market. Which is what Wallapop has done.

When Facebook recently began testing ‘Local Market’, a buying and selling community powered by Facebook groups, we asked Agustín Gómez what he thought about the move. “I think it’s fantastic and they’ve been testing similar ideas for a long time”, he explained. “This only confirms that we’re on the right path and that tech trends are leaning towards local experiences”.

OfferUp saw it first (2011). Wallapop next (2013) and Letgo was the last to join the party. The market is still up for grabs, but as it is often the case with marketplaces, winner-takes-all dynamics might leave the defeated wondering what do to next.

Photo | DWilliams

The post Letgo started late, but is it beating Wallapop in the US? appeared first on Novobrief.

Akamon has been finally sold. Canada’s Imperus Technologies has exercised its acquisition option and will be acquiring the 100% of the Barcelona-based gaming company co-founded in 2011 by Carlos Blanco, Vicenç Martí, Jaume Ferre, Josevi Pons, Carles Pons, Dani G Blazquez and Axel Serena.

Carlos Blanco tells Novobrief that the final acquisition price will be €23.7 million, as previously reported, including two previous down payments of $600,000 and $700,000, respectively, received over the past few weeks.

We understand the deal includes a mix of cash and Imperus stock, but that the vast majority will be pure money that will end up in the pockets of Akamon’s founders and investors.

Since its founding in 2011, Akamon had raised close to $4 million from various local investors, including Axon Partners and Bonsai Venture Capital. According to official filings, Axon owns 13% of the company and Bonsai around 8%. The rest is on the hands of the company’s founding team. Carlos Blanco, Jaime Ferre, Josevi Pons, Carles Pons, Dani G Blazquez y Axel Serena.

Carlos Blanco and Jaume Ferre own 41% of Akamon through Pm5 Digital Entertainment Limited, a London-based firm they co-founded in 2011. 24% is controlled by JDC Media Holdin SL, which is owned by various Valencia-based entrepreneurs that launched Edelweiss, which would go on to become Akamon’s studio in the Mediterranean city. CEO Vicenç Martí currently holds a 6% stake.

Only the company’s CEO and some early employees will receive Imperus stock. All other parties involved will receive a pure monetary outcome from the transaction.

In an interview with Cinco Días, Carlos Blanco says that the difference between this and previous sktartup exits in Spain is that the vast majority of Akamon’s stakes were still in the hands of the team. “20% of the money involved in this deal will end up in the hands of executives and employees, thanks to their stakes and option plans. This is not common in Spain”.

While true in some cases, it should also be noted that 90% of Trovit’s €80 million exit ended up in the bank accounts of Iñaki Ecenarro, Daniel Giménez, Raúl Puente and other early employees.

The post Imperus exercises its option and acquires Akamon for €23.7 million appeared first on Novobrief.

The first rumours about an acquisition deal for Akamon appeared over the summer. Sources close to the company told Novobrief at the time that the startup would be sold soon, as its main shareholders (co-founding team and investors) wanted to cash out and knew that a significant financial return could be obtained.

Novobrief first talked to Carlos Blanco about the acquisition in early September, days before Canada’s Imperus Technologies published a press release announcing a pre-agreement with the Barcelona-based gaming company.

Blanco, who remained a board member of the company but was not anymore involved in its day-to-day operations, was in favour of selling. And so were the rest of shareholders and investors. This makes sense given the fact that he and co-founder Jaume Ferre owned 41% of Akamon through Pm5 Digital Entertainment Limited, a London-based firm they co-founded in 2011. Stock option plans aside, they could have earned between €8 and €10 million in the deal.

Akamon’s other co-founders controlled an additional 30% of the company. Investors Bonsai Venture Capital, Axon Partners Group, Grupo Itnet and Exelweiss had a stake of about 21% in the gaming startup and CEO Vicenç Martí between 7 and 8 per cent.

According to the Spanish official registry, this is what Akamon’s cap table looked like at the end of 2014’s fiscal year.

Despite the fact that a pre-agreement to buy Akamon was announced by Imperus in early September, the Canadian company went through a bit of trouble as it looked to complete the €23.7 million deal. This included changing CEOs and also looking for cash to buy Akamon, which it recently did, receiving $28 million from Third Eye Capital (TEC). Imperus’ stock has dropped 64% since early 2015.

Imperus had already made two down payments to Akamon of over $1 million, which means that the company was, in a way, forced to complete the deal if it didn’t want to lose additional capital and piss off its shareholders.

Akamon: strong on desktop, weak on mobile and social gaming

As with most startup exits, some are starting to wonder if Akamon was sold too soon. Its investors and shareholders probably don’t think so, since the financial returns they’ve received are significant and there’s very little Imperus stock involved in the deal.

Founded in 2011, Akamon was not in a tight financial position, as the company had revenues of $9 million in the first half of 2015 and profits of almost €800,000 in fiscal year 2014. Akamon’s cash reserves of €3 million will also be pocketed by its investors, early employees and founding team.

Akamon had built its mini gaming empire with a desktop first mentality, and the company had very little traction in the mobile and social space and only a handful of apps for iOS and Android. This, in a moment when casual gaming and gambling is quickly moving towards smartphones, represented an impediment to its future growth.

A source close to the company described Akamon’s exit as “perhaps a bit rushed”, but said that the company had enough cash to continue operating on its own and growing, albeit at a possible slower growth than in previous years.

Another source backed this view of the company’s health, pointing out that cash was not a problem but that the company was losing in the talent wars to other mobile gaming powerhouses that are headquartered in Barcelona, such as Socialpoint, Ubisoft or King. “There wasn’t a willingness to continue and fight for the future of the company, and talent was also an issue”, the anonymous source said.

Both sources claim that if the company had made a good and careful transition to mobile and social gaming, its acquisition price could be much higher down the road. Akamon decided not to pursue this and it €23.7 million on the table to back their decision.

It wasn’t time to take more risks, and the decision to sell the company was unanimous.

Photo | Pixabay

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Startup acquisitions are tricky, because in most cases the price is never revealed by the parties involved. As we discussed on our H1 2015 summary, in the first six months of the year in Spain there were more than 15 exits, but in less than a handful was the actual price of the acquisition revealed.

That said, since late 2014 Spain has seen three significant exits -four counting Bodas.net, but very few details were revealed at the time- where we know most of the story, allowing us to make a quick comparison of such acquisitions.

We’re talking about Trovit (€80 million), La Nevera Roja (€80 million) and Akamon (€25 million).

As we said when we did the analysis of La Nevera Roja and Trovit: there are many paths to exit and the traditional rules of how to create founder/investor value are there to be broken.

Photo | TBIT

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Our fourth case study from Madrid’s Google Launchpad discusses one of most complex business challenges in the technology business world: growing and scaling marketplaces where a balance between supply and demand must be found. market in which you need to attract supply and demand.

We approach this discussion by exploring how two of our Launchpad incubated startups -nanny marketplace Beppopins and senior care marketplace Handoo- tackled these challenges and also by by exploring the pros and cons of a hypothetical joint venture between them.

The underlying theme in the case study is that complex challenges that these business models present should be cut down into small problems that can be then solved on its own.

All previous reports can be found here.

Disclaimer:

These case studies do not aim to provide a definitive guide for solving a problem, but rather to provide a glimpse into how taking a week to rethink your startup with the help of highly qualified mentors can offer companies a fresh perspective on their struggles and missed opportunities. This was a paid project and Google covered the expenses associated with the production of these reports.

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FOND-ICO Global, the Spanish fund of funds associated to ICO (Instituto de Crédito Oficial) and managed by the also public firm AXIS, has announced that it will be extending an additional €300 million to Spanish venture capital firms in its effort to promote the local investment industry by adding more fuel to the fire.

With this additional capital, Fondico Global’s current size stands at €1.5 billion and will continue in its strategy of copying public-private efforts such as Yozma in Israel.

So far Fondico has allocated €876 million to Spanish VC firms, in the areas of growth, venture and incubation.

In its fifth call, which has just been announced, the fund of funds has given the following venture and incubation firms €121 million in total.

Venture Capital (€12.8 million)

• Cygnus Asset Management (firm that’s previously invested in VC firm Kibo Ventures)
• Onza Capital (Fintonic, eShop Ventures, Bucmi, People Who Global)

Incubation (€7.7 million)

• Business Booster (Valencia-based accelerator)
• Digital Assets Deployment (Rodolfo Carpintier’s accelerator)

Fondico also allocates capital to large VC and private equity firms that do not tend to invest in the technology business, thus we haven’t included such firms in this article.

In its previous fourth calls, these are the venture firms and incubators that have received public money to be invested in Spanish tech startups:

Venture

• Adara Ventures Partners (Alienvault, Playgiga)
• Ambar Capital y Expansión
• Suma Capital SCR (Tradeinn)
• Seaya Ventures (GetYourHero, SinDelantal, Miora, Cabify, Ticketea)
• Axon Partners Group (Wayook, Akamon)
• Caixa Capital Risc
• Forbion III Management
• Cabiedes & Partners
• Inveready
• Bullnet

Incubation

• Clave Mayor
• Caixa Capital Risc

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