There’s no better way of realising changes in an industry than building visual representations of it. A lot has been written over the past few months and years about the Spanish technology ecosystem, and many have wondered if the country has a big enough tech sector to be considered an ecosystem and if it could once compete with the likes of London, Berlin, Paris os Stockholm.

The fact of the matter is that no, Spain’s startup scene is much smaller and younger than those, but since the financial crisis of 2007 we’ve seen a significant explosion in the number of startups being created, which has been followed by an also exponential surge in the number of investors and VC firms in the market and the capital available for technology companies.

When it comes to Spain, it’s often said that five years ago VCs could choose in which startups to invest, and these days, in theory, good and growing companies can choose which local investors to bring on board.

From Cluster Consulting to the dotcom burst

It’s not easy to pinpoint the beginnings of Spain’s technology ecosystem. However, most in the industry consider Barcelona-based company and consulting firm Cluster as one of the earliest and most successful tech enterprises in the country. Nonetheless, and as Mar Galtés explained in this very good article, the company served as a source of entrepreneurs and investors (Nauta Capital) that went on to build companies in the next decade. Something similar also happened with Grupo Intercom.

Cluster Consulting was born in 1993 and was sold to Diamond Technologies in 2000 for $1 billion. Fast forward a couple of years from Cluster’s origins and one can start to see a significant increase in the number of early tech companies being founded in Spain.

Ole, Lanetro ZED, TradeInn, Softonic, InfoJobs (Schbisted) or eDreams (IPO) are clear examples of this. A handful of big companies that were created over a four year span that were joined by the likes of Atrapalo, idealista (Apax Partners) and Toprural (Homeway) right in the middle of the dotcom bubble.

Although its burst mostly affected US investors and companies, its effects were heavily felt all over the world and in most technology scenes, included Spain. The graph that illustrates this article clearly shows that from 1999 to 2005, the year when companies such as Panoramio (Google), Milanuncios (acquired by Schbisted) or Indisys (Intel) were created, there wasn’t a whole lot happening in Spain.

The fact that there wasn’t much activity doesn’t mean that good companies were not created in those years. In fact, in 2002 Scytl was formed as a company and since then it has become one of the biggest success stories to come out of Spain and a truly international company from day one.

In 2008, right in the middle of another financial crisis, Sequoia Capital circulated ‘RIP Good Times’, a presentation in which it cautioned investors and companies about what was about to come: a period in which capital available in the market would drop and many companies with unstable and unscalable business models would suffer.

Interestingly, from 2008 to 2010 Sequoia made some pretty good investments in companies like Airbnb, Greendot (IPO), Dropbox and OpenDNS (acquired by Cisco for $635 million this year). Sequoia made the same number of investments in the 15 months prior to the ‘good times’ than after. It’s called consistency.

High production of companies between 2006 and 2011

In Spain we did not have such hard times in 2007 when it comes to technology capital markets, but a visual representation of the companies being created over the past 19 years also shows that 2006 to 2011 was an amazing time for startups in the country.

It was in this period of time when startups such as Privalia, Trovit (Next Co), Buyvip (Amazon), Tuenti (Telefonica), AlienVault, UserZoom, Mitula (IPO), Wuaki (Rakuten), peerTransfer, Jobandtalent, bq, Kantox, Packlink, Akamon (Imperus Technologies), Ducksboard (New Relic) or La Nevera Roja were created.

A handful have already exited and most have raised significant rounds of funding with an international mindset from day one. As Iñaki Arrola once wrote, technology companies are not created overnight and success takes time and patience.

Frothy times have continued, and from 2012 to today the rate of new companies doesn’t seem to have stopped, including relative and early successes like CartoDB, Typeform, Wallapop, Letgo or 8fit.

This surge in companies has been accompanied by a significant increase in the capital available from local and, most importantly, international Venture Capital firms. Last year we saw more foreign VCs than ever before back Spanish companies, and it seems as if this year the record will be once again broken.

With abundant capital at the early stage, international VCs currently provide the necessary capital for mature and high-growing international businesses to scale. As James Cameron from Accel Partners recently told us, the iconic firm has made 5 investments in Spain this year, more than in any other European country.

All of this does not mean that it’s all fine and dandy in the Spanish technology ecosystem and that it can now look in the eye of London, Stockholm or Tel Aviv. But the formula continues to improve and hopefully many of the companies that were created in the last decade will prove to become success stories in the next few years. It’s just a matter of time.

Disclaimer: Iñaki Arrola and Ian Noel of Vitamina K contributed to this post with Crunchbase-sourced data and company suggestions.

The post A visual representation of Spanish startups and the NASDAQ: the golden years of 2006-2012 appeared first on Novobrief.

The fact that there’s a new startup in Barcelona should be no surprise for anyone that has been following the Catalan tech ecosystem. But Stuart is different.

For one, none of its founders are Spanish, they all come from France and they have vast experience in creating and building companies. Stuart’s lineup is formed by Dominique Leca (founder of email client Sparrow, acquired by Google), Clement Benoit (former founder and CEO of restaurant delivery company Resto-In) and Benjamin Chemla (former CEO of Citycake.fr).

Secondly, the startup has quietly build a team of more than 40 people all around Europe, with 20 or more staff members being in Barcelona, where the company has its headquarters despite being a French-registered entity.

On top of that, Stuart has raised €22 million pre-launch, at a valuation of €45 million, led by Le Groupe La Poste’s subsidiary GeoPost. Prior to that, the company had already received €1.5 million in financial support from French business angels J.D. Blanc, J.A. Grunion and O. Matzot.

So, what does the company offer to attract such a massive amount of funding even before a public launch?

Stuart and its experienced co-founders promise to “transform” the way goods are delivered within cities, “enabling anyone to get nearly any product delivered in less than 60 minutes”.

A value proposition that might sound familiar to those that have been following the development of Postmates or also Barcelona-based Glovo. Stuart’s job positions on LinkedIn (and there’s a bunch of them), explain that the company’s “on-demand mobile application connects customers and businesses with independent local couriers”.

Steve O’Hear at TechCrunch has more details about Stuart’s offering, which might include an app and API that online stores will be able to plug into to offer consumers same-hour local delivery.

Prices start at €2.99 per delivery (much lower than Glovo’s €5.90).

O’Hear also adds:

“Rather than going down the surge-pricing route, Uber-style, the startup’s algorithm will where necessary ‘pool’ deliveries to keep the cost down. I guess a good analogy might be ridesharing, where each participant has a slightly different pick up and drop off point.”

The company is supposedly running private tests in Paris with various local ecommerce sites, racking up more than 1,000 deliveries a day in less than a month.

More fuel to the logistics space fire.

The post Stuart: the Barcelona-based logistics startup that has raised €22M before its public launch appeared first on Novobrief.

Local events discovery app Fever has raised $12 million in funding from Accel Partners, Fidelity and 14W Ventures. All three firms had investment in the company’s Series A round, which was raised just six months ago, and Bernardo Hernandez’s Solon Ventures is also participating in the deal.

The investment was recently disclosed in a SEC filing and I’ve later confirmed with various sources close to the company its size and the name of the investors behind Fever’s Series B. These sources also say that Fever’s valuation has doubled.

At Novobrief we’ve written about Fever on various occasions, highlighting the internal turmoil the company has gone through and the changes it has experimented since the startup was founded in Barcelona in 2011.

Things appear to be more stable right now, and various sources have told me that since the publication of this article about the company, the board and other advisors have taken a more active role in the day-to-day operations of the company.

Sources have also told me that recent board meetings have been “intense”, and that as a result Bernardo Hernández will have a less active role within the company. I’ve asked Bernardo about this via email, but he declined to give any details on the situation and simply said that “it’s a very complex situation and I’d rather not comment”. Bernardo will remain as a board member.

Despite management and personal changes at the company, it seems as if Fever’s traction continues to improve

The app serves as a discovery mechanism for local events in cities like Madrid, New York or London, allowing users to buy tickets or find deals for certain events (concerts, restaurants, etc).

One source has told me that annualised net revenue run rate for the company currently stands at between $1.5 to $2 million, with gross transactions surpassing the $70 million mark. These numbers will certainly raise people’s eyebrows, especially given the fact that most of the deals inside the app tend to be cheap (less than $10). More than 200,000 users buy tickets through Fever on a monthly basis.

Spain and the US represent about 40% each for Fever’s bottom line, with the UK accounting for the remaining 20%.

These numbers have not only attracted the attention of investors, but also of ticketing giants such as Eventbrite, who I understand is actively talking to the Madrid-based company and exploring ways of working together.

There’s no doubt that Fever’s past is less than pretty, but it seems as if the company is slowly but surely turning things around.

The post Fever closes $12M Series B round led by Accel Partners, Fidelity and 14W Ventures appeared first on Novobrief.

When I interviewed Glovo co-founder Sacha Michaud a few weeks ago, he admitted that the Barcelona-based logistics startup would announce in “coming weeks” a new and bigger round of funding. It only took a few days.

Techcrunch reports that Glovo has raised €2 million from various business angels, including Bernardo Hernández, Zaryn Dentzel (Tuenti) and Felix Ruiz (Jobandtalent), as well as investment firms Antai Ventures and Cube Investments.

As Michaud admitted a few days ago, the startup is looking to integrate itself with a larger number of online stores in order for Glovo to be included as a shipping and same-hour delivery option.

In the interview he said:

“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.”

Glovo is currently active in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia and chargers consumers a €5.5 delivery fee. Glovers (couriers) keep 70 to 80 per cent of the fee.

Glovo competitor and also Barcelona-based Stuart recently announced a pre-launch €22 million round, once again highlighting how competitive the on-demand logistics space has become in recent times.

The post On-demand logistics platform Glovo raises €2M from Antai, Cube and Tuenti mafia appeared first on Novobrief.

With a war chest of about $150 million, you can do various things. You can spend millions of dollars a month on marketing, product and growth, you can substantially expand your team or you can also acquire other companies for various reasons.

Wallapop has done all three, including the acquisition of a mobile marketplace startup that has yet to be announced by either party. Until now.

The name of the startup is Sell It, and it was co-founded by Patrick Houwer and French entrepreneur Fabrice Grinda in New York City in October 2014.

There was no cash involved in the deal, which took place two to three months ago, and Sell It’s founders and employees received Wallapop stock in return.

The app, which offered users the opportunity of buying and selling goods at a local level, got little traction in comparison to Wallapop or competitors Letgo and OfferUp, but the Barcelona-based startup still decided to acquire it.

Why did Wallapop acquire Sell It?

I’ve talked to various sources close to both companies and I’ve even asked current and former employees about the deal. As is often the case with anything that involves Wallapop, nobody is willing to say a word, neither to confirm nor deny the deal.

But I know it did happen, as several former employees of Sell It have told me that they stopped working on the product “as soon as it was acquired by Wallapop”. An investor in Wallapop even asked me “but has the deal been publicly announced?”, pretty much confirming what various people have told me over the past few days.

With very little traction and with no Sell It employees transferring to Wallapop (at least according to my LinkedIn searches), all possible explanations of the deal end up in the same place: Fabrice Grinda.

Grinda is one of the most respected European entrepreneurs and he knows a lot about classifieds and about building online marketplaces. In fact, he’s the co-founder of classifieds juggernaut OLX, a company he launched with Alec Oxenford in 2006 and where he served as CEO until 2013.

Two sources close to Sell It have told me that Grinda “had to do something with Sell It” and selling (no pun intended) to Wallapop was one of the best options available. Who would say no to having stock in a fast growing startup that competes at a global level?

Grinda doesn’t mention in any of its social media profiles (or AngelList and Wikipedia) that he’s the co-founder of Sell It, but there’s nothing like a simple domain whois to see that sellit.co was actually registered by Grinda himself in 2013, months before the official launch of the app.

It’s not far-fetched to believe that Grinda could help Wallapop in a lot of areas, including its current US expansion and in the process of building a huge online classifieds business and network.

What’s even more interesting is that the connection between Fabrice Grinda and one of Wallapop’s closest competitors, also Barcelona-based Letgo, is strong. One of Letgo’s co-founders is actually Alec Oxenford (Grinda’s partner at OLX) and, as Letgo’s Enrique Linares told me in a recent interview, the startup believes one of its biggest advantages over its competitors when it comes to conquering the US market is… in the team’s past experience at OLX.

• Carles Grau (Letgo’s CTO) and Enrique Linares (co-founder) both worked at Captalis.com, a fintech startup invested by Fabrice Grinda
• Jordi Castello (co-founder) was a member of OLX’s founding team (following the acquisition of Mundoanuncio) and worked for the company for 4 years
• David Wieseneck (VP Finance), worked for more than 4 years at OLX as director of accounting
• Diego Cassinera (CTG), spent almost 7 years at OLX in various engineering positions
• Santiago Santine (head of customer care), was also the head of customer care of OLX between 2009 and 2015

The connections between Letgo and OLX are all over the place. With the acquisition of Fabrice Grinda’s Sell It, the connection between Wallapop, OLX and also Letgo seems stronger than ever.

Is the enemy in Wallapop’s house? Or is it the other way around?

The post Wallapop makes its first acquisition, buys OLX-related startup Sell It appeared first on Novobrief.

When a space is too crowded and more people come into it, there’s a saying in Spain that goes ‘éramos pocos y parió la abuela’. I don’t know how to properly translate that into English, but I do know that the logistics space pretty much looks like that in recent times.

Just over the past few days we’ve seen Spain-based startups such as Glovo or newborn Stuart raise significant rounds of funding. On top of that, the space is also being joined by companies such as Comprea, Delsuper or Deliberry that want to clone Instacart in Spain.

Well, there’s another startup joining the fray: Ermes, the new project of Bernardo Hernández, the former head of product at Flickr and co-founder of Fever, the local events company that has just raised a $12 million Series B round.

There’s not a lot of information out there and the company is not willing to disclose any details about their goal or current state of development. When I asked Bernardo about Ermes, he just said “we can’t say much yet”.

All we know about Ermes is that it promises to “disrupt last mile logistics” and that the company claims that users “love to shop online but hate coordinating home deliveries” (which is true), and that they will be “introducing the ultimate e-commerce delivery tool”.

The description sounds similar to startups such as Doorman or Roadrunnr.

Bernardo is joined in the project by Javier Sanz and Alberto Arranz, two Madrid-based entrepreneurs who had previously launched Fastisimo, a freight delivery startup that shut down in August.

According to Ermes’ profile on AngelList, Bernardo will serve as head of product. Him and his co-founders have yet to list the company on their LinkedIn profiles.

There are no funding details available about Ermes, but given the salaries the company is offering for two New York-based positions (€85K to €185K), it seems plausible that Bernardo -himself or through his fund Solon Inversiones- has allocated some capital to the young startup.

Update: A couple of sources have told me that Ermes has raised €8 million pre-launch, mostly from Bernardo Hernández and Solon Inversiones.

In a recent interview at Madrid’s Google Campus, Bernardo said that he’s very interested in the logistics space. Ermes fits right into that curiosity, let’s see what they ship.

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The post Ermes, Bernardo Hernandez’s latest startup, promises to “disrupt last mile logistics” appeared first on Novobrief.

Spain hasn’t been very friendly to transportation startups that are trying to change the status quo and the way the industry has operated over the past few decades.

While Spanish consumers have received services like Blablacar, Cabify and even Uber with open arms, traditional Spanish companies and regulators have not been as welcoming.

Uber (and UberPOP) is now banned in Spain (as well as in many other European countries), and startups like Cabify and Blablacar have seen legacy competitors knock on regulators’ doors to ask for the suspension of their services.

In the case of Blablacar, bus association Confebus took the Spanish subsidiary of the French company to trial last month, arguing that the car-sharing startup represents unfair competition. Confebus claimed that drivers who advertise their services on Blablacar were making a profit with each ride and that the company acted as an intermediary, managing payments and imposing certain conditions.

Blablacar refuted these claims in court. The European unicorn said that it’s “almost impossible” for a user to make a profit by driving people around and that the company only transmits and manages the information provided by the users. “We don’t own cars, professional drivers, nor do we set routes and stops”, the company said during the trial according to El Español.

In the case of Cabify, it was the Federación Madrileña del Taxi which presented an official complaint in front of a judge. In early November, the association took Cabify to court, as it argued that the Madrid-based startup operated a taxi service instead of a VTC one. VTC licenses in Spain are limited by law, to one for every 30 traditional taxi licenses.

The Federación Madrileña del Taxi said that, under Spanish transportation laws, Cabify’s drivers are not allowed to drive around looking for customers and that after every ride they’d have to return to “an operational base” before accepting new clients.

Cabify defended itself by saying that it’s an agency that has formal relationships with drivers, and that these do not invoice Cabify on a per-ride basis, but every month.

In both Blablacar and Cabify’s cases, its rivals asked the judge for the permanent shutdown of their services.

These requests were not accepted by the judge and today it was announced that both Blablacar and Cabify will be able to continue operating in Spain, while the cases continue to be investigated before a proper decision is made in coming months.

El Español first broke the news about Blablacar, and we’ve now learned that the judge in Cabify’s case will also allow the transportation startup to keep operating normally.

Two significant wins for two companies that are trying to change the way transportation services have worked in Spain for decades.

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Photo | Joe Gratz

The post Disrupting transportation: Spanish judges reject temporary suspension of Blablacar and Cabify appeared first on Novobrief.

PSA: We’ve recently switched our newsletter to Mailchimp and it seems that it’s ending up in users’ spam folder on Gmail (Google Apps), Yahoo and Hotmail/Outlook. If possible, we’d kindly ask you to check your spam folders and tell your email provider that we’re no spammers. Thank you.

With more than $40 million, job matching startup Jobandtalent has become one of the richest Spanish startups. Richest in terms of funding, because many in the country continue to question whether the company has a good enough product or business to justify that number.

Given the fact that there’s no better way to find out than asking the company itself, I recently took a trip to number 93 at Paseo de la Castellana to sit down with co-founder and co-CEO Juan Urdiales. We talked about the past, present and future of the company.

Before doing that, I took a look at Jobandtalent’s financials at the Spanish official registry. Those filings, provided by Dato Capital, show that the company had sales of €1 million in 2014, up from €768,000 in the previous year. A moderate increase in revenue that was accompanied by a much bigger surge in its loss, as the company co-founded by Urdiales and Felipe Navío posted a loss of €2.5 million last year, 7.5 times more than in 2013.

Jobandtalent in 2014: revenue of €1 million, financial loss of €2.5 million

While these numbers would scare off many rational investors, they did attract the attention of a wide variety of financial backers, who injected €23 million into the company in May 2015.

Since then, the same question about Jobandtalent remains: how the heck does the company make money?

The origins of Jobandtalent

Felipe Navío, Felix Ruiz (chairman) and Juan Urdiales

As we start talking about the current state of the company, Urdiales quickly explains where the company comes from, as if knowing Jobandtalent’s past would make it easier to understand its present and future.

The first conversations about the job market took place in 2008, when Felipe Navío was working at Tuenti and few months after Urdiales sold its first startup, online clothing store Pluscuamperfecto. “I tried to raise capital for Pluscuamperfecto, but at the time I did not realise it wasn’t an attractive business for investors”, he says. “One day I talked to Felipe about how tough it was for some people to find a job and how we could make it easier, and those first conversations where the origin of Jobandtalent”.

Felipe left Tuenti soon after and Tuenti co-founder Adeyemi Ajao helped build the foundation of the company. Ajao was about to start an MBA at Stanford, but had to wait a few months for the program to start, so he decided to help. “He didn’t invest capital in the company, but he did help us a lot in the fundraising process and in the recruitment of JT’s first developers”.

Urdiales was good friends with Tuenti’s co-founders Adeyemi Ajao, Felix Ruiz and Zaryn Dentzel, and there’s no doubt that this close relationship helped the startup in its beginnings.

When asked about Jobandtalent’s founding team, Urdiales names himself, Felipe Navío, Adeyemi, Tabi Vicuña, Pablo Gomez-Ballesteros and Alberto Mateos as key components of what has now become a 100-person startup. Tabi and Alberto no longer work at the company, but Urdiales talks fondly about them and recognises their importance when it mattered the most.

Despite the fact that a lot has changed since then -the company’s first product was desktop-oriented and had a strong social network component, thanks to the influence of Tuenti-, the company’s co-CEO says that their goal has remained the same: to make the process of receiving relevant job offers easier for users, and for these to find the right job without much effort.

From desktop to mobile and the importance of Jobandtalent’s algorithm

Two years after founding the company, Urdiales and Navío realised that users were not coming back to the platform once they signed up. “The product didn’t work, users didn’t understand its value and retention wasn’t good”, he says. The only users that were actually coming back to the website were those that were heavily using Jobandtalent’s recommendation system.

JT’s recommendation system works as follows: users are asked about their job title, current company, industry, years of experience and salary. Based on that, the company shows users a stream of job offers that they can show interest in or reject (Tinder-style), improving the algorithm and thus, in theory, making the whole experience better.

“This recommendation system means a better experience for users and companies. When a job offer is posted, we’re able to match it to the right profiles based on all the user data we have, in a short period of time. This way we increase the quality of the job matching process and we reduce time-to-employee. It’s all about generating liquidity for both sides of the marketplace”, Urdiales explains.

2011 to 2013 were transitional years, as the company tried to build a mobile-first experience, and these days Urdiales says that Jobandtalent’s apps have been downloaded 9 million times and that between 4.5 and 5 million users come back to them on a monthly basis.

“We push job offers to them, instead of relying on the traditional system of workers trying to find a new job. We want to do that for them and I believe we have the right technology to do so”, he says.

Contrary to what is often perceived in the market, Urdiales explains that Jobandtalent’s is mostly a platform for blue collar jobs and workers. “We’re focused on this type of jobs, which represent a massive and underserved market”, he adds.

Jobandtalent’s business model

Product and history questions aside, what I wanted to get to is Jobandtalent’s business model. For a long time I didn’t understand how it worked, but investors in the company often talked about how their approach could change the way a significant part of the job market functions.

So I asked Urdiales himself about this. “I believe the job market is currently evolving from a lead generation or listing model to a transactional one”, he says. “This has happened in many other verticals but not in this one, and we believe we can achieve this”.

To understand what Urdiales means by applying a transactional model, we must first understand the company’s four main sources of revenue.

Advertising #1

Companies can post job offers for free on Jobandtalent. However, the startup also presents big clients the opportunity of promoting their brand and the way they work with profile pages and such. These packages cost between €6,000 to €30,000 per year, and they allow companies to reach a wider pool of workers on the platform.

“It’s similar to Adwords, but with a very strong performance and branding component”, he says. “There’s no CPC and it’s oriented towards big companies that want to have higher visibility on Jobandtalent”. What this means is that, if you pay, you have a better chance of reaching the right users.

These ads account for 30% of the company’s revenue.

Advertising #2

Given all the information the company supposedly has about its users (salary, industry, etc), Jobandtalent says it can help traditional advertisers reach certain audiences more efficiently.

This is a pure programmatic or RTB ad buying process.

Education

Jobandtalent recommends users certain types of educational programs based on their professional profile and the kind of job offers they tend to apply to.

Urdiales says that this represents 40% of the company’s income, and that it’s an area “that’s growing very fast”. Clients include big institutions like Instituto de Empresa and other smaller programs, which pay Jobandtalent per lead generated.

Hiring fees

Since September the company is testing with SMEs a new model, that they call transactional, that’s basically one which forces companies to pay between €49 to €199 per worker hired through the platform.

To make sure that Jobandtalent finds out about these hirings, they offer an incentives package to workers, which includes €250 if they open a bank account with BBVA, medical insurance, one year free membership with Pepephone and some other perks.

“We give all of this to the user, which creates a big incentive for them to report that they’ve been hired through the platform, so we don’t miss anything”, Urdiales comments.

These hiring fees represent what Urdiales calls “moving to a transactional model”. It has been done before at certain headhunting firms and for well-paid jobs, but the company believes that if they can successfully apply it to the blue collar market, they have a big opportunity in front of them.

“In January we’ll announce something big”

On top of this, Jobandtalent claims that they will launch a new transactional model in January. “It’s going to be very big, but we can’t give you more details at the moment”.

Urdiales says that they expect transactional to represent half of Jobandtalent’s revenue in mid 2016, “and more than 80% in the long run”. “What companies want is to pay per successful hire, instead of paying €100 or €150 to simply post an ad”, he notes.

Whether that happens is another key question that will depend on the company’s ability to apply their formula in the job market.

Fundraising and international expansion

Jobandtalent is currently present in Spain, UK, Mexico and Colombia, and the company is still thinking about how to best tackle the US market. “There’s no rush when it comes to the US. We are aware that if we launch there and we’re successful, the value of the company could increase exponentially. But you can also build great and long-lasting companies in Europe or Latam alone”, Urdiales says.

According to the company, they’re not in a tight financial position and they have “plenty of cash in the bank”. However, they do admit they’re talking to new investors that can help them in their international expansion. “We’re not in a hurry. It’s more about finding the right investors than just cash”, he admits.

Up until now the company has only raised capital from Spanish investors (Pelayo Cortina Koplowitz, Qualitas Equity Partners, FJME Kibo Ventures or Nicolas Luca de Tena), but they admit that for them to grow properly outside of Spain, they might need new partners.

“We’re talking to everybody, but one thing is for certain: Atomico hasn’t acquired us”, he says while laughing, in reference to a poorly written article published on El Confidencial a few weeks ago.

The post Jobandtalent promises to help you find your dream job: but can they find a scalable business model? appeared first on Novobrief.

This is a guest post written by Philippe Gelis, CEO and co-founder of fintech and FX startup Kantox.

Day after day, when I explain what we do at Kantox, people ask me, “Banks are your enemies, then?” and I always reply: “Are we their enemy?”. We don’t consider banks as enemies. However, without any doubt, Kantox came about as an alternative to the bad practices of the oligopoly of traditional banking and its clientele abuse.

There is a relationship of competition-collaboration that, given the latest twists of the big financial companies, looks increasingly moving in the direction of collaboration. Perhaps, it is yet another example of the saying, “if you can’t beat your enemy, then join them”.

When the fintech phenomenon arose, banks laughed at us. We were some crazy insignificant people, waving the flag of transparency and armed with technology, fighting back against an archaic sector, more powerful than most governments. When their customers, the same people who they had rewarded with hidden commissions and with a good dose of the status quo, began trusting and recommending us, only then did they start paying attention to us. They began by criticising our model and tried to discredit us, but the fintech wave had already begun.

Recently, a banker wrote to me, saying:

“I fully agree with the analysis that Kantox makes of the financial sector and its future trends, although I have to admit that I was wrong about Kantox in 2013, thinking that it was just a good idea with an irrelevant market share, if it even managed to last the first year. Actually, my prediction was that, in the best of scenarios, it would be an ant compared to the elephants of banking. However, you have transformed into a mouse that terrifies those elephants, and now you are ready to take the next step and transform into hunters who overcome banking elephants, thanks to technology and intelligence, despite a smaller size. I wish to participate in this revolutionary task and, maybe, this will lead us in some years to see a fintech bank.”

These days some of our competitors fear us, but some are sufficiently clever to build bridges and to try to redefine themselves, collaborating with fintech startups and creating a constructive ecossystem for both parties. The first beneficiaries of this strategy are customers.

Spanner in the works

A couple of years ago, some UK banks tried to halt the establishment of P2P lending companies in the country. They slowed down the administrative procedures to paralyse the credit procedure of their customers. Now, we are seeing the same thing in Spain. This is what we are facing:

• Cross-selling of products: Traditional banks threaten their clients with cutting their credit if they use a fintech company for other services. For example, in some cases, they link export credit with currency exchange and won’t accept that the part related to the currency is conducted by a fintech company when they give them credit. Curiously, these threats never end up being carried out. I pause here for a brief legal point: cross-selling products is illegal, so I invite all those companies that experience the same thing themselves to report it to consumer associations and the European Commission (we can help on that).

• Discrediting fintech: The reasoning? They state that it is “risky” to work with a small company, which makes me ask myself if they also consider it “risky” to offer mortgages in foreign currencies to families who end up bankrupt, or shares (“preferentes”) to elderly people or those without any financial knowledge who end up losing all their savings.

• Closing fintech company accounts: One Catalonian bank in particular once decided to close all the bank accounts of all the fintech companies that were their clients under the pretext that “their operations don’t fit with us”. Strange… I’ll let you guess what bank I am speaking about.

• Refusing to transfer funds to fintech companies: At the time of exchanging currency, for example, the customer receives communication from the bank saying that “we cannot send funds to Kantox”. That is false, and a way of convincing customers who do not know how operations are conducted.

• Using dumb excuses: Banks are also very good at making mistakes on purpose and using dumb excuses to justify them. Examples: “Sorry, I did not understand you wanted to use Kantox so I already exchanged your USD into EUR… (with a huge spread)”, “I forgot to send the funds to Kantox, I did not remember you said it was urgent…”. What I love the most about cases like this is when customers feel empowered and decide the switch to another bank or ask for a full refund.

In some cases, these practices are not decisions coming from the bank, but from personal or account managers of their branches, who decide individually –and surely motivated by commercial pressure– to be “clever” in the way that they make their clients “loyal”.

Moreover, we know that some banks have implemented systems to alert and detect transactions conducted by fintech companies. This is financial intelligence in the purest NSA form.

We know that some banks have implemented systems to alert and detect transactions conducted by fintech companies.

Its tempting to share with you the list of banks or their client victims of these practices, but I will attempt to contain myself… for now. However, internally we do keep a ranking of bad practices of those entities that treat their clients the worst – and they make our marketing better, I have to say.

It is gratifying to see that there are less and less customers who allow themselves to be swayed by their managers –yes, the same ones who for years have misled them with opaque and unfair commissions. The head of currency of a large Spanish bank once told me, over coffee in a Starbucks, that “customers don’t need to understand the products and their real cost”. Yet another reason to keep working as we do at Kantox. 

We could share these bad practices with the Bank of Spain, consumer associations or the European Commission as well as the press –who try and insist that we reveal exact cases–, but I consider it more productive and motivating to show that not all banks are like that. At least in the rest of Europe.

Smart banking Vs Cosmetic banking

There are banks that embrace fintech. Arkea, in France, positions itself as the bank for fintech, providing them with the necessary banking services for their operations, like segregated accounts or payment system. They have converted this collaboration into part of their positioning. They invest in fintech companies like Pret d’Union. They buy others like Leetchi. They collaborate with Compte Nickel. This is a clear case of “smart banking”. Even more surprising, they do it in their local market without fear of cannibalizing themselves.

In contrast, we find those entities that set up fintech incubators or hackathons; venture capital funds to invest in fintech; and other marketing operations of what I refer to as “cosmetic banking”.

The headlines are more alluring than in the tabloids, but if they really do want to join the fintech bandwagon and have a future, these banks are going to have to reinvent themselves, change their DNA and be brave. Cosmetic surgery is a form of deceit that only satisfies someone for a few more years…

The post Smart banking vs. cosmetic banking: unfair strategies to fight the fintech phenomenon appeared first on Novobrief.

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It’s a new week. Which means there has to be a new investment fund launching in Spain. Of course there is, and it’s called Samaipata Ventures.

This new Venture Capital firm is being led by Jose del Barrio, one of the co-founders of La Nevera Roja, acquired by Rocket Internet for €80 million earlier this year. Del Barrio is joined by Alvaro Gonzalez-San Pedro and Ignacio Tovar in this project.

These are the relevant details: Samaipata’s fund will have a size of €20 million, its LPs are some of the backers of La Nevera Roja (Nicolás Luca de Tena, the Juantegui family and more) and its objective is to invest in ecommerce and marketplace businesses.

“We believe in the specialisation of VCs and we want to do that from the get-go”, del Barrio told me in a recent interview. “These are the areas where we have expertise and we want to have a hands-on approach with startups”.

Most VCs say exactly that when it comes to their relationship with startups, but as many of you might already know, doing it and saying it are two very different things.

The fact that Samaipata is going to focus on two specific industries is also interesting, given the fact that there are not many Spanish VCs that invest in certain verticals instead of shooting at anything that moves.

Samaipata says that it will invest not only at the seed stage, but mostly in later rounds. 80% of the fund’s size will be invested Series A and B rounds and in “companies that can become market leaders”. The firm will allocate €0.5 to €0.7 million per round and up to €1.5 million, including follow-on rounds.

The remaining part of the fund, 20%, will be used for seed investing (€50K to €200K).

The first company Samaipata has backed is Deporvillage, which clearly fits their criteria: mature ecommerce business with an international focus.

“I really wanted to build my own fund. While I was at PWC, before starting La Nevera Roja, I worked in the M&A department. So this is kind of going back to my roots”, del Barrio concludes.

Samaipata joins a crop of new funds and firms that have fresh money to back Spanish startups, including:

• Qualitas (€60m)
• Nauta (€60m to €150m)
• Hotusa Ventures
• Carlos Blanco’s new fund (not yet launched)
• Javier Santisos’s growth fund
• Galdana Ventures (€150m, fund of funds)
• Lanzame Capital (€20m)

The post Samaipata Ventures: La Nevera Roja’s co-founder launches €20M fund for ecommerce and marketplace startups appeared first on Novobrief.

EsLife, the Valencia-based home cleaning startup, is shutting down. The company officially announced it on its blog yesterday, simply saying that EsLife would no longer be offering its services to its customers.

“Today, November 30 2015, EsLife will stop working”, reads the blog post.

The announcement doesn’t mention why the company is shutting down, but I’ve heard from multiple sources that it is as a consequence of a labour inspection from Spanish authorities that took place earlier this year.

Following the appearance of the first rumours regarding EsLife’s legal situation, I contacted co-founder and CEO Richard Gracia in October and he told me that they had yet to make a decision regarding the company’s future. At the time he said that they were studying the options they had.

Home cleaning startups, and many other similar marketplaces where the supply side is made of professional (or not) workers, currently face legal uncertainty. It’s not yet clear whether the cleaners need to be employees of the companies acting as intermediaries (EsLife in this case) or if simply being autónomos (fully legal freelancers) is sufficient.

Will EsLife’s competitors be affected by this?

When I first talked to EsLife a year ago, Gracia said that EsLife couldn’t force cleaners to pay social security contributions or be legally self-employed. “However, we do everything we can to try to achieve this”, he said.

The company is not disclosing the nature of the labour inspection it faced a couple of months ago, but it seems as if was the definitive nail in EsLife’s coffin.

EsLife had raised €740,000 from various accelerators and funds, including Lanzadera, Plug and Play Spain and Angels Capital, Juan Roig’s (Mercadona) investment vehicle. The company had also received €50,000 from public institution ENISA.

According to its CEO, EsLife was very close to raising an additional €2 million from investors.

Asked about why he thought EsLife was targeted first by Spanish authorities, instead of competitors GetYourHero or Wayook, Gracia told me that it was due to his company being the “biggest one in the market”. “We had thousand of clients in multiple cities in Spain, he said.

He also added that he didn’t believe there were many significant differences between EsLife’s way of working and that of GetYourHero or Wayook, leaving the door open to more inspections and, thus, uncertainty in the home cleaning sector. GetYourHero and Wayook claim to only work with fully legal workers.

GetYourHero has raised more than €1.5 million from Seaya Ventures and business angels, while Wayook is backed by Axon Partners Group. In October 2015, GetYourHero also acquired the remaining assets of Rocket Internet’s Helpling, which decided to scale back its operations in Spain.

Will they be next?

The post Cleaning startup EsLife shuts down following labour inspection and amid legal concerns appeared first on Novobrief.

Tracking expenses is a pain in the ass. And it it’s so for a freelancer like myself, I can’t imagine what it feels like for multinationals and big companies. Joel Vicient saw the same problem more than 10 years ago and he decided to tackle it.

“A decade ago I started a technology consulting firm in Tarragona, and I quickly saw that tracking expenses, invoices and other forms bureaucracy was a waste of time”, he recently told me in a phone conversation.

Those were the origins of Captio, a Catalan startup co-founded by Vicient, Joaquin Segura, Lluís Claramonte and Dan Moser, that has grown significantly over the past few years thanks to the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology built in-house.

The company, under the name Ongest, participated in one of SeedRocket’s first editions (2009) but quickly saw that what they had built needed a new focus. “The first product, which extracted relevant data from invoices and expenses using scanners, was aimed at accountants and was desktop-oriented”, he says. “We did ok, but it wasn’t interesting for us or for investors in terms of growth and scalability”.

At the time, smartphones were increasingly becoming a force in the world of technology and apps were starting to be a thing, which pushed the company to transform its product and focus exclusively on mobile phones. On top of that, Vicient recognises that “the way accountants work is exclusive to Spain, but tracking tickets and expenses is a global problem for companies all around the world”.

“We took the technology we had built and we applied it to the smartphone”, he adds. It was 2012 and the OCR system they had built, combined with semantic technologies, were the beginning of a new phase for the Tarragona-based startup.

Captio: profitable, €80K MRR and 40K MAU

Captio’s apps allow employees to simply submit expenses to their employers by taking photos of tickets or invoices. The startup establishes a direct connection with their client’s finance departments to update their expense tracking software in real-time and with the official Spanish tax agency, thus avoiding tickets being lost, administrative mistakes and fraud.

The approach to solving this simple problem is working well for Captio. Vicient admits that they’ve been growing at rates of more than 300% over the past few years on various fronts (revenue, tickets scanned, active users) and that more than 40,000 people use the app on a monthly basis.

“Managing this kind of growth is tough for a small company”, he says. “We had 10,000 users in January and we’ve been growing at 15-20% every month. This means that growth needs to increase accordingly in various areas that might not have been obvious before, like product, sales or human resources”.

Captio has grown from 15 employees in early 2015 to 50.

While the company declines to discuss specific revenue metrics, I’ve heard from sources that its monthly recurring revenue (MRR) stands at €80,000, which is significant given the fact that Captio is currently only available in Spain. “Expanding internationally is our next big challenge”, Vicient admits. Telefonica, BBVA, Carrefour, Bankinter or Olympus are some of their biggest clients.

According to the Spanish official registry, Captio had about €1 million in revenue in 2014 and was profitable.

Captio has raised more than €2.3 million from Kibo Ventures, Bankinter, THCAP and business angels such as Carlos Domingo, Carlos Blanco or Juan Margenat. “A few years ago, when we told investors that we were building accounting software, they didn’t pay much attention to us. These days, when we mention that we’re a fintech startup, their eyes widen”, he concludes.

The joy, I guess, of being in one of the hottest technology sectors right now.

The post Expense reporting startup Captio has 80,000 reasons to believe you can build a big business selling only to Spain appeared first on Novobrief.

Number26’s founding team (left to right): Christian Rebernik (CTO), Maximilian Tayenthal (COO, CFO) & Valentin Stalf (CEO)

Number26, the German startup that offers a new and fully digital banking experience, is now available in Spain.

The startup, which sits on top and uses the banking license of an official financial institution named Wirecard, is looking to differentiate itself from competitors in two areas: in terms of design and usability and in how easy it is to create a new account.

The experience it offers is mobile-centric and after registration, which is done via browser or app and after showing our face and passport to a German representative, consumers will receive a MasterCard debit card in 3 to 4 business days.

Once received, you’ll be able to withdraw cash from any Spanish ATMs and send and receive money to any European bank account, with no fees attached.

Asked about this, a Number26 representative told us that “we will not charge fees for withdrawing money at any ATMs, however there is a really small percentage worldwide where ATMs themselves charge fees”. If this happens, the company says, “we recommend to cancel the transaction and find the next ATM”. This applies to any ATM in Europe.

In terms of receiving and sending money from/to other bank accounts, Number26 claims that it’s “free of charge to your account” within Europe. That means that if your bank charges any fees when receiving money from any account, that is out of Number26’s control.

Expanding in countries with “old banking technologies”

The company, which has been operating in its home country for almost a year, has launched simultaneously in France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Slovakia and España.

Number26 says that these countries were selected as the first step in the company’s expansion because they “rely on old banking technologies and an expensive infrastructure”. As a result, the company says, they “believe that there is a higher demand for our mobile first bank account”.

The company is working on a Spanish version of its site and mobile apps, which we guess it will be key in Number26’s adoption in Spain. Customer support is also done from Germany and in English, and Spanish consumers won’t have the option of visiting any physical bank branch for other customer support issues they might encounter.

Besides the usual features most banks provide these days (such as push notifications or SMS when any translation takes place), Number26 offers features such as MoneyBeam (to send money to friends), the ability of withdrawing and making cash deposits at thousands of grocery stores (only in Germany) or flexible overdraft levels.

The startup, which claims to have 80,000 clients in Germany and Austria, also promises to integrate other financial products into its app in the near future, such credit, savings or insurance products.

Number26, which is quite similar to banking startup Simple (acquired by BBVA for $117 million), has raised more than $12 million from various German VC funds, including Earlybird VC, backers of Spanish mapping company CartoDB.

The post Number26, the German startup that offers a new and fully digital banking experience, launches in Spain appeared first on Novobrief.

Guest post: This post was written by Rodrigo Martinez, a Spanish early stage investor at Berlin-based VC firm Point Nine Capital.

For those who don’t know us, Point Nine Capital is an early stage investor based in Berlin. So far, we only have one investment in Spain – we invested in Typeform when they had 20,000 signups and no revenue.

At this stage, we know that the founders will face a steep learning curve. Our goal is to be their best partner and to provide close support. But we don’t have answers to all the questions, so connecting them with our portfolio and network is a key way we try to help them grow.

Business founders get plenty of support from us, but we realized that we didn’t spend enough time helping tech founders. Most of the time, they’re first time CTOs, so they have to learn how to scale teams, processes and technology. To try to solve that, we did our first CTO meetup in Berlin.

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As I mentioned in a previous article, in Spain there are very promising developments. However, the ecosystem is still young and fragmented between Madrid and Barcelona. Probably because of that, there’s a lack of communication between the key players and the lessons learned are not spread quickly enough.

Business founders are still somehow connected, but the challenge for CTOs here is even higher.

Therefore, we decided to put together a meetup for the top startups and tech’s CTOs in Spain that we could reach out to. On Friday November 27, more than 80 CTOs and VPs at some of the most well-known startups in Spain joined us to discuss the lessons they are learning while building successful products and teams.

Here I will summarize some of the key messages, with the hope that these will also be helpful to other CTOs who could not join us – you can also follow some of them on Twitter.

5 tips to scale teams

• Invest in people, that’s the answer to all problems: some common practices we heard of are to allow teams to spend time learning, to not forget about showing appreciation for jobs well done, to coach people, to always keep hiring in competitive roles, etc.

• Define company values: that might sound like corporate bullshit to most engineers, but it helps to get to faster decision making and it allows you to be aligned on your decisions when you have a larger team.

• Create a hiring brand: everybody mentioned that hiring tech talent is very hard. You need to make yourself attractive to developers – and the answers shouldn’t be only cash. The companies that struggled less to hire developers used their employees as their best ambassadors. We also learned that a hard hiring process attracted talented engineers at the early days of Tuenti.

• Define the right incentives: when companies grow, the challenges to manage diversity will start to kick in. An employee in his 20s will probably be more focused on the upside (thus training, equity, etc are good tools to remunerate), while somebody in his 40s will look for balance (family time, cash to pay mortgage/schools, etc). On a not so positive note, it’s important to highlight that I couldn’t find a single female CTO to join us. There’s a big problem with diversity in our industry.

• Good communication will only get more challenging: as the leader on the team, you need to make sure that you set processes to get fluent communication – 1 on 1s are mandatory, make sure you spend time with that.

Some other cool initiatives: a manager has every day a 9:30 coffee with a different employee. One year later, he has spoken several times and in private with all of his employees. Another company organized volunteer blindlunches, so people from different departments get to know how other areas work.

Bonus: Hire from tuenti, apparently that’s what everybody does.

5 tips to scale technology

• Invest in people, that’s also the answer here.

“Tech is a team sport, no space for rock stars” – John Carbajal, CTOat @ Kantox.

• Optimize for speed of development – don’t over-scale: solve problems as they appear, but invest early in monitoring -not only when issues happen- so it gets less messy to identify the sources of problems and to solve them.

• Build vs buy: think about the cost of building AND maintaining a feature in terms of engineering hours. Focus only on what’s core for your product and don’t reinvent the wheel – ie. some people even outsourced database management.

• Mobile is still very early: it’s hard to support all different platforms, versions, screen sizes, etc. You will have to make decisions on when to stop. There are also plenty of new challenges that you don’t have on the web – like doing proper QA in mobile is hard, due to the fact that virtualization doesn’t give you the same feeling; some people do QA in the elevator.

• Bonus: build relationships with Apple, you might need them to release a new version under preasure.

5 tips to scale processes

• Set the right priority: you have to choose if you accept growing fast AND breaking up things – you can’t be fast without breaking things.

• Be lean, test a lot, measure and iterate: after customers ask for it, first do a basic MVP for them, then validate if the metrics prove the case. After that, in the next iteration, spend time building a more solid product. Also, remember to kill stuff you don’t use!

“MRR is THE metric, but hard to translate into developers’ priorities. We focus on customer engagement as a proxy” – Jordi Romero, CTO @ Redbooth

• Understand who drives product, make sure they listen to customers: there’s no common answer if product should be inside or outside the tech organization, but it’s important to know how you get customers’ feedback in the product cycle – somebody has to speak with customers!

• Make clear rules to prioritize jobs: bugs-first? when is a bug a top priority? when do you refactor? when is it done? or ‘done done’?

“When something is ‘done’ is different in different countries, learn about it! In some countries in Latam, you might need to add 4 days to get into the stage of ‘done’ in US,” – Joan Villalta, VP @ Scytl

• Follow best practices in mature processes: allow one click test-and-deploy, test to make users happy, try to avoid developers messing directly with servers, etc.

I want to use the final words to thank everybody involved:  the attendees were very engaged which enriched a lot of the conversations. There was a huge amount of talent in the panels, but no less sitting in the audience. Spanish investors were very helpful in introducing us to their CTOs; it’s hard to attract +80 CTOs without their help. Oh, and also without Caixa Capital Risc, AWS, Wayra and MWC we wouldn’t have had a venue, food and beers

The post Sharing is caring: 15 lessons from the top CTOs in Spain appeared first on Novobrief.

I was calmly browsing the web a few days ago when an email appeared in my filled inbox. The subject was “beBee Social Network Startup”, and in the body of the email a nice communications person suggested that I should write an article about the company with the following headline: “9 million users in 9 months and an $11 million injection into beBee”.

My first reaction was ’screw it’. I hate being told by PR people or startups themselves what the headlines of my articles should be, but I have to admit that those figures did indeed call my attention. Did such a startup exist? Was beBee a real thing? Did they really amass those numbers in such a short period of time?

Well, it seems that the answer to all of those questions is yes. But, as Internet history has previously shown, numbers are just numbers and there are many ways of reaching them.

beBee defines itself as a social platform that connects people based on their interests and hobbies. What they like to call an ‘affinity networking’. In practise, beBee is like the child of LinkedIn and and other interest-based platforms such as Google+ communities.

Once you sign up you’re asked to complete your profile with your professional background and also with what really interests you, be it technology, sports or cooking. beBee then establishes connections between you and other similar folks through communities.

It’s not something really impressive or that hasn’t been seen before. The most interesting aspect about the Madrid-based and 50-person startup is where it comes from.

Canalmail, one of Spain’s biggest technology exits?

“We want beBee to be a 50% professional and 50% entertainment network”, co-founder Javier Cámara told me in a phone interview. “Well, perhaps we want the professional aspect to be a bit more important in the near future”.

Javier Cámara is not new to the game, and neither is his co-founder Juan Imaz. Imaz founded Mixmail, the first free web based email service in Spanish, in 1996. Three years later, right before the burst of the dotcom bubble, he sold the company to Ya.com.

One year later, in June 2000, both Imaz and Cámara (a former employee of Oracle in Spain) founded email marketing startup Canalmail, which would end up becoming one of the largest technology exits in the history of Spain; at least according to sources.

In 2008 Veronis Suller Stevenson, the majority investor behind digital advertising company Media Response Group, acquired a 30% stake in Canalmail for €10.5 million, valuing the company at €42 million.

In 2007 the company had reached €11 million in revenue and a positive EBITDA. According to data from Dato Capital, Canalmail posted revenue of between €1.5 to €3 million in 2014, far from its heydays.

So, if beBee had indeed raised $11 million pre-launch from its co-founders and investors such as Eduardo Diez­ Hochleitner (former CEO of PRISA Group), Enrique de la Rica (Dean of the business school ESEUNE) and Julio Bueso (founder of Web Financial Group)… where did all that money come from?

According to sources close to the company, Canalmail was sold for much more than that: €60 million. “It was never reported in the press, but VSS actually acquired 60% of the company for €60 million”, this source says. “If I’m not mistaken, this represents one of the bigger exits in Spain’s technology history”.

Canalmail’s co-founders did not comment on this and I’ve yet to find any reports in the media detailing the €60 million acquisition. To get confirmation, I’ve also reached out to VSS, but have yet to hear back from them.

Job portals that would end up becoming beBee

Following the exit, Cámara and Imaz decided to focus on building professional and vertical networks to help people find jobs. “We made quite some money with the deal and in the next few years we focused on buying great domains and on building a professional network”, Cámara explains.

Job portals such as informaticos.com or ingenieros.com would end up becoming what is now known as beBee. “In the summer of 2014 we decided to unify all of those portals under one brand, beBee”, the company says. “A network where you only see what really interests you”.

By taking advantage of its origins, beBee started off with a database of more than 1 million users. This took place in February 2015, and the company now says that it has more than 9 million in Spain and Latam.

“We’re growing very fast and we want to reach 40 to 50 million users in the next couple of years”, Cámara explains. “We’re currently focused on Spanish, Portuguese and English users. In the future we’d also like to launch in the US, but only if we’re able to raise a large round (€30 million or so) in America”.

The company says that more than 4 million people actually use the network on a monthly basis and that it makes money through targeted advertising. “Brands love the possibility of targeting very specific audiences. For example, engineers based in Madrid who are also into running”, Cámara comments.

A few days ago, I asked on Twitter about beBee, to see if any of my followers were users of the site. I only received one response from beBee’s Twitter profile, saying that they had more than 9 million users. The tweet, which has now been deleted, included this image.

Asked about the “company’s value”, a beBee spokesperson said that “it is the valuation calculated by the value per user. The value includes the data, interaction and sharing of information, what the information is worth to beBee, our advertisers and our investors, and the value includes additional confidential info”.

If the data is indeed true, the average beBee user is worth $40. More than each Twitch, Instagram or Dropbox user and about the same as a Whatsapper and half of a Twitter user.

Too positive or disingenuous?

The post This Spanish startup claims to have raised $11M pre-launch and to have a better value per-user than Instagram appeared first on Novobrief.

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored article, which means that it’s financially supported by CartoDB. This article has been written by them with Novobrief’s supervision.

CartoDB is showing the way in smart city technology with location intelligence.

Today we are more connected than ever before. We use technology to enhance, share and control the world immediately around us -turning on lights, locating the nearest bike rack or parking space- from our smart devices. More subtly, connectivity is also expressed at the community and city level, where improved communication, participation and collaboration has increased with access to data and information from agencies, institutions and citizens.

CartoDB, the leading company for location data analysis and visualization, was recently featured as one of the innovating technology companies from New York at Barcelona’s Smart City Expo World Congress.

“The projects in the pipeline that were demonstrated in Barcelona, including one with Mexico City, are some of CartoDB’s most ambitious, complex, ventures to date, and have the potential to redefine the standards of living,” says Santiago Giraldo, Senior Technical Evangelist for CartoDB.

CartoDB makes it easy to turn geospatial datasets into critical, shareable insights that streamline inter-agency communication and decision making. The location intelligence platform allows any state, city, and country to turn geospatial datasets into meaningful visualizations and critical insights powered by unparalleled ease of integration, data processing capacity, and analytical speeds with cutting-edge design.

Location data is paramount to intelligent cities planning and development. Geographical information provides a common frame of reference and big picture analysis for entrepreneurs, citizens and policymakers alike. The availability of geo-tagged data creates rich new layers of information that can be utilized at scale to create evolving solutions for more livable cities, intelligent policy and design, better research, improved emergency response, predictive analysis and economic opportunity.

“We’re discovering unprecedented opportunities to empower citizens and government agencies with everything from biking and housing apps, to risk platforms and customazible city dashboards,” continues Giraldo.

Citizen participation is now acknowledged as an essential ingredient for intelligent city innovation, success and longevity. The ideal vision for smart cities is one where infrastructure and services are connected with technology to empower informed citizens and government officials across agencies as partners.

The savvy smart city is one where technology and data serves the goal of improving standards of living, including sustainable use of resources and pollution reduction. Local authorities are looking for ways to maximize shrinking resources –to do more, to do it more efficiently, and to use data for informed decision-making. Municipalities must manage these services across geographic areas, and the ability to harness real-time data is vital for understanding and analysis.

To learn more about how CartoDB can empower your city government, visit their resource center.

The post Learn how CartoDB’s location intelligence platform will help shape the future of Smart Cities appeared first on Novobrief.

From left to right: Gonzalo del Pozo, Gonzalo Ortiz and Marcelo Badimón.

A lot has been written this year about the acquisition of La Nevera Roja or Akamon. However, one of the most significant exits of 2015 for Spanish technology companies took place Down Under, on the Australian Stock Exchange. Mitula Group, a vertical search engine and classifieds aggregator founded in Madrid in 2009, went public on the ASX in July, raising A$45 million.

Without making much noise, Mitula Group has become one of the largest -and most profitable- internet companies in Spain. The company had revenue of $16 million in 2014 (+53% YoY) and a net profit of almost $4 million (+153% YoY). Its stock price has increased by +18% since the IPO and the company is currently valued north of $140 million.

Impressive numbers that have gone unnoticed by many in the country. That’s why in October I took a trip to Mitula’s headquarters in Madrid to interview its co-founder and CEO Gonzalo del Pozo. What follows in an edited version of our conversation.

You started early in the classifieds sector. How long ago?

We started in 97, with a real estate portal called Globaliza. Gonzalo Ortiz were the co-founders and at its peak we had 70 employees and the support of important venture capital firms.

We were pioneers, in the sense that not a lot of people had built similar companies back then. Be it in Spain or anywhere else in the world. Newspapers had 20 pages dedicated to classifieds and it was a huge source of revenue for them, but that didn’t last long.

I remember those years as a constant struggle, especially because we launched right before the burst of the dotcom bubble. In the years 2000 and 2001 we tried to raise funding but it was impossible to do so. Those were tough days. We also made several mistakes along the way, like opening multiple sales offices when we didn’t have a good enough product and when not a lot people were yet online in Spain. It was a great way of making mistakes and learning from them.

When we saw that we wouldn’t be able to raise additional capital we decided to call it a day and start decreasing the size of the company. Dissolving a company in Spain is very tough, and we saw that firsthand. For many years we were using any capital we had to lay people off.

What we did obtain in those years was a lot of expertise in online marketing (SEO, SEM) and in the classifieds business. More so for being the first ones in the space than for being the best at it. To take advantage of this expertise, we built an internet agency called Trazada Internet Marketing that we would end up selling to QDQ.

At the same time, we also started a startup incubator, Tadium, thanks to the resources obtained via Globaliza, which was doing much better and making money. One of the first businesses that we incubated at Tadium was Mitula. We were interested in vertical search engines and aggregators because we’d seen that they were working in other countries. Indeed was a great example for us.

Given the fact that we were good at online marketing, we were tech people and the idea was a good fit for the team we had, we decided to test it in 2008 and we launched a year later. Idealista was one of our first clients.

Globaliza is still in business today. We’re proud of that.

What did Mitula look like at the beginning?

When we launched Mitula we were already focused on three key verticals: real estate, jobs and automobiles.

The strategy was to look at the market and see where we could fit in. Two of the biggest players back then were Nestoria and Trovit. We liked them both and we thought that there was room for another player if we were able to position ourselves somewhere in the middle between those two.

In terms of traffic acquisition, which is the more technology-centric part, we saw ourselves closer to Trovit. In product and sales, closer to Nestoria. In retrospective, launching Mitula was a natural step for people with our experience and a model that we identified ourselves with.

“Launching Mitula was a natural step for people with our experience and a model that we identified ourselves with”

We launched simultaneously in three countries, which wasn’t the case for most Spanish internet companies at the time or even today. Spain, Italy and France were first and the rest of the countries came later.

Our strategy was to grow horizontally, and by that I mean launching the same product in as many countries as possible. We also quickly understood the importance of time to market. Trying to position yourself as a company on Google nowadays is tough, and with a vertical search engine like ours even more. In 2007 or 2008 it made sense, but I wouldn’t even try today. I think we were one of the last companies of our nature to join the space.

You mentioned that Trovit and Nestoria were examples for Mitula. What were the main differences between your product and business and theirs?

I think the differences depend on the market and country, but, in general, conversion rates are very similar regardless of the aggregator. It’s tough to differentiate yourself from competitors but one thing still holds true: classified portals need one key thing, which is traffic. But in the end, you’re just another one.

We never thought that we were competing against each other. You might compete in prices, but not in terms of volume or in trying to win a fight. Because Google has won that fight and they’re the real competitor.

Traffic to these sites is finite. It’s growing, but it is finite. The more traffic you want, the higher the cost. That’s why Google Adwords is such a great business.

Mitula Group’s sites throughout the world.

Now that you mention Google. How dependent are you on the search engine and what kind of relationship does Mitula has with Google?

It’s a love-hate relationship. We’re dependant on them, but they also slightly depend on companies like us.

Google is two different concepts: Google organic search, which everybody depends on, because even if you spend millions of dollars in TV ads, most people still use Google to try to find the hotel or car they want.

Then, Google is also a partner, a client. Google Adsense is Mitula’s biggest client in terms of revenue. Traffic wise, 30% of our traffic doesn’t come from Google.

Google is also synonym with “online search”. If you want to be in that space, you need to be in Google and you have to realise that they set the rules. These can affect you or not, but that’s reality.

On the business side of things. Are you also trying to reduce the influence of Google on Mitula’s bottom line?

Adsense is a great source of income for us. Following the acquisition of Nestoria, we now have two very different products on our portfolio. Nestoria doesn’t rely on Adsense and doesn’t follow a freemium model, it’s only for paid clients. And that’s how it’s going to continue to be in the future.

“Google is our biggest client and 70% of our traffic comes from them”

Mitula is more focused on growing horizontally. For example, we just launched in Vietnam and Adsense helps you make money from day one. Google helps you sell your ad space in Vietnam, it collects the money, it applies currency exchange rates and then you just simply have to invoice them. This is wonderful and most people don’t think about it when they criticise Google.

What do you see as your main source of growth in the short term?

Right now we’re extremely focused on the Asia-Pacific region. We just opened an office in Singapur and this will allow us to be near our clients in countries like India, which is a huge market and one that requires you to be as close as possible to it.

Markets like Indonesia or the Philippines are also very attractive. These are markets with low internet penetration that, however, are growing very quickly thanks to smartphones, countries with a large population, with a growing middle class and with increasing disposable income.

The markets where we decide to launch also need to have an ecosystem of online advertising and classifieds, because we need that content to provide value.

If I’m not mistaken, Simon Baker was key in the development of Mitula as a company and in its IPO. How did someone with so much experience in the classifieds business decide to invest and become a significant part of the company?

From 2001 to 2008 Simon was the CEO of REA, one of the biggest classifieds portals in the world. After Newscorp bought it, they launched a very aggressive expansion plan and they came to Europe in 2005 to buy complementary companies. They acquired companies in the UK and Italy and in Spain he came to saw us when we were running Globaliza. They didn’t acquire us, but this is how we met.

We kept in touch with him and when we launched Mitula we told him that we wanted him to invest in the company, and in 2010 he joined along with another shareholder. Since then he’s been very involved in the company and a member of our board of directors.

Was that the only outside investment Mitula received in its history?

Yes, it was a strategic investment for us. Simon has a name in the classifieds business and people associate him with the industry. In fact, he was really important in our IPO on the Australian Stock Exchange.

We believed he could be big for us and that has been the case.

Talking about the IPO. How or when did you decide to go ahead with it?

The company was growing fast and we needed to make important decisions that would affect its future.

Then, in October of last year, Next acquired Trovit for €80 million and we thought: damn, something is going on here. Back then we were half the size of Trovit, but they launched the company three years before we did.

We looked at the possibility of selling Mitula, but the fact of the matter is that it’s very hard to sell a company like ours. What Trovit achieved doesn’t happen very often.

Why is it hard?

There are very few companies where our type of business model fits in. Then there’s also the issue of setting the right valuation for companies like ours, which grow very fast and have a very large EBITDA margin. It’s not like we’ve been losing millions of euros every year; in fact, we’ve paid dividends to our shareholders for many consecutive years.

We didn’t spend a lot of time looking at potential buyers. Not because we were not interested in that possibility, but because there’s only 5 to 10 companies that could complete such a deal. We talked to them but we decided to go for the home run.

“It’s very hard to sell a company like ours”

Going big meant trying to acquire Nestoria (we had complementary businesses) and then taking the company public. I went to see investors in New York and London, but in the end we saw that Australia had the biggest concentration of investors who understood the classifieds businesses and the opportunity for vertical search engines or aggregators.

We knew that in order to acquire Nestoria we needed to raise capital. We did so, we bought Nestoria and now we were more prepared to reach a higher valuation and IPO as Mitula Group.

Did you ever consider other stock exchanges?

We talked to people at the Alternative Investment Market in London but it wasn’t a good fit. We never considered an IPO in Spain, since only 5% of our business comes from here.

What’s the process of taking a company public like?

It’s tiring, very tiring. But it’s just work. You get told that you need to meet a certain number of requirements and the only option you have is to meet them. It took us a few months to do so.

Simon often says that we were also a company that was ready for the challenge. We had been following strong accounting principles for years and producing quarterly reports on a regular basis. The road show went very well and in June or July we’d decided our stock price and the amount we wanted to raise. In the end it was A$45 million combining the round raised to acquire Nestoria and the IPO. It was an adventure.

Is an IPO a distraction for employees? Are they constantly obsessed with the price of the stock?

I don’t think it is. Only a few of us were actually involved in the process. Simon, our CFO and myself.

Some of our early employees who are also shareholders obviously do pay attention to the stock price, but I don’t think that this happens to the point that it becomes a distraction. Internally we held various talks with our staff to tell them that everything was under control.

What’s your take on the current state of the classifieds industry? Lately in Spain we’ve seen the acquisition of Milanuncios, Trovit or idealista.

I think that in the last 5 years we’ve seen the development of an industry at a global level that didn’t exist before. It’s a large industry that moves billions of dollars every year.

I believe that we’ll see more and more IPOs , acquisitions or large rounds of funding in the next few years. There’s an industry now, there are a lot of investors that actually understand this business.

And on the mobile side of things? Are companies like Wallapop or Letgo poised to become threats to established classifieds businesses?

If you talk to Schibsted you’d see that these are the type of companies that they’re actually worried about. I think they represent a great opportunity for everybody.

However, I still don’t know how they’re going to be monetised. The classifieds sector hasn’t changed much in the last 20 years, in the sense that those who want to publish an ad need to pay for it. It’s a great business.

“Mobile encourages local and in-person transactions, and that’s also hard to monetise”

I’m sure mobile classifieds companies will be able to find a way to monetise their platforms, but I don’t know how. Mobile encourages local and in-person transactions, and that’s also hard to monetise.

20 years ago most in our business didn’t know how to build a scalable business model either, and look at where we are now. I think it’s just a matter of time.

Where would you like Mitula to be in 3 to 5 years?

I think there’s still a great opportunity in front of Mitula Group. Being a public company allows us two things: our current shareholders can sell some of their stock to make some money; and we now have the ability to raise capital on a steady basis to not only grow organically, but also through acquisitions.

In terms of growth, I think we’ll continue growing at a 50% rate year-on-year and we’ll reach a higher valuation than the one we currently have. How big? I have no idea.

Do you see yourself as the captain of the ship in 5 years?

That, I don’t know. It depends on the company, on the board of directors. I will do whatever is better for Mitula Group.

It’s not the same to lead a company that’s valued at $150 million than one that has a valuation of more than $500 million. Those are different companies with very different needs.

The post The story of Mitula Group: the company behind the largest IPO by a Spanish tech company of 2015 appeared first on Novobrief.

Not often do we get to see Wallapop’s founding team at a conference or on stage. Well, that’s not exactly true. Miguel Vicente and Gerard Olive, two of the app’s co-founders, have often appeared at conferences to talk about the startup. But its CEO and the person who runs the company on a daily basis, Agustin Gomez, has kept a low profile since Wallapop’s inception.

This, however, changed this week when Agustin appeared at TechCrunch Disrupt and was interviewed on stage by Natasha Lomas. He did not say anything about the company that was unknown, but he did comment on a few topics that I’ve covered over the past few months on this very same blog.

No value in talking about fundraising or valuation

Wallapop has never been willing to talk in public about the amount of money they’ve raised, who they’ve raised it from or what their plans are for the near future.

We have it on good authority that the Barcelona-based startup has raised more than $140 million from Fidelity, Insight Venture Partners, Accel Partners, Northzone VC or Vostok. However, Agustin Gomez once again declined to talk in detail about the topic; which is totally understandable from the startup’s point of view.

“A long time ago we thought there was no upside to talking about fundraising, we never comment, we keep a very low profile. This is a personal point of view, the only ones interested in how much money we have in the bank are our competitors. I don’t see any upside about talking about financial raising. We focus our communications and PR in topics that are interesting.”

The press seems quite obsessed these days about turning startups into unicorns (private companies that reach a $1 billion valuation), as if that meant much in the grand scheme of things. TechCrunch was the first to mention in May that Wallapop could be on its way to reach that status.

This is what Agustin had to say about the topic and the nonsense talk about this or that startup becoming a unicorn.

“Something that in Wallapop we have control over quite well is never speculating with the valuation of the company. A lot of people get mad — they think the company is better if it has a higher valuation. But when you think in the long term, especially in the classifieds industry where it takes years to take the market, you have to manage your valuation and be very coherent.”

Wallapop as a TV driven company

In the past we’ve mentioned the now famous TV ads Wallapop has produced, both in the US and in Spain.

With no monetisation strategy in place, Wallapop continues to be focused on increasing its user base and finding a right balance of buyers and sellers for its marketplace to improve over time.

Asked about the company’s marketing strategy, Agustin claimed that Wallapop is a “TV driven company”.

“We’ve learned a lot about how to combine traditional TV marketing channels with a huge digital strategy”, he said. “TV still works”.

The acquisition of Sell It

When we broke the news that Wallapop had made its first acquisition, buying NYC-based Sell It, the company declined to confirm the news. However, on stage Agustin did say that the acquisition took place a couple months ago, explained the reasoning behind the deal and also what they plan to do with the company’s assets.

“This is something that I can officially announce. Wallapop’s main objective is to expand our business in the US”, Agustin said. “We started talking with Fabrice Grinda, who six months ago launched Sell It, and since we were looking to create a strong team in the US, we talked about joining forces. We share the same vision about this new category and the deal happened very quickly. I’m now really happy to have Fabrice on our side and he’s going to help us expand our business in the US”.

Fabrice Grinda is the co-founder of classifieds juggernaut OLX. Letgo, one of Wallapop’s main competitors and also a Barcelona-headquartered company that has raised more than $100 million in funding, is also founded by former OLX executives and employees.

The post Wallapop talks fundraising, why TV works for apps and Sell It acquisition appeared first on Novobrief.

Robo-advisors, also known as online wealth management services, are on the rise. The combination of low interest rates, high commissions from banks and low returns from other investment vehicles, means fertile territory for fintech startups willing to manage -and increase- people’s savings through technology.

US-based Wealthfront was one of the first startups to disrupt the sector. The company has raised more than $129 million from multiple VCs and currently has $2 billion in assets under management.

Spain lacked a service of such characteristics, with the only example being London-based ETFmatic, co-founded by the Spaniard Luis Rivera.

Led by Unai Ansejo Barra, François Derbaix and Ramón Blanco, Indexa Capital is now joining the field, with an initial investment of more than €1 million from Cabiedes & Partners, Fides Capital, Viriditas Ventures (Yago Arbelos), Derbaix, his wife Marta Esteve (Soysuper, Rental) and Álvaro Ortiz.

The Madrid startup is launching today, promising better returns for investors willing to give the company at least €10,000. Derbaix and Ansejo had previously founded Bewa7er, a secondary market for company’s shares that was put on hold weeks after its launch.

Indexa Capital, Wealthfront and similar companies in the sector enable clients to invest their money on a monthly basis in a diversified portfolio of ETFs. The service competes with traditional investment services offered by banks, but promises much lower commissions (0.79% annually vs. 3.40% at banks, according to Indexa), automated processes, better returns and more transparency. Indexa says that it expects to offer its clients annual returns 3.1% higher than banks.

To know more about ETFs, read this article from Samuel Gil, where he explains the great opportunity for automated wealth management services. “Robo-Advisors”, he says, “pretend to offer a fully only service as good (or better) than the one provided by traditional advisors, at a much lower cost and with smaller investment requirements. Good, pretty and cheap. And for the masses”. Derbaix has also written about the project here.

The post Indexa Capital is the first Spanish online wealth management service, backed with €1M from Cabiedes and others appeared first on Novobrief.

Businesses that want to have their own app can hire a developer to build it, simply use a responsive theme from WordPress or Squarespace, decide to screw their potential clients or… have a company like Upplication do it all.

The Madrid-based startup offers clients a platform to create simple but functional apps on their own. The company, which was founded in 2012 by José Luis Vega de Seoane and Victor Rodado Frutos, went through Wayra two years later and has now raised €1.1 million to accelerate its international expansion.

The round, which brings the total raised by Upplication to almost €1.5 million, was led by Corporation Global and also includes the participation of business angels Luis Pardo, Juan Pablo Herrera (both from Sage), Sixto Arias, Luca de Tena’s family office and Telefonica’s startup accelerator.

Prices for Upplication start at €29/month.

In a phone conversation, Victor Rodado declined to discuss the company’s financials, but did say that they expect to reach €1.6 million in revenue in 2016. Besides selling their SaaS product themselves, the company has also signed agreements with AXA, Vodafone or Telefonica to reach other potential and lucrative clients.

Competitors in the space include Como.com, Goodbarber, Apps-builder or Valencia-based Mobincube.

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