OneRagtime’s Spanish Start-up Ecosystem Analysis — December 2018
So, we’ve wrapped up another year. As we all wound down for the Christmas break, it seems that Spanish investment took a little breather too. As we often see in the Spanish ecosystem, investment is seasonal and this was just one of those slower months. December 2018 saw €9.9 million raised across 8 rounds in 4 ecosystems — let’s go a little deeper and find out what happened.
Barcelona is holding its lead over competitor ecosystems Madrid and Valencia, once again coming up top for number of deals, even if there were just 4 funding rounds in the Catalan capital this month. Barcelona is also the home to December’s biggest fundraiser, Hosco, the hospitality network, who raised €5.4 million at Series A (see more below). Barcelona is creating a reputation as Spain’s most active ecosystem. Yet despite this emerging trend, there is also reason to look to Valencia too, which continues to be a growing ecosystem, consistently securing deals month-on-month.
As we mentioned in November’s update, we’ve changed our classification slightly to take small Pre-Seed and “Venture Rounds” into account. We’re borrowing Crunchbase’s term “Venture Round” here, which is used to signify smaller funding rounds that often serve as a bridge between Seed and Series A. Unsurprisingly given the few rounds, total funding was low this month, massively bolstered by Hosco’s Series A.
As we’ve mentioned, December’s biggest round came from Hosco, the network dedicated to the recruitment and guidance of hospitality professionals. They announced a fundraise of €5.4 million in a round led by Nauta Capital, with participation from Athos Capital and several business angels. The next biggest round, at €2 million, was from Bewe, the software start-up for beauty, health and wellness SMEs. Third was Chronoexpert’s €0.8 million round. Chronoexpert is a global platform for buying and selling used watches.
Across this small data set (due to the lower number of rounds this month), the go-to-market distribution has shifted again to, putting B2B start-ups at 62.5% in deal volume, and a significant 83.2% in value of deals.
Once again, with this month’s lower number of rounds, there is not a significant amount of data to draw conclusions about sectorial trends in the Spanish ecosystem. Nevertheless, the most dominant sector was Fintech in December, with rounds from Valencia-based Declarando, and Madrilenian Afterbanks. As we’ve mentioned in previous updates, we’ll continue to track the sector distribution from long term indicators of movement in Spanish tech.
Et voila! We hope it’s useful for you to see the latest funding news packed up into this speedy monthly update. Either way, we’d love to hear your feedback, get in touch to let us know and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter to follow more of what we do. And while you’re at it, don’t forget to head to our Platform to apply to join our Investor community and invest in our one-of-a-kind start-ups. Or if you have an exceptional start-up we should know about, our Platform is also the place to pitch us and apply for funding, contacts, operational resources and so much more ✌️
Wishing you a fantastic start to 2019!
