Spain and Portugal are effervescent up within the European tech ecosystem, with loads of new startups and funding rounds being introduced within the two nations. Barcelona-based Plus Companions just lately launched with the intention of closing a $30-$50 million million fund; Yellow is a brand new VC agency that launched with a €30 million fund; and Spanish VC Kfund raised $75 million.
As we speak, one other Spanish agency, All Iron Ventures, is rebranding. It’ll now be often called Acurio Ventures and it’s closing its third fund of $166 million (€150 million). The fund will solely make ‘follow-on’ investments and won’t lead offers.
Below its earlier moniker, launched in 2018, the agency had backed European tech startups together with Seedtag, Jobandtalent, Lingokids, Preply, Refurbed and Lookiero. Acurio was co-founded by Ander Michelena, who bought his earlier startup, Ticketbis, to eBay for €16.5 million in 2016.
LPs within the new fund embrace an unnamed U.S. college endowment, pension funds, corporates, some 35 household workplaces, an insurance coverage firm and tech executives.
The brand new fund has already made round 20 investments, and it’ll function with a generalist thesis (not specializing in any explicit sector), investing throughout the entire of Europe. The fund has belongings below administration value round €300 million.
Michelena informed TechCrunch the follow-on fund will take fairness stakes of between 3% and 10%, as he feels it offers the agency higher flexibility to entry firms, handle follow-on funding reserves, and undertake divestments.
“Within the final 12 months, we’re in all probability been one of the vital energetic VCs in Europe, doing 20 investments,” he mentioned. “We consider the market is on the level of turning and has arrived on the backside of valuations, and we’re profiting from that. There will likely be a sluggish restoration, so we wished to make a push there. It was time to push the accelerator.”
Michelena identified that the agency’s portfolio development is totally different from different corporations: “We do 50 firms per fund as a substitute of the everyday 20 […] We mainly, each quarter, have a look at the portfolio and resolve how a lot we comply with up.”
He mentioned the opposite large benefit of this mannequin is it lets the agency do distributions to paid-in (DPI) earlier. DPI is among the core monetary metrics that VC funds use to judge their funding efficiency.
“We will exit in rounds, and we don’t have to attend till the top of the lifetime of the fund. So it’s somewhat bit totally different method than common VC in that sense,” he mentioned.
The agency has a workforce of 12 individuals primarily based in Bilbao, Madrid, Barcelona and London. Its companions embrace Michelena, Diego Recondo, Hugo Mardomingo and Kate Cornell.
The agency is drawing on Basque origins for its new “Acurio Ventures” moniker: It’s impressed by Juan de Acurio, one of many 12 sailors who returned to port from the expedition world wide led by Magellan and Elcano 5 centuries in the past.
In keeping with a Dealroom report on the Spanish tech ecosystem, the mixed enterprise worth of Spanish startups surpassed €100 billion in 2023. The report additionally discovered that enterprise funding in Spanish startups held up final 12 months, with €2.2 billion raised throughout some 850 funding rounds.
The annual “State of European Tech” report for 2023 discovered Spain’s ecosystem to be in fourth place total in Europe, with the very best variety of startup fundings final 12 months.
Earlier this 12 months, Madrid-based VC agency Seaya closed Seaya Andromeda, an “Article 9” €300 million local weather tech fund primarily based out of Madrid.
Plus, the European Funding Financial institution’s enterprise capital arm additionally backed a brand new fund in Spain this 12 months that goals to take a position €1 billion ($1.1 billion) in growth-stage tech startups.
