Freepik has been acquired, while Tradeinn exceeds €100 million in sales in just 5 months! Let’s go over the top stories happening in the startup universe this month.
Malaga-based Freepik, bank of images and visual resources on the internet, has been acquired by EQT. The Swedish fund has bought the majority stake in a transaction in which it has been valued at more than €200 million.
Girona-based Tradeinn, specialized in clothing and equipment for practicing different sports, has exceeded one hundred million euros in sales in the first five months of the year. The company thus maintains its objective for 2020 despite the coronavirus and plans to close the year with 250 million euros of turnover. In 2019, the company billed 188 million euros.
Itnig News
After three long months, we finally reopened the Itnig Coffice and coworking doors!
🎧. Bernat Farrero on En.Digital Podcast
📺. MasterClass de Bernat Farrero – BMF Business School
📺 Qonto, the French neobank, has raised more than $150M and has been in the Spanish Market for a year now. To celebrate their first anniversary in Spain, we interviewed Country Manager Carles Marcos i Guàrdia to know more about the startup’s journey and future initiatives.
Startup Inside Stories Podcast
This month, we had very interesting guests and topics on Itnig’s weekly podcast.
- Episode 142: Bloobirds with Javier Darriba
Barcelona-based Bloobirds closed a €3M funding round and Bernat Farrero and Jordi Romero have a chat with Javier Darriba, CEO and cofounder. Javier explains how the platform works, and how it is to close a funding round in the midst of a pandemic. We talked about Salesforce, Hubspot, Zendesk, and UserZoom, a project also co-founded by Javier, which has raised more than $36M. “We can win battles in Europe, but the war is won in the US,” speaking of UserZoom. He explains his exit from the project and how the present and future of Bloobirds looks like.
- Episode 143: B2B Sales with Javier Llorden
Can a sales team sell anything? Bernat Farrero and Jordi Romero invite Javier Llorden to ask him everything about B2B sales. Javier is an expert with a career dedicated to sales and, above all, he is an expert in managing and knowing how to scale a sales team.
- Episode 144: Tiko, How to Scale an Instant Buyer with Ana Villanueva
We’re living interesting times for the real estate industry and so we invited Ana Villanueva, CEO and co-founder of Tiko, an iBuyer that buys houses making the whole process faster than the traditional real estate agency. Ana explains how it works, where the business is, how it has raised more than $51 million, and how debt financing works. With COVID19 and digitalization, we also talk about the future of real estate.
- Episode 145: Same Day Delivery with Kubbo
We invited Victor García and Eric Fernandez, the founders of Kubbo, one of the startups in which we have invested through the Itnig Fund. Eric and Victor came to our “Pitch to Investors” event and we decided to invest in their vision. Kubbo is a distributed logistics company, that offers small businesses the opportunity to provide same-day delivery to their customers.
- Episode 146: Polaroo with Marc Rovira
We invited Marc Rovira, CEO and cofounder of Polaroo, a new marketplace to contract, manage and pay for home services. Polaroo aims to change the way we deal with our utility services, making it easier. Marc also opens up about his experience as an entrepreneur with investors and why you shouldn’t give up until you’ve visited at least 200 to get funding. We also talk about marketplaces and how Polaroo raised their last funding round.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel.
June Startup News & Updates
Other than Freepik or Tradeinn bringing good news for the Spanish startup ecosystem, there are a lot of other things happening:
Despite suffering a 75% drop in revenues around mid-March, Uber’s competitor Bolt has raised 100 million euros from Naya Capital, reaching a valuation of €1.7 billion. The new funding will go to its main business and newer services like scooters and food delivery.
Mark Zuckerberg expects more than 50% of Facebook’s 48,000 employees to work remotely within 10 years. He also added that those who choose to move to other places in the United States or elsewhere will receive a payment based on where they live. Still, questions about whether it’s fair to pay employees based on their location are sure to grow as more outfits adopt remote-work policies.
It’s been a topic of interest whether this pandemic crisis will be the birth of the next unicorns. Pascal Cagni, former EMEA head of Apple, runs C4 Ventures, which has launched a second fund at €80 million. With a 5 unicorn track record, the VC firm is looking for the next Covid unicorns. Speaking of which, according to a survey by Station F, 94% of startups are going to survive the next six months, good news isn’t it?
May has reactivated investment in startups with 70.89 million euros invested in a total of 23 public operations (Spain). The month reached the second-highest figure of the year after the month of February with €137M of investment and places the accumulated investment for 2020 above 300 million euros.
2019 was a year with a list of unicorns finally going public. Slack, Lyft, and Uber all made their public debuts. Airbnb was supposed to go on the list this year but, with COVID-19, the tech IPO market basically stopped. Now that things have started moving again, Crunchbase shared a new list of few venture-backed companies that have gone public.
EuropeanStartups.co is the data platform curating all European startup data in one place with the aim of facilitating informed conversation and collaboration across the continent’s different ecosystems. Read about how Europe can dominate the next decade of tech.
In other news, in an effort to limit the entry of immigrants into the country, Donald Trump decided to suspend new work visas and barred hundreds of thousands of foreigners from seeking employment in the US. European startup founders, investors and chief executives had a simple message to all those affected: come to Europe instead. Seedtable provided this amazing list of 40+ European visas for tech founders and employees including a path to citizenship for every country.
On a more positive note, it’s been a unicorn week🦄 Ireland earned its second unicorn with performance management platform Workhuman reaching a $1.2 billion valuation. Meanwhile, British used-car startup Cazoo also reaches unicorn status at a $1bn+ valuation and an extra $31M funding.
New Funding for Startups
- Dutch VC firmhenQ has launched a fourth fund of €70 million for pre-seed to Series A rounds in European B2B software companies.
- BCN – Bloobirds raised €3M
- BCN – Belvo raises $10M
- Denmark – Podimo scores €15M to develop a curated podcast platform that pays content creators
- France – Aircall raises $65M in Series C funding
- Switzerland – Scandit lands $80M in Series C
- Germany – Medwing has secured €28M in a Series B round
- Italy – Milkman gets €25M
- Amsterdam – Otrium snags €24M
- Israel – Nanox expands series B to $51M
- Valencia – Zeleros, hyperloop company, closed a €7M funding round
- London – Decibel secures $40 million Series B
- Switzerland – Appway raises $37M
- France – Saagie has announced a £22.3m fundraising round
- Switzerland – Tink takes funding from PayPal (again)
- Berlin – Vara raises €6.5M for AI breast cancer screening software
- Paris – Alkemics raises €21M
- Madrid – Ontruck secures €17M for its digital freight platform
- Hamburg – Bepro raises €8.8M to expand its football tech platform
- London – Hyris closes Series A round for its food safety and COVID-19 surface testing kits
- France – Rainbow raises €1 million to launch two new brands
- Flying taxi company Lilium got $35M from Baillie Gifford, known for backing disruptors like Tesla, SpaceX, Airbnb, and Spotify.
- Barcelona- Oxolife raised €5M led by Inveready
- Barcelona + NY – Onna raises $27M Series B
- Stockholm – Stillfront lands €114 million to expand its global group of gaming studios
- Munich – Kaia Health secures $26 million in Series B funding
- San Sebastian – CounterCraft raises $5 million for software that dupes attackers and gathers counterintelligence
- Helsinki – Swappie raises €35.8 million to bring the circular smartphone economy to the masses
- Dublin – same-day grocery delivery startup Buymie raises €5.8 million
- Berlin – Homeday snaps up €40M for its hybrid brokerage solutions
- London – SLAMcore gets $5 million to bring spatial awareness to robots and drones
- Finland – IQM secures €17.5M
- Spain – Colvin raises €14million
- London – Hopin raises a $40M Series A led by IVP.
- Berlin – Rasa secures $26 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others for open-source chatbot software
- Stuttgart – Smark lands €3.1M to boost its automated food shopping services
- France – ubble completes €10 million seed funding round
- Vienna – GoStudent raises €8.3M to take its affordable online school across Europe
- Budapest – AImotive raises $20M to become Europe’s ‘largest automated driving company’
- London – Connect Ventures, focused on seed-stage investments, has announced a new $80 million fund to support product-led European founders.
Random Tech News
- SpaceX’s first crewed spacecraft successfully docks with the ISS.
- Amazon is in advanced talks to buy Zoox in a move that would expand the e-commerce giant’s reach in autonomous-vehicle technology.
- What Shopify and Amazon can learn from Mimetic Theory.
- First public trial of ‘self-driving’ scooters launches in the US.
- Walmart says it will discontinue Jet, which it acquired for $3B in 2016.
- Sony will show off the first PlayStation 5 games on June 4th.
- All-electric Cessna makes maiden flight.
- Bonus: Try to dock into the ISS
- A new dashboard for Tinybird Analytics.
- Google will rank webpages based on Web Vitals, but not in 2020.
- TikTok was the most downloaded app in Q1, 2020. It’s a great time for brands to spend on TikTok, but will they?
- No end-to-end encryption for free Zoom users so company can work with law enforcement.
- Software Engineering within SpaceX.
- USB-C is still a mess.
- Tesla will develop a new 12-seater electric van for Boring Company airport tunnel.
- DeepFaceDrawing generates photorealistic portraits from freehand sketches.
- Zoom and Tesla have grown faster than any other NASDAQ 100 stock this year.
- Apple adds anonymous symptom and health info sharing to its COVID-19 app and website
- StopCovid, the app for tracking the spread of coronavirus has been installed on more than 1m phones despite being launched just 2 weeks ago.
- Someone paid $2.6 million in fees to move $134 worth of crypto.
- Who should own the copyright of AI-generated art?
- Babylon Health admits GP app suffered a data breach.
- SpaceX launches 58 more Starlink satellites.
- You can help a Mars Rover’s AI learn to tell rocks from dirt.
- Apple reveals schedule for ‘biggest ever’ WWDC.
- And finally…here’s Sony’s PlayStation 5.
- WhatsApp finally launches payments, starting in Brazil
- Plagued by security woes, Zoom promises end-to-end encryption starting in July.
- EU opens Apple antitrust investigations into App Store and Apple Pay practices.
- Rumor: Apple working on foldable iPhone with separate but ‘seamless’ screens.
- Google quietly launches an AI-powered Pinterest rival named Keen.
- How quantum computers could make future humans immortal and its first intuitive programming language.
- SpaceX applies to offer high-speed internet service to Canadians.
- GitHub plans to replace racially insensitive terms like ‘master’ and ‘whitelist’.
- 20-year-old Robinhood customer dies by suicide after seeing a $730,000 negative balance.
- Zuckerberg loses $7B as firms boycott Facebook Ads.
- Watching movies in ‘Fortnite’ is more fun than a theater.
- Luckin Coffee’s board is forcing out its chairman (and viceversa).
- Olympus quits camera business after 84 years.
- Microsoft Stores are closing forever.
- Amazon to acquire autonomous driving startup Zoox.
- Craig Federighi confirms Apple Silicon Macs will not support booting other OS.
- iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents every few keystrokes.
- BONUS: A visual introduction to probability and statistics.
- BONUS 2: A list of AI educational resources curated by DeepMind Scientists.
June was a good month! Freepik being acquired, while Tradeinn exceeds €100 million in sales in just 5 months are great news for the ecosystem.
At Itnig, we write a weekly newsletter where we keep our community updated on everything related to startups, tech news, fundings, and we share our weekly podcast!
Subscribe and keep up with the startup universe, or feel free to come back for more startup news of the month here!