First of all, we’re excited to announce a new startup joining the Itnig Fund portfolio: Payflow, a new fintech that allows employees to collect the fraction of their salary that they have already worked instantly and through a mobile application whenever they want. The startup was founded in February 2020 and has already closed a €1.6M round with the participation of Rocket Internet, Lanai Partners, Itnig, Abac Nest, Michael Benabou, and Clement Benoit, among others.
– Curious about why and how Itnig invests in new startups?
Let’s also talk about TravelPerk’s acquisition of Albatross, an early-stage API startup that offers information on post-COVID travel restrictions and local guidelines to travel applications. Travelperk visited Itnig podcast back in March 2019, Bernat and Jordi interview Javier Suárez, founder and CPO to learn about the company’s first 3 years. Albatross’s technology and data will be incorporated into TravelCare, TravelPerk’s existing travel risk management offering.
Barcelona-based fintech Goin has closed a €5 million round led by Anthemis, recognized British fintech-specialized fund, K Fund, and Encomenda Smart Capital. Goin allows users to save and invest, making it easier for people to achieve their financial goals. Check out our podcast episode with CEO and cofounder David Riudor!
📈Speaking of powerful teams, EU-Startups posted a list of 10 Barcelona-based startups that continue to grow fast despite the current crisis and we’re proud and want to congratulate our friends from Factorial and Payflow for being included!👏🏻
In the startup world, it seems that the goal is to have a unicorn, a company whose valuation has exceeded $1 billion. The pandemic crisis has made the entrepreneurial ecosystem begin to focus on another animal: the camel. Why? It’s simple: camels are able to survive droughts. Camels are resilient startups that can overcome extreme situations.
Startup Inside Stories Podcast
This month, we had very interesting guests and topics on Itnig’s weekly podcast.
- 147: Technology and patents valued at more than €60M, Lleida.net and Sisco Sapena
Bernat Farrero and Juan Rodríguez interview Sisco Sapena, an Internet pioneer in Spain and founder and president of Lleida.Net, a 25-year-old technology startup, offering solutions and services for the certification and security of electronic mail, SMS and electronic documents. Sisco also explains what it means to be a publicly-traded company and is valued at close to 60 million.
- 148: Product makers and their mysteries
Bernat Farrero talks to three digital product leaders, Ignasi Buch (Typeform), Kike Alonso (Tuenti, Carto, Microsoft and Factorial) and César Miguelañez (Factorial). Product people adopt all kinds of names, and it is a role that has gradually become a key role in any digital company.
They talk about how to identify a good or bad person in a product. Where do product people come from? What studies do they have? What does their day-to-day consist of? Where do they get ideas from? How do they measure their productivity? How are product teams structured? What is Product-led growth?
- 149: Project Lobster with Oscar Valledor
Oscar Valledor, the young founder and CEO of Project Lobster, visits the podcast. Project Lobster is a local, independent brand of sunglasses and prescription glasses with the goal to revolutionize the optics industry and improve the consumer experience when. Oscar started the project in his last year of college, and now is an up and running business with 3 physical stores in Spain and a large volume of online consumers.
- 150: Payflow And The Liquid Salary
We invited Payflow, the last startup in which Itnig has invested, to tell their story on our podcast. This new fintech allows employees to collect the fraction of their salary that they have already worked instantly through the app whenever they want. The startup, born in the middle of the pandemic, has recently closed a €1.6M round!
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July Startup News & Updates
In other news, Karma Kitchen, the London-based kitchen space startup, has raised more than €277M in a Series A funding round. Cofounder Eccie Newton, who currently operates one kitchen site, has a five-person team and had initially set out to raise £3m. Wait… what?! “People think it’s a typo,” laughs Newton, “It’s not a typo.” Within five years, Karma Kitchen hopes to be providing thousands of food businesses — from restaurants to caterers to meal kit companies — with flexible kitchen space.
Online marketplaces have played a central role in our modern economy, as seen by the rise of companies such as Airbnb, Amazon, or DeliveryHero. Nowadays, anyone can get access to almost anything in just a few clicks. Take a look at the European B2B Marketplace Landscape.
After GrubHub being acquired by JustEat-Takeaway, the food delivery sector continues with its consolidation process. Another big negotiation between Uber and food delivery app Postmates is in the oven. The agreement, yet to be confirmed to be official, contemplates a disbursement of 2,320 million euros. The operation would boost the activity of Uber Eats, the group’s delivery branch, and thus offset the collapse suffered by the pandemic crisis.
⚠️Another acquisition alert: Asian e-commerce giant Alibaba negotiating the acquisition of Glovo, the Catalan delivery startup. Both companies have already maintained the first approach in this regard. It wouldn’t be the first time that Glovo, valued at more than $ 1 billion is targeted for sale. Just a year ago, Uber and Deliveroo were in contact with the Barcelona-based company with the aim of taking over. Although Glovo’s valuation exceeded those 1,000 million in 2019, becoming the second Spanish unicorn, the startup has been dragging losses for several years: it closed 2018 with a negative result of 45.7 million euros and a turnover of 52.3 million. Is this worth it for Amazon’s competitor Alibaba?
💰Nauta Capital, one of Europe’s largest B2B-focused VCs, investing in startups at seed and Series A, is launching its fifth fund with €120 million to back early-stage European B2B startups. With offices in London, Barcelona, and Munich, the firm has led investments in more than 50 companies, which include Brandwatch, digital consumer intelligence company with $100 million ARR; Onna, a knowledge integration platform that just raised €25M; and PromoteIQ, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2019, among others.
K Fund has also launched a new €70 million fund. The firm looks for Spanish startups with an international outlook, as the plan is to invest from €200,000 to €2 million, writing first checks in 25-30 companies. A portion of the fund will also be set aside for follow-on funding for the most promising of its portfolio, with a mix of B2B and B2C companies across a wide variety of sectors, including travel, fintech, insurtech, and others.
SaaStr founder, Jason Lemkin, wrote about how these unprecedented times are the best of times for SaaS VCs. Why? He finds two related reasons:
1. The stock market for public SaaS and Cloud companies is at an all-time high. 2. In many categories of SaaS, usage is way way up since March 15. Work from Home has been accelerated by a decade. Digital transformation by 5 years. Read the full post.
Sifted also took the opportunity to give more perspectives on the subject asking: Are SaaS startups kings of the coronavirus crisis?
💰 Early-stage venture capital firm CRV has closed a $600 million new fund. According to CRV, the fund was completely raised over 19 days of virtual meetings during the pandemic. The company has most recently invested in companies likeFactorial, Fauna, and Postman. Some of its most notable exits are Twitter and Zendesk’s IPOs.
New funding for startups
- Valencia – Voicemod raises €7.1M to help gamers and creators change their voice in real-time
- Germany – SolarisBank raises €60 million
- Switzerland – Medtech CUTISS raises €18.72 million in Series B
- Brussels – Skipr scores €7 million for its B2B mobility-as-a-service solution
- Lithuania – Ziticity raises €2.2 million to revolutionize last-mile delivery
- Tallinn – Veriff lands €13.7 million to expand further internationally
- Paris – Okarito raises €2.1 million to manage post-COVID business trips for startups and SMEs
- Sweden – Oatly to raise $200 million in equity investment led by Blackstone Growth
- London – Moneybox secures €33 million
- London – Ravelin raises £16.4 million for enterprise-scale fraud detection services
- Stockholm – Voi achieves profitability and secures €26.3 million additional funding
- London – Drover secures €22.6 million to scale its ‘car-as-a-service’
- Berlin – Meditopia secures $15M Series A co-led by Creandum and Highland
- UK – Fintech startup Lanistar raises £15 million
- Munich – Userlane scores €10M for the global expansion of its digital adoption software platform
- Barcelona – motorbike sharing company Yego raised €7.5 million
- Germany –LeanIX closed $80 million in Series D funding
- Switzerland – food-tech startup Yamo raises €10.1M in Series A funding.
- Finland – Traplight raises $9M round led by EQT
- The UK – PQShield raises £5.5m
- Germany – 2trde raises €2.5 million in seed funding
- Finland – MariaDB raises $25m to expand SkySQL cloud database
- Netherlands – VarmX raises € 32 million series B financing
- Madrid – biotech Atrys Health raised €35 million
- Cartagena (Spain) – Odilo raises €8.7M
- Valencia – medtech startup QUIBIM scores €8 million for AI platform that detects diseases, including COVID-19
- Madrid – Ironhack raises €1.4M
- London – Polymateria raises £15M for new plastics that automatically biodegrade and leave no trace
- Munich – Scalable Capital raises €50 million Series D
- Tel Aviv – Uber rival Gett raises $100 million as it pivots toward the business travel market
- The Netherlands – PlantLab scoops up €20M funding
- Revolut extends Series D round to $580 million with $80 million in new funding
- BONUS: Life Science Funding Spikes In 2020
Random tech news 
- Rocket Lab launch fails during the rocket’s second stage burn.
- Tesla overtakes Toyota to become the world’s most valuable carmaker.
- Google acquires North.
- LinkedIn says its extra intense clipboard snooping in iOS is a bug.
- Naughty Dog condemns harassment as The Last of Us 2 developers face death threats.
- Facebook admits to improperly giving user data to third-party developers, again.
- TransferWise to offer investment products but has ‘no plans’ to become a bank.
- Discord now has a $3.5B valuation and $100M for a sales pitch lighter on the gaming.
- Recruiting Is Poker – Not Chess.
- Apple supplier Foxconn to invest $1 billion in India.
- Content creators react to possible US ban on TikTok.
- Ubisoft CCO Serge Hascoet resigns in wake of sweeping allegations.
- What does 1GB of mobile data cost in every country?
- The world is drinking less coffee while office workers stay home.
- 300 drones lit up the night sky in Seoul.
- Elon Musk sets update on brain-computer interface company Neuralink for August 28.
- Coinbase reportedly prepping to go public, and the good times are back!
- A copy of Super Mario Bros. for the original Nintendo just sold for a record $114,000.
- LEGO and Nintendo have joined forces to offer us some light relief and nostalgia with the Nintendo Entertainment System LEGO kit.
- Zoom announces a touchscreen device for remote workers.
- A hacker used Twitter’s own ‘admin’ tool to spread cryptocurrency scam and swipe personal data. And no, you couldn’t have made more money than the hacker.
- Instagram confirms its TikTok rival, Reels, will launch in the US in early August.
- Translate ancient hieroglyphs with Google’s new AI-powered tool.
- How to know if your company culture is broken.
- The US military is using online gaming to recruit teens.
- Russian cyberops are targeting COVID-19 vaccine R&D, intelligence agencies warn.
- Scientists achieve first complete assembly of human Xchromosome.
Tinder reported its busiest day to date, ringing in more than 3bn swipes globally. - Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack.
- Facebook ignored racial bias research, employees say.
- Slack files EU competition complaint against Microsoft.
- Space Force debuts official logo and motto.
- Pentagon’s U.F.O. unit to disclose some of its findings to the public.
- How to validate your startup idea quickly.
- I am a model and I know that artificial intelligence will eventually take my job.
- BONUS: SaaStr Summit Enterprise – The Future of Work
Subscribe and keep up with the startup universe, or feel free to come back for more startup news of the month here.
This is a compilation of all the weekly newsletters we sent during July. We keep our community updated on everything related to startups, tech news, fundings, and we share our weekly podcast!