Spain and Portugal are effervescent up within the European tech ecosystem, with loads of new startups and funding rounds being introduced within the two international locations. Barcelona-based Plus Partners lately launched with the purpose 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.
Today, one other Spanish agency, All Iron Ventures, is rebranding. It’ll now be referred to as 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.
Under 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 offered 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 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 price round €300 million.
Michelena instructed TechCrunch the follow-on fund will take fairness stakes of between 3% and 10%, as he feels it provides the agency better flexibility to entry corporations, handle follow-on funding reserves, and undertake divestments.
“In the last 12 months, we’re probably been one of the most active VCs in Europe, doing 20 investments,” he mentioned. “We believe the market is at the point of turning and has arrived at the bottom of valuations, and we are taking advantage of that. There will be a slow recovery, so we wanted 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 companies per fund instead of the typical 20 […] We basically, every quarter, look at the portfolio and decide how much we follow up.”
He mentioned the opposite massive benefit of this mannequin is it lets the agency do distributions to paid-in (DPI) earlier. DPI is without doubt one of the core monetary metrics that VC funds use to judge their funding efficiency.
“We can exit in rounds, and we don’t have to wait until the end of the life of the fund. So it’s a little bit different approach than regular VC in that sense,” he mentioned.
The agency has a group 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 is impressed by Juan de Acurio, one of many 12 sailors who returned to port from the expedition all over the world led by Magellan and Elcano 5 centuries in the past.
According to 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 Investment Bank’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.
