Globally Ambitious Startups in Spain
Let's get specific. Who are the innovative tech companies building right now in Spain? There are dozens of well funded venture backed companies solving myriad challenges. Spain is seeing the benefit of a 5x increase in venture funding over the past five years. These are a few that stand out to me in ambition, positive impact, and traction.
- Trucksters - Trucksters uses data/software to improve efficiency in long-haul trucking (analogous to Flexport and Uber). Trucking is both a significant source of global emissions, and also a cost center for global economy. Trucksters optimizes by using relays, powered by data and algorithms, creating faster transit times and lower cost. As with Flexport, a huge business can be built by layering data on top of existing transportation networks - while benefiting stakeholders along the way.
- Samara Energy - Samara simplifies the process for households to install solar energy systems, batteries and EV chargers, and provides them tools to manage their usage. Distributed generation of clean energy will allow us to transition from gas and coal, and build more resilient national grids. Residential solar installation is a huge opportunity for Spain, and the rest of Europe, to meet climate goals and lower energy costs. Samara benefits from these significant tailwinds, and social impact scales proportionately with revenue growth.
- Fence - Fence is building a SaaS platform to digitize asset based lending (analogous to Carta for cap tables). We saw the pain of setting up a new lending facility first hand at CircleUp - massive inefficiencies as documents go back and forth between borrowers, lenders, and lawyers. Post-close, monitoring covenants and payments remains manual throughout the industry. This friction means capital is more expensive for borrowers, and well established solutions that exist in larger markets, such as traunching and syndication, aren't even attempted. Like Carta, Fence is building a digitally native SaaS product to provide legibility to a massive offline market. The technology, which is already in use by an asset-backed debt facility, is also built on Ethereum, increasing transparency (and providing a real world use case for crypto).
- Qida - What I love about Qida is that they are building for an obvious, yet very difficult problem - how do we help more seniors age safely, with dignity, in their homes? Hard because it is an intensely personal purchase process for each customer, and a complex service organization to build. Qida is building technology to help the market operate efficiently and, as importantly, investing deeply in a brand and customer commitment focused on quality and care. The ethos of the brand fits the market challenge, developing a sustainable edge on others that would seek to follow them into this large, growing, global market. At scale, one can imagine the attractive margins of a software driven marketplace of quality in-home care on a global scale.
- Haddock - Haddock is another data play on top of 'real world' businesses, in this case restaurants. The app digitizes suppliers, invoices, tickets - all aspects of the restaurant business. What I like about the story is that the team emphasizes the control this gives to business owners - menu changes, supplier management, dynamic pricing. Haddock adoption increases the profitability of their customers through better, faster decision making from real-time data.
- Mitiga Solutions - Mitiga helps improve decision making through better data and analysis, similar to Haddock and Trucksters. Their market is climate adaptation. They build models to help customers such as insurers and real estate companies make better long term decisions based on a proprietary Climate Risk score. For this business, a significant concern is customer adoption. It is one thing to sell data which improves your P/L in the next week or month (like Haddock) and quite another to tell your customer their Climate Risk score over the next 50 years is a 73. Feedback loops and quality verification will be constant challenges in getting to scale. But, the market (massive global spending shifts over decades as a result of ever growing climate change impacts) and the team (spinout from the Spanish National Supercomputer Center) are compelling. If you squint, you could imagine a global FICO-like quasi-monopoly providing reliable high margin digital products to millions of customers, while also meaningfully helping the world avoid worse damage from climate impacts.
- Saturno Labs - Finally, I wanted to include Saturno though it isn't entirely clear where the lab will go. They are a 'factory of ideas' completing projects for clients, such as Amazon and the City of Madrid. They are shipping, and they have an explicit goal to boost local talent in Madrid, building a network of innovators to support their professional growth. CEO Nati Rodriquez deserves a follow on Twitter (here) as a leader in the Spanish ecosystem. Different from all the others above, yet also an important startup building in Spain.
I'm quite sure I've missed dozens of other companies. There is a lot of capital coming in, particularly at the early stage. These ambitious founders are building in Spain, but all of the companies above could grow naturally into other geographies - following a broader thesis that Madrid is a great place to locate a globally ambitious company.
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