A list of 109 international Venture Capital firms that have invested in Spanish startups
Activity from international Venture Capital firms in the Spanish tech market almost follows a Pareto distribution: in 2017, rounds led by foreign VCs accounted for just 17% of all investments closed by Spanish startups. However, these rounds represented almost 80% of the total investment volume in our country.
This is not very surprising for a variety of facts, two of the most important being that Spanish startups tend to have lower valuations than their counterparts in other European markets (which means lower prices for international VCs to pay) and that there’s very little Series A/B/C capital in Spain, as most local funds are still primarily focused on pre-seed and seed deals.
(For this analysis, I’m going to consider seed rounds as those lower than €3 million, to be consistent with Dealroom’s very interesting seed-to-series-a report.)
As a consequence of the above and as more local startups mature into later stages, in the past few years we’ve seen a significant increase in the number of foreign VCs investing in Spain. These VCs are not only adding fuel to the (nice) fire at the Series A or B stages, but also investing earlier, sometimes even in seed companies (LocalGlobe and Point Nine Capital come to mind).
At K Fund, we believe that one of the roles we’re trying to fulfill as investors is that of helping our portfolio companies get to Series A and raise funding from some of Europe’s top VCs. That’s why we spend a lot of our time building relationships with investors in London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm or in the US.
Having said that, we don’t want to stop here, and we also want to help the ecosystem as a whole to understand which international VCs are active in Spain (we’ve done the same with local investors), what companies they’ve invested in and what types of rounds they tend to lead.
That’s why we’ve put together the following table, which includes the names and activity of 109 foreign VCs and additional details that might help other Spanish founders understand who’s active in the local market and what doors to knock on.
(In the Seed, Series A and Series B+ fields we’re not only taking into account first investments by these firms, but also follow-on activity based on public sources. As an example, if we believe that X fund has not only invested in the seed round of company Y but also in its Series A/B, we’ll show that in the appropriate cell in the table.)
As you might have guessed, these VCs often come to board meetings in Madrid, Barcelona or Valencia, establish and grow relationships with local VCs to follow their portfolio, meet business angels who have access to early stage deals and, of course, take some time to meet new companies and founders. That might be you, and if we can help you find those international investors that could help you down the line with your Series A, B or C round, we’re happy to do so.
If you want an easier way to navigate the table, you can use this link. And to understand even better the connections between these VCs, check this tweet from our portfolio company Graphext.
