The Kibo Ventures 2020 Year in Review

2020 is definitely a year we will all forever remember for many different reasons.

In the case of Kibo Ventures, we have been incredibly fortunate to safely navigate the Covid-19 pandemic while witnessing very intense activity in our portfolio and launching the third generation of our funds. We wanted, however, to express our solidarity with all those affected by the sanitary and economic drama, and are determined to help overcome it and keep hope (we actually take our Kibo name from one of the Kilimanjaro peaks and from the Japanese “ki-bou”, which means “filled with hope”).

A) Very Robust Portfolio Performance

Solid performance and fundamentals have allowed many portfolio companies to raise additional capital in the midst of Covid-19. More than $750m in growth rounds from Tier 1 financial and strategic investors over the last twelve months is a very impressive figure for our young portfolio (5 of the 6 largest rounds in companies with Spanish or Portuguese links are Kibo Ventures’ investments).

This figure adds to other very relevant metrics of our Fund II (launched Sep’16 and featured in this post):
- 91% of portfolio companies have raised additional funding following Kibo Ventures’ initial investment;
- 55% of portfolio companies have so far raised growth rounds (ie Series B+) or exited;
- 2% loss ratio, so far

According to Dealroom.co, European top quartile VCs achieve a 40% conversion to Series A (12% in Spain) — in this context, our figures gain even more prominence.

Feb’20 — Flywire

Flywire, a vertical payments company headquartered in Boston (US),and with main engineering offices in Valencia (Spain), raised a $120m Series E led by Goldman Sachs, with participation from Tiger Management (which adds to an impressive list of investors including Spark Capital, Bain Capital, F-Prime, Temasek, QED and Accel) With this round, Flywire, one of largest investments in Fund I, has entered the exclusive list of fintech unicorns.

Mike Massaro, Flywire’s CEO, has expanded the business from a pure payments company to also building software to help process payments (which makes it both a SaaS operator and a transactions platform), with a focus on the education, health care and travel industry verticals. Flywire moves billions of dollars across 200+ countries and 150 currencies, has 500+ employees and revenues of $100m+.

Mar’20 — Mediasmart

Mediasmart was one of the first programmatic mobile ad platforms in Europe where Kibo Ventures was a founding investor in 2012, a rare case for us, and helped define the company’s strategy and hired its CEO Noelia Amoedo. Noelia is a terrific startup CEO, grew the team and product, and was instrumental in selling the company right before the pandemic broke out to Affle, publicly traded Asian ad-tech player. Mediasmart provided Affle with differentiated assets in incremental traffic attribution and measurement of footfall traffic to retailers from mobile campaigns as well as a leading position in key European markets.

May’20 — Definedcrowd

Founded by Daniela Braga (one of our 10 women founders, 20% of Kibo Ventures’ portfolio), DefinedCrowd is the trusted AI data partner, offering an overarching infrastructure of solutions focused on making AI smarter. By combining the human knowledge of a 300.000+ worldwide crowd and machine learning to create a natural interaction between people and machines towards a smarter future, DefinedCrowd delivers high-quality training data at scale and at record speed.

Headquartered in Seattle (US), with main engineering offices in Lisbon and Porto (Portugal), raised a close to $60m Series B, led by Evolution Equity Partners and Kibo Ventures, which included participation from Hermes GPE, Balderton and Semapa Next.

Sep’20 — Devo

Devo, the cloud-native data analytics and cybersecurity company founded by Pedro Castillo (currently CTO), announced a $60m Series D. The round was led by Canadian VC firm Georgian, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners and Insight Partners. It also welcomed former leader of IBM’s $2 billion security business unit, Marc van Zadelhoff, as the company’s new CEO. The company is headquartered in Boston, with a very large engineering team based in Madrid (Spain).

Their unique technology and the pace of execution will most likely turn Devo into the largest software company with Spanish roots.

Oct’20 — Exoticca

Together with events, retail or restaurants, the travel industry has been dramatically affected, and our portfolio company Exoticca has obviously suffered from the Covid pandemic.

Exoticca is an online travel agency that provides long-haul experiences all around the world and the crisis hit them strong: revenues completely crashed in March and April. CEO Pere Valles and the rest of the team reacted extremely fast, preparing and executing an action plan that allowed the company to overcome the situation, and toped up it’s 2019 Series B with €5m from new and existing investors.

Exoticca will emerge even stronger from the situation lived in 2020 and are confident that will consolidate as a leading player in the long-haul package travel business. Team has, once more, proven that product and execution are key assets, and that you can find enormous opportunities behind every crisis.

Oct’20— Vilynx

The company was acquired by one of the world’s leading tech giants, although terms were not publicly disclosed. Headquartered between San Francisco (US) and Barcelona (Spain), the team led by Juan Carlos Riveiro and Elisenda Bou built a self learning AI platform centered around video providing its service to large media clients in the US and Europe. Vilynx platform became fully multimodal including audio and NLP. Its world-class AI team will remain in Barcelona and is expected to grow significantly post-acquisition. This is a great milestone for the team and also for Barcelona as it builds its relevance as an AI hub in Europe.

Oct’20 — Bipi

Mobility has been one of Fund II’s core investment thesis.

Bipi, is a flexible Car-as-a-Service subscription marketplace. The $10.5m Series B was led by Toyota AI Ventures (first ever investment outside of North America) with participation from Adevinta (first ever investment in a Spanish startup), Atresmedia and existing investors Maniv Mobility, IDC Ventures and TA Ventures.

Hans Christ (CEO) and Alejandro Vigaray (COO) have managed to consistently attract top mobility investors (firstly Maniv Mobility, making Bipi their first European investment and more recently Toyota AI Ventures), to help Bipi become the leading European player.

The company will soon announce an extension to the Series B.

Oct’20 & Jan’21 — Clarity AI

We first backed entrepreneur Rebeca Minguela in 2012 when she launched Blink Booking, a company acquired by Groupon in 2013. We backed her again when she launched Clarity AI.

Clarity AI, headquartered in New York (US) with offices in London (UK) and Madrid (Spain), is a global data science and technology platform that uses machine learning and big data to deliver environmental and social data that empowers investors to measure the impact of their portfolios. Clarity AI’s platform analyzes more than 30,000 companies, 200,000 funds and 400 countries and local governments, delivering data, analytics and software applications for investment and corporate research and reporting.

The company closed a $15m round in Oct’20 led by Deutsche Börse, with participation from Kibo Ventures, Mundi Ventures, Seaya Ventures and Founders Fund. In less than 3 months and in record time, Clarity Ai has closed another relevant round led by Blackrock.

We are confident Clarity AI will achieve its mission and vision of bringing impact to markets, becoming the gold standard platform for impact and sustainability assessment.

Nov’20 — Tier

Tier is another testament to our mobility investment thesis. Based in Berlin (Germany), Tier has experienced exponential growth and is a true example of flawless execution. Lawrence Leuschner, Tier’s CEO, has always believed in a vision to change mobility for good and true to his mission, made Tier the first micro-mobility company to be fully climate-neutral. Tier’s commitment to being
climate-neutral does not only benefit the environment but also ensures a liveable and sustainable future. Tier is a true pioneer in this space adopting a multimodal platform to address different mobility needs.

The company annouced a $250m Series C led by Softbank.

Nov’20 — Paack

E-commerce has boomed during the pandemic. Paack, headquartered in Barcelona (Spain), currently operates in 4 countries and offers last-mile delivery services to retailers with its owned dedicated network of distribution centres and delivery stations. Fernando Benito, founder & CEO, has expanded the company to over 3,000 professional drivers, 100+ international clients, 4.8/5 consumer satisfaction, and 96% success rate at first delivery attempt.

Paack secured a $53 million Series C funding round led by Bregal Milestone, with participation from other existing investors like Unbound, RPS Ventures, Rider Global, and Fuse Ventures.

Dec’20 — JobandTalent

JobandTalent, a Workforce-as-a-Service managed marketplace, is our largest investment in Fund I. Since we first invested in the company in late 2012, we never cease to be impressed by co-founders’ Juan Urdiales and Felipe Navío ability to execute.

Their recent $108m Series C1 round led by Infravia Growth with participation from existing investors Atomico, Seek, DN Capital and Kibo Ventures, represents the second largest amount raised by any Spanish company in 2020.

More than 80,000 workers have used its platform to secure temp gigs in the last year across the seven markets where it operates in Europe and LatAm (Spain, UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Mexico and Colombia); while 750+ employers are signed up to recurrently manage a large part of their workforce.

We have no doubt JobandTalent will become the global category leader.

All in all, Kibo Ventures’ portfolio companies top the list of the 25 largest rounds in Spain during 2020 (#2, #3, #4, #5 including JobandTalent, which is not listed in the graph below and a total of 6 in the top 25), as well as the #1 round in a Portuguese startup (DefinedCrowd).

B) Teams rising to the pandemic challenge

Our portfolio companies have not only been able to raise financing rounds during this difficult year, they have given us an incredible lesson in resilience and generosity.

Teams reacted fast in March, designed contingency plans, adapted runway and burn-rates, thought about what their teams would need to work remotely and safely and went out of their way to see what they could do to help the community.

We are incredibly proud of each of our portfolio teams for rising to the challenge. We know how they reacted and the measures they took will make them stronger.

We would like to especially acknowledge a few of them. Odilo for opening its learning platform to all schools during the pandemic, directly impacting +3 million students, their teachers and families. Stoyo for launching its campaign #putyourmoneywhereyourheartis to help promote local businesses with Facebook ads. Bipi for offering 20% of their car fleet to hospital staff to go to work safely during the pandemic. Carto for launching an app together with Telefónica in record time for users to monitor their symptoms and get information on what to do. Tier for sharing up to 5000 free rides per day for people working in system- critical jobs — the silent heroes. JobandTalent collaborated with the Spanish Ministry of Public Health to create a webapp in 3 weeks to manage and control a massive Covid-testing project, to determine infection rates across different regions. It also formed a covid-expert committee to provide free-consultation around health and safety measures for its 80,000+ workers during the pandemic.

We went out of our way to be there for our companies too. We did a full analysis of how Covid would impact our portfolio and how we could best help and we provided monthly updates to our LPs.

We reached out fast, connected teams, looked at all financing options and government aid packages, shared ideas and we gave time to help the community at large. We launched a program to help women entrepreneurs vcs4women.com bringing together more than 20 women investors and we took part in the #help4startup program offering our time to entrepreneurs on how to best get immediate aid.

We are in the business of backing stellar teams, these exceptionally testing times have given us the opportunity to see them rising to the challenge. Thank you for your tireless work.

C) Kibo Ventures Fund III

And with 2020, came #3.

Special thanks to all investors (both existing and new) that have trusted us and to the entire Kibo Ventures’ team for an incredible work in very uncertain and difficult times.

We launched our third generation of funds with a first close of Fund III in Sep’20 — our Partner Sonia wrote a detailed piece outlining the investment strategy, which is very consistent with that of Fund II.

We expect to complete a second close during Q1'21, which should bring us close to our €100m target. This and more news around team (new additions, promotions) and branding to be announced shortly.

It’s been a long post, so thank you for making it this far :)