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Spain and Portugal are bubbling up in the European tech ecosystem, with plenty of new startups and funding rounds being announced in the two countries. Barcelona-based Plus Partners recently launched with the aim of closing a $30-$50 million million fund; Yellow is a new VC firm that launched with a €30 million fund; and Spanish VC Kfund raised $75 million.
Today, another Spanish firm, All Iron Ventures, is rebranding. It’ll now be known as Acurio Ventures and it is closing its third fund of $166 million (€150 million). The fund will exclusively make ‘follow-on’ investments and will not lead deals.
Under its previous moniker, launched in 2018, the firm had backed European tech startups including Seedtag, Jobandtalent, Lingokids, Preply, Refurbed and Lookiero. Acurio was co-founded by Ander Michelena, who sold his previous startup, Ticketbis, to eBay for €16.5 million in 2016.
LPs in the new fund include an unnamed U.S. university endowment, pension funds, corporates, some 35 family offices, an insurance company and tech executives.
The new fund has already made around 20 investments, and it will operate with a generalist thesis (not focusing on any particular sector), investing across the whole of Europe. The fund has assets under management worth around €300 million.
Michelena told TechCrunch the follow-on fund will take equity stakes of between 3% and 10%, as he feels it gives the firm greater flexibility to access companies, manage follow-on investment 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 said. “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 pointed out that the firm’s portfolio construction is different from other firms: “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 said the other big advantage of this model is it lets the firm do distributions to paid-in (DPI) earlier. DPI is one of the core financial metrics that VC funds use to evaluate their investment performance.
“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 said.
The firm has a team of 12 people based in Bilbao, Madrid, Barcelona and London. Its partners include Michelena, Diego Recondo, Hugo Mardomingo and Kate Cornell.
The firm is drawing on Basque origins for its new “Acurio Ventures” moniker: It is inspired by Juan de Acurio, one of the 12 sailors who returned to port from the expedition around the world led by Magellan and Elcano five centuries ago.
According to a Dealroom report on the Spanish tech ecosystem, the combined enterprise value of Spanish startups surpassed €100 billion in 2023. The report also found that venture investment in Spanish startups held up last year, with €2.2 billion raised across some 850 funding rounds.
The annual “State of European Tech” report for 2023 found Spain’s ecosystem to be in fourth place overall in Europe, with the highest number of startup fundings last year.
Earlier this year, Madrid-based VC firm Seaya closed Seaya Andromeda, an “Article 9” €300 million climate tech fund based out of Madrid.
Plus, the European Investment Bank’s venture capital arm also backed a new fund in Spain this year that aims to invest €1 billion ($1.1 billion) in growth-stage tech startups.
