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 goal 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.

As we speak, one other Spanish agency, All Iron Ventures, is rebranding. It’ll now be often known as Acurio Ventures and it’s closing its third fund of $166 million (€150 million). The fund will completely make ‘follow-on’ investments and won’t lead offers.

Beneath 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 bought 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 brand 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 beneath administration value 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 firms, handle follow-on funding reserves, and undertake divestments. 

“Within the final 12 months, we’re most likely been some of the energetic VCs in Europe, doing 20 investments,” he stated. “We imagine the market is on the level of turning and has arrived on the backside of valuations, and we’re benefiting from that. There might be a gradual restoration, so we wished 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 companies: “We do 50 firms per fund as an alternative of the everyday 20 […] We principally, each quarter, take a look at the portfolio and determine how a lot we comply with up.”

He stated the opposite huge 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 are able to exit in rounds, and we don’t have to attend till the top of the lifetime of the fund. So it’s a bit of bit totally different strategy than common VC in that sense,” he stated.

The agency has a staff of 12 individuals based mostly 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’s 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.

In accordance with 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 found Spain’s ecosystem to be in fourth place general 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 based mostly out of Madrid.

Plus, the European Funding Financial institution’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.