Barcelona Startup News April 10, 2017

Hello and happy Monday! We hope you had a great weekend and are ready to crush on this short holiday week!

Last week, we held a fantastic panel on digital marketing featuring the Marketing Directors from Kantox, DEXMA, and Talent Clue. In case you missed it, you can watch the recap video here.

If you’re interested in pitching your startup in front of investors and innovators at Sonar 2017 – you better hurry:

Applications for Startup Garden Pitch Contest at Sonar+d close on April 17th.

Next week, 4YFN is cohosting the annual Facebook developer conference and wants to invite you to attend an F8 Meetup in Barcelona. Click here to register for the the April 18th event.

Ok, let’s take a look at the latest Barcelona startup news from this week: 

THIS WEEK’S HIGHLIGHTS:

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Startup & Investment News

• Virtualization technology startup NFWare closed a $2M investment round
• Car parking reservation platform Parclick raised €2M to accelerate growth strategy
• Barcelona-based SocialDiabetes received €1,6M from the EU for internationalization
• eSports startup GamersWalk closed a €600k investment round to get ready for growth
• Home service app Jobin secured a €320k investment round to conquer €800M market
• Barcelona startup Hu:toma raised €300k to build API ecosystem around its technology
• Barcelona’s Trea Capital Partners closed its first fund at €70M, to invest in Spanish SMEs
• Crowdfunding platform La Bolsa Social invested over €1M in social projects already
• Catalan booking platform for beauty services, Treatwell, grew bookings by 341% in Q1
• Barcelona has a new investment fund: Bloomium, to invest a total of €1,2M in 12 firms
• Barcelona’s GPS locator startup Alpify extended its tracking service to cities & families
• Ex-director of Burberry Spain left company to launch Barcelona fintech startup InbestMe
• Amidst talks of second investment round, CEO of Barcelona firm Eelp left the company

Tech News

• Barcelona’s digital ecosystem moved a total amount of €1,200M in 2016
• Ecommerce giant Amazon to open 4th logistic center in Catalonia, to create 650 jobs
• Amazon reaches new deal with Correos Express, firm to deliver 150.000 parcels a day
• Following an inspection Amazon has to pay €2,2M in fines to Spanish tax agency
• Uber doubled revenues in Spain to reach €1,2M in 2015, but is still miles behind Cabify
• Spain’s government is set to increase R&D spending by 4,1% to €6.029M for this year
• But is it really good news? Spain’s R&D spending will still just make up 0,54% of GDP
• The truth about junior IT engineers and progammers in Spain 
• President of BBVA says that they want to become “the Amazon or Netflix of banking”
• Ex-Wayra director Amartino to become Microsoft’s director for startups in LATAM
• Amazon, El Corte Ingles & Zara are the top 3 ecommerce firms in Spain in revenue
• Catalonia’s CaixaBank crowned ‘Model Bank of the Year’ for its digital transformation
• IoT spending in Spain is expected to grow from €13,5B in 2017 to €23B in 2020

Good Reads

• GOOD READ #1: How Kantox, DEXMA & Talent Clue nail digital marketing for startups
• GOOD READ #2: Why Americans Don’t Understand The European Startup Scene
• GOOD READ #3: Why hiring for an early stage startup is hard
• GOOD READ #4: Learning the Design to Code process

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GREAT EVENTS THIS WEEK

• Tue, 11 Apr @ 19:30: Slow websites are not fun
• Wed, 12 Apr @ 18:30: Els Robots a la nova era digital
• Wed, 12 Apr @ 19:00: Iniciador Barcelona: WySee, Ad-Pure, CorreYvuela
• Thu, 13 Apr @ 19:00: ¡Scaling está de moda!

See the full Event Calendar here

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STARTUP JOBS IN BARCELONA

Barcelona startup news April 10, 2017 cover all the latest stories about Barcelona’s Tech & Startup scene from April 4th until April 10th, 2017.