One of our mottos at K Fund has always been to be super transparent and generous with our time and resources. 

Transparent with the way we work, the way we think, the terms and docs we use to close deals and in many other ways. And generous in the sense of sharing, for free, resources with the community at large that we believe can benefit the whole ecosystem, not just our portfolio companies and also other VC firms.

Ecosystem Insights is another step in that direction.

Since 2013 I’ve been manually tracking all publicly announced funding rounds raised by Spanish startups. I first started to do this in order to produce reports and articles on the health of the local ecosystem, but at K Fund we’ve realized that such a list of more than 1,800 rounds can be useful for more than just content.

There’s a lot of stuff we use this database for:

• To look for companies that we can introduce to our portfolio startups for business development purposes
• To find pre-seed companies that we could perhaps back at some point based on when they raised their last round of funding
• To understand what type of deals (stage, industry, etc) are international VCs participating in
• To see what other local VCs are investing in
• To find startup activity in your city or region, be it for HR purposes (changing jobs) or any other reason
  

The list of potential use cases is much longer than this and I’m sure people will come up with new ways to take advantage of the data available.

The database

Each row is a funding round that’s been publicly announced in the press. For each company/round, we try to include the following data:

• URL of the company
• City oh HQs
• Business model: main business model of the company
• Sector or industry: both ‘sector’ and ‘business model’ are approximations to describe the activity of a company. You’ll probably notice that some business models and/or sectors don’t really correspond to reality (especially in old deals), but we do our best with this and we’ll continue to iterate on it. On this topic, we’d like to highlight that in the list we’ve included biotech companies, because we think it’s been a category where Spain has punched above its weight for several years and we’d like to acknowledge it.
• Size of the round
• Investors: all of the investors that have participated in a round
• Time of the round (quarter, month, year)
• Lead by foreign investor and foreign investor participation: this is a quick and easy way to find out rounds that included the participation of foreign VCs (usually Series A+), in order to help identify funds that have been previously active in Spain
  

The embedded Airtable table allows you to apply any filter or sorting mechanism to find the right results. A couple of examples:

• Madrid-based companies that have raised between €1M and €5M led by a foreign investor
• Barcelona-based companies in the SaaS and travel space that have raised funding from K Fund
  

If instead of applying filters you want to directly search the database, there’s also a search function on the top right corner.

Ecosystem Insights

The second tab is a visualization of some of the data included in the Airtable. It’s a quick way of showing certain trends in the Spanish startup ecosystem.

The charts are somewhat interactive, in the sense that you can play with the data in the legend in order to hide a specific year, city or type of round to see other results more clearly.

As we said at the beginning, we’re sharing this with the community for free because we believe it can help every single stakeholder in the ecosystem (founders, employees, companies, local and foreign investors, public entities, etc) in ways that we probably can’t imagine ourselves.

We could have kept this close to our chest because it’s really something that we use quite often at K Fund on a day-to-day basis and with our portfolio companies. But if we did that, in a way we would be making our size of the pie bigger instead of the whole pie, and we truly believe this game that we’re playing -investing- is not a zero sum game.

Enjoy!

Since this is a manual process, we won’t update the data on a weekly basis, but expect for us to update the database at least once a quarter. Thanks a ton to Minimum Run for helping us put together this and to our colleague Pablo Pinedo for contributing to the maintenance of the database. If you think some of the data is wrong, let us know using this form.