Venture Capital/Analysis/

Investment into Spanish startups at record levels in 2022

Investment into Spain is still growing, despite wider economic worries

By Tim Smith

While we might be in the era of VC doom memos and contagious market jitters, Spain’s startup sector has never been healthier, in terms of investment volumes.

That’s according to a report from private investment industry body SpainCap, which says that VC deals in the country surpassed all records in the first half of 2022.

VCs invested €850m in Spanish startups in H1 across 298 deals, compared with €722m in the same period in 2021.

SpainCap said that the record figure was largely down to a big increase in tickets over €10m, led by international funds. Of the €890m invested in the first half of the year, €704m (79%) came from international funds, showing that Spain is still heavily reliant on outside money — the figure stood at 80% in 2019.

Oriol Pinya, president of SpainCap, said the findings were evidence that, despite the current economic environment, Spanish “startups and SMEs remain attractive for international investors, who continue to bet on Spanish talent”.

Some of the biggest rounds this year in Spain include orthodontics startup Impress raising $125m, no-code survey company Typeform raising $135m and business travel platform TravelPerk raising $115m.

SpainCap added that, when taking private equity deals into account, private investment in H1 of 2022 was also up on last year, totalling €5.16bn, up more than 170% compared to 2021.

Tim Smith is Sifted’s Iberia correspondent. He tweets from @timmpsmith