Fintech and Venture Capital in Spain: A View from Barcelona

The wider tech scene

Dealroom values Spain's tech start-ups at €125bn in total, 2.3 times their 2020 value, which makes Spain the second fastest-growing ecosystem in Europe over that period, behind Belgium.

• 8th largest tech ecosystem in Europe by total value.
• €3.1bn of venture capital raised by Spanish start-ups in 2025, the third best year after 2021 (€4.4bn) and 2022 (€3.6bn).
• €1.2bn raised in Madrid and €1.1bn in Barcelona in 2025, more than two thirds of the total between them.
• €21.5bn raised by UK start-ups in the same year, for comparison.

More than 600 investors put money into Spanish start-ups in 2025, and Spanish investors provided 55% of the total. Spain accounts for 7.1% of the start-ups founded in Europe each year, but has produced only 17 unicorns, about 3.6% of Europe's total. The best known include Glovo, Perk and Factorial in Barcelona and Cabify in Madrid.

The appendix at the end compares Madrid and Barcelona with other hubs in Europe, the US and the Gulf.

Fintech and payments in Spain

Fintech was the largest sector for start-up investment in Spain in 2024. It raised €1,030m across 32 deals, about a third of the total, according to Fundación Bankinter. One company accounts for much of that: seQura, the Barcelona buy-now-pay-later firm, raised €410m including debt.

2025 was quieter for fintech. It fell out of Fundación Bankinter's top three sectors, each of which raised more than €300m: software at €516m, biotech at €354m and business and productivity tools at €321m. The fintech rounds were smaller. Flanks, which aggregates private banking portfolio data, raised a €14m Series A led by Motive Ventures and Battery Ventures. Payflow, which offers on-demand salary through payroll, raised €10m and then a €3m extension.

The Banco de España counted 427 fintech firms based in Spain in May 2025, up from 291 in 2020. Its count leaves out banks.

Payments, currency services and crypto has nearly tripled and is now close to lending in size, but crypto accounts for most of that growth.

The jump in crypto firms, from 8 to 88, partly reflects regulation. Since 2021 anyone offering crypto exchange or custody in Spain has had to register with the Banco de España, and the count can include the Spanish entities of foreign exchanges, such as Binance's, which registered in 2022. The EU's MiCA rules have since replaced that register. Firms had until 1 July 2026 to get a licence from the CNMV, Spain's securities regulator and the equivalent of the FCA for this purpose, or leave the Spanish market, so the count may well fall when the Banco de España next updates it.

The Spanish firms with a CNMV licence include Bit2Me, the first Spanish exchange to get one, which raised $30m in a round led by Tether in 2025, and Criptan. The banks have moved in too. BBVA was the first firm licensed in Spain, in March 2025, and CaixaBank and Santander's Openbank now offer crypto trading as well.

The firms are still small, and the Banco de España describes fintech as a marginal part of the Spanish financial system. However, they are growing fast. The Banco de España has published accounts for 294 of the 427 firms. Those 294 employed 6,521 people in 2023, nearly twice the 3,517 of 2018, and their assets rose from €1.0bn to €3.5bn over the same period.

Banks and deals

The large banks are also investors. BBVA Spark, BBVA's unit for high-growth companies, says it has committed around €1bn in under four years, and corporate venture capital takes part in about one in five Spanish start-up rounds.

2025 also brought a run of fintech M&A, often with Spanish companies as buyers:

• Santander agreed to buy 50% of Nera, an Argentine payments and financing platform for farming businesses.
• Embat, the treasury software company, bought Necto in the US.
• PayRetailers bought CelerisPay in the Netherlands.
• Babel bought Meraki in Colombia.
• Ion, backed by Agible Capital, took a majority stake in Diusframi, which works in payments and financial software.
• Loomis Pay bought Sighore, which sells payment systems to hotels and restaurants.

Santander's and Babel's deals use the Spanish-language route into Latin America that Spanish banks and fintechs share, and a British or German competitor doesn't have it.

Public money

Early-stage money is easier to find in Spain than later rounds. Local funds provide 59% of early-stage funding in Spain, the fourth highest share in Europe, and public money adds to it:

• ENISA, the state innovation lender, makes loans of €25,000 to €1.5m per company and has €303m set aside for 2025 and 2026.
• Fond-ICO Next Tech, a €4bn public fund, backs scale-up funds and co-invests €5m to €20m in companies that stay in Spain. It never takes more than 49% of a fund.

AI in fintech

AI is where much of the newer money is going. Almost one in five Spanish start-ups founded since 2021 is an AI company, and Dealroom ranks Spain's AI ecosystem the third fastest-growing in Europe since 2020, up 3.7 times in value. The AI companies in finance that have raised most recently sell software to finance teams and lenders, and three of the four below are in Barcelona:

• Murphy (Barcelona) uses AI agents to collect debts by phone and message in more than 100 languages. It came out of stealth in July 2025 with €12.8m led by Northzone, with ElevenLabs among the investors.
• Embat (Madrid) sells treasury software with an AI agent that handles bank reconciliation and cash forecasting. It raised a €30m Series B led by Cathay Innovation in May 2026.
• Dost (Barcelona) automates invoice processing and accounts payable for mid-sized companies. It raised a €6.7m Series A led by Octopus Ventures in November 2025.
• Remuner (Barcelona) works out the commissions and bonuses owed to sales staff each month, replacing the spreadsheets finance teams usually use for this. It raised $6.5m led by Seaya in September 2025.

Two of them are already selling in the UK. Embat launched in the UK and Ireland in 2025, and Dost's chief executive moved to London to open a seven-person office there.

Barcelona and Madrid

Madrid is the larger fintech centre. Of the 294 fintechs with published accounts in 2023, 148 were in Madrid province and 71 in Barcelona province. Barcelona's number grew faster, from 41 in 2018, a rise of 73% against Madrid's 48%.

Across all sectors the two cities are close in size, with Barcelona slightly smaller. Dealroom puts Barcelona's start-ups at $40.4bn against $47.3bn for Madrid, and each raised between €1.1bn and €1.2bn of venture capital in 2025. ACCIÓ, the Catalan government's business agency, counted 2,403 start-ups in Catalonia at the end of 2025, and they raised €1.131bn across 203 rounds. Financial services, travel tech and health tech took more than half of the money invested in Catalan start-ups over the previous five years.

Barcelona's best-known fintechs are in payments and finance software:

• seQura, buy-now-pay-later for retailers, raised the largest Spanish round of 2024: €410m including debt.
• Kantox automates currency management for corporates and was bought by BNP Paribas for about €120m.
• Murphy uses AI agents for debt collection and raised €12.8m in 2025.

Barcelona also draws people from outside Spain. In Mind the Bridge's 2023 count, foreign founders made up 19% of founders at Barcelona scale-ups, and foreign staff 23% of their employees.

The follow-on funding and exit gap

Follow-on funding

Later rounds depend on foreign money, in fintech as in the rest of Spanish tech. In the first half of 2025, Series C and growth rounds were 15% of deals and 78% of the money invested, and rounds that mixed Spanish and foreign funds raised just over half of all start-up investment, according to Fundación Bankinter. SpainCap puts the international share of private venture capital in Spain in 2025 at 63.8%, the highest it has recorded. Dealroom calls rounds above €100m the main structural challenge for the ecosystem.

The gap starts before Series B. Dealroom found that Spanish companies graduate from seed to Series A at a lower rate than peer ecosystems, and that those that get past Series A do as well as many peers at Series B and beyond.

Dealroom's figures for Barcelona show where companies drop out.

Above that, Dealroom counts 37 Barcelona companies at Series C and 24 that have raised more than $100m.

One in five seed-funded companies raising a Series A is the narrowest step in Barcelona's funnel, and it is low by comparison. On the same Dealroom measure, 32% of seed-funded companies go on to a Series A in Madrid, 30% in London and 44% in the Bay Area. After Series A, Barcelona is much closer: 30% go on to Series B, against 33% in London.

Exits

Exits are the other half of the problem. Spain recorded 44 exits in 2025, the third best year after 58 in 2022 and 48 in 2021, including the sales of vLex and Wallapop. It has more than 3,300 VC-backed companies, and 40 of them have reached $100m of revenue or a $1bn valuation. Fewer large local buyers and listings mean fewer returns for Spanish funds to put into the next round.

The exit numbers are starting to improve. Spanish private equity and venture capital funds sold holdings worth €3,227m at cost in the first half of 2026, 65.5% more than a year earlier and the most SpainCap has recorded. Behind the 40 largest companies, Dealroom counts another 181 with revenue of $25m to $100m. Those are the next candidates for a sale or a listing.

In fintech, most exits are sales to larger companies. Kantox went to BNP Paribas, and Baker Tilly's review of 2025 found Spanish fintech founders mostly selling into larger platforms instead of listing. The best-known listing is still Flywire, which started in Valencia as peerTransfer and listed on Nasdaq in 2021.

Next

The next piece looks at what the gap means in practice: why Spanish fintechs look to international investors, often in the UK, for their later rounds, and what entering the UK market involves since Brexit. It will also cover the same questions for UK companies looking at Spain.

Appendix: how Spain compares

Spain sits in the second tier of European tech. Measured by venture capital raised in 2025, the UK took about €21.5bn, Germany €11.5bn and France €8.7bn, against Spain's €3.1bn. The city figures show the same gap. Madrid and Barcelona are each worth about as much as Milan and less than Dubai, and London is worth 15 to 18 times either of them.

On growth since 2020, Spain is near the top. Among European countries whose start-ups are worth more than €100bn in total, Dealroom ranks Spain second, behind only Belgium. For comparison, Swedish start-ups grew 1.5 times between 2020 and 2024, from €210bn to €319bn. Spain is growing faster from a smaller base.

Sources: Dealroom city profiles, October 2026, counting companies founded since 1990; 2025 country VC figures from Tech.eu for the UK, Germany and France, and Dealroom for Spain.

Sources