As we head into 2024, we want to reflect on the past year at Adara Ventures. Despite complex market conditions, we continued backing the best early-stage enterprise tech founders in Europe, expanded our investment thesis, and celebrated many impressive growth stories and exciting technological breakthroughs across the Adara portfolio.

We are grateful to work with so many ambitious, hard-working founders and partners, and we want to say thank you for sharing your journey with us. We are excited to continue growing and achieving great things together. 

Happy Holidays from all of us at Adara Ventures! 🎊

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Highlights from 2023

🌱 Expanding our investment thesis and support for the ecosystem

This year we welcomed Alberto Echeverri as Partner to co-lead our investments in startups enabling this energy transition, combining our deep expertise in investing in startups with a competitive technological advantage with his experience working with digital ventures in the energy sector. Alberto previously led the Innovation and Digital Portfolio at Siemens Energy and has unparalleled insight into the challenges that energy transition startups are working to solve.

We believe startups will be at the forefront of innovation in the energy sector, developing cutting-edge technologies and solutions that challenge conventional energy systems. This year we also joined the Cleantech for Iberia coalition as a founding member, alongside top investors, scaleups, corporations, and universities across Spain and Portugal. With a combined fund size of more than €1 billion, our collective mission is to accelerate the deployment of the most ambitious climate and industrial solutions, forging an ecosystem that brings together capital, technology, and policy to enable Iberian net-zero industrial leadership. 

🏆 Adara wins 2023 VC Deal of the Year

We received the award for Best Venture Capital Deal at this year’s SPAINCAP Awards for the partial sale of portfolio company Seedtag to private equity investor Advent International in July 2022. We are proud to have received this award for the third time in the past five years, with this being the fourth time we’ve received the award since SPAINCAP began the recognition. 

💫 Investment highlights

It has now been four years since we launched AVIII, our €80m third fund, to continue backing the best early-stage enterprise tech founders in Europe.

Throughout the year, we continued to invest in startups addressing complex challenges for the modern enterprise and reinforced our commitment to portfolio startups that demonstrated remarkable growth. We completed our 18th investment in 2023, to be announced in early 2024.

☁️ We led the €4m Series A round for Jotelulu, a fast-growing startup based in Madrid that helps transform IT companies into cloud service providers. 

👁 We made a pre-seed investment in Kimera Technologies, a new startup from Valencia that has developed a computer vision AI solution to transform visual content into more valuable business data. 

⚡️ We welcomed XONAI to the Adara portfolio, a UK-based cloud optimization startup that helps enterprise organizations reduce data infrastructure costs at scale, joining their $3.5m seed round. 

🔬 We participated in IOMED’s €10m Series A round led by Philips Ventures and XTX Ventures as they continue scaling AI for healthcare data activation. 

✈️ We also participated in Caravelo’s €3.5m Series A investment round led by Samaipata to continue growing subscription solutions for the travel industry.  

🎉 Celebrating more growth stories, launches & accomplishments 

💥 Cyber Guru achieved 10x growth in less than two years, helping more than 500+ organizations transform employee behavior and improve the first line of defense against cyber attacks. ​​

🇺🇸 XYZ Reality hired a new CRO and officially expanded into the US market, opening a new regional office in California and boosting its sales & revenue operations teams.

🇪🇸 BEONx founders Rubén Sánchez and Emilio Galán were selected amongst the top 100 founders with the most capacity to generate employment in the Spanish ecosystem in 2023.

🏆 CounterCraft announced David Brown as its new CEO and was featured on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2023. 
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✈️ Caravelo announced new deals with leading airlines, including Wizz Air, FlyArystan, Avianca, and Jazeera Airways, a testament to the increasing airline industry interest in subscription services.

⛓ Freeverse launched LAOS, a new blockchain dedicated to interoperable digital assets.

🔬Quibim doubled revenue growth over the past year and partnerships with 70+ hospitals and 11 clinical trials, including Philips, to help clinicians deliver better and more affordable prostate cancer care with its AI-enabled image analysis software.  

🇪🇸 Our Partner Rocio Pillado was recognized as one of Spain's most promising startup investors to watch in 2023.

🚀 Seedtag was featured as one of the 10 fastest-growing Spanish startups, growing its headcount 50% over the past year. 

✨ Komon launched its official app in both English and Spanish, increasing access to Komon's features and artists' communities.

🙌 40 of our portfolio founders came together in October for our annual Big Dog event to share knowledge, network, and have a great time together. 

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As always, if you’re an early-stage founder building something extraordinary, we'd love to hear from you. You can also stay up-to-date with Adara Ventures and our portfolio news by subscribing to our monthly Caminos newsletter and connecting with us on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

See you in the new year! 🌟