vLex has been acquired by Clio in one of the largest exits in the history of the Spanish tech ecosystem, with the transaction valued at over $1B. The Barcelona-founded legaltech company, known for its powerful AI-based legal research platform, joins forces with the Canadian legal software giant to form a global leader in legal technology. The deal marks a rare non-financial sponsor acquisition of this scale in Spain and positions vLex as the country’s newest unicorn. 🎉

Founded in 2000 by brothers Lluís and Ángel Faus, vLex grew steadily and profitably, raising just over €5M in its first two decades. It began as a Spanish-language legal library (derecho.org), expanded across Latin America, and eventually acquired UK-based Justis and US-based Fastcase — a bold move that gave it access to over 1M U.S. lawyers and made it a serious contender alongside Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis. More about the history of the company here.

A key differentiator was vLex’s early and proprietary adoption of AI. In 2018 it launched Vincent, an internal legal AI assistant, years ahead of the current generative AI boom. The platform was rebuilt in 2023 around LLMs, becoming a key asset in a market where legaltech is rapidly transforming. This, combined with a vast proprietary legal dataset — over 1B documents and 540M legal citations — made vLex a highly coveted asset, with licensing interest from the likes of OpenAI, Microsoft, and xAI.

Oakley Capital acquired a 60% stake in vLex in 2022 for around €70M, backing the Fastcase acquisition and overseeing a period of rapid ARR and EBITDA growth. The exit marks one of the firm’s most successful deals to date.

Clio, founded in 2007 and recently valued at $3B, serves over 200,000 legal professionals globally. With vLex, it aims to integrate legal content, workflows, and AI to create an all-in-one platform that combines practice management with deep legal research — offering clients more value and expanding vLex’s reach exponentially.

Both Oakley and vLex’s founders are reinvesting in the new entity, with the 383-person vLex team joining Clio’s 1,500 employees. While exact role definitions are pending, Lluís Faus is expected to remain actively involved in the integration and future development of the combined platform.

This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Crescenta:

Desbloqueamos la inversión en fondos de Private Equity globales.

Coinvierte con los inversores institucionales más experimentados en fondos gestionados por algunas de las gestoras más reconocidas del mundo como EQT, Cinven o Clearlake.

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Regístrate en Crescenta

Startup funding news 💸

TuringDream has raised €6M in a seed round led by Adara Ventures and HWK, with participation from Next Tier Ventures. The startup enables companies to build multi-agent AI applications (MABAs) without code

Akaio has raised €2.3M in a seed round. Akaio connects companies with innovation trends via SaaS

BM2Solar has raised €2M in a round led by Axon Partners Group, with participation from Inclimo and Black and Blue Investimentos. The Valencia-based company develops photovoltaic projects and will use the funds to expand its pipeline in Spain and Latin America

Vixiees has raised €1M in a round co-led by Draper B1 and Abac Nest Ventures. The Barcelona-based startup offers a B2C sales automation platform

Kuikads has raised €1M in a round led by Abac Nest Ventures. The Barcelona-based startup offers a platform for large-scale personalized video creation

M&A 🎉

Tradeinn + Apollo

Apollo Global Management acquired a 30% stake in TradeInn from Suma Capital for over €200M, valuing the Girona-based e-commerce platform at more than €700M. The deal gives liquidity to early investors, including Suma Capital and several minority shareholders, while founder and CEO David Martín remains in control.

The deal reflects one of the largest shareholder transitions in the Spanish ecosystem this year and underscores TradeInn’s strong fundamentals, with €550M in 2024 revenue and €55M in EBITDA. The deal also marks a major return for Suma Capital, which entered in 2015 with an investment of ~€45M and exits at a valuation implying several hundred million euros in proceeds. More info here.

Signaturit acquired (again) by Namirial (Bain)

Signaturit is set to be acquired by Italian firm Namirial, which was itself recently bought by Bain Capital for €1.1B. The Spanish e-signature and digital transaction management platform, owned by PSG Equity since 2020, will become part of a new European legaltech leader. According to Expansion, Signaturit is at €70M ARR

Other deals

• Idealista acquired Certicalia, a Zaragoza-based proptech platform specialized in connecting users with professionals for energy certificates and other legal property documents. Certicalia is a bootstrapped company

• Cuatroochenta acquired 100% of MP Services, a Barcelona-based company specialized in fraud prevention for digital payments in sectors like airlines, fashion, and sports e-commerce

• Nuclia, the Manresa-based startup specialized in agentic RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), has been acquired by Nasdaq-listed Progress Software. Founded six years ago, Nuclia developed a powerful AI-based search engine that helps companies retrieve internal data—emails, calls, presentations, chats—quickly and reliably. Nuclia had raised around $6M
  

Investor & accelerator news 🚀

Local investors active abroad:

• Alantra’s energy transition fund, Klima, led a €23M round into Amsterdam’s Dexter Energy

Batir a largo plazo al mercado es complicado, y poca gente lo consigue. Si además no tienes tiempo o conocimientos para invertir en bolsa, lo mejor que puedes hacer es utilizar Indexa Capital.

Invierte con Indexa

Startup news 💡

Freepik has made AI image generation unlimited for its Premium+ and Pro users, removing all token limits, caps, and cooldowns. The change applies to top models like Mystic, Google Imagen, Seedream, and more. CEO Joaquín Cuenca emphasized their bootstrapped origins and user-first approach: “Limits kill momentum.”

Tucuvi has consolidated its presence in Spain, now operating in over 10% of public hospitals. The healthtech startup offers an AI-based virtual medical assistant that automates clinical follow-ups via phone calls.

Wallbox will now count SEPI Digital as a key shareholder after the public entity acquired an 11% stake, becoming its second-largest investor

Glovo has suspended a controversial heatwave bonus in Italy that offered riders €1 extra per delivery during extreme heat. The initiative drew backlash from unions and politicians, who argued it incentivized unsafe working conditions

Interview with Ramiro Iglesias, co-founder of Crescenta, the first fully digital private equity manager in Southern Europe regulated by the CNMV, that’s democratizing access to private capital by allowing retail investors to build diversified portfolios from just €10,000

Aura Pay, the Spanish fintech focused on remittances, has launched operations in the U.S. to digitalize how migrants send money to their home countries

Big company & policy news 🤓

Microsoft has announced a new wave of layoffs that will impact its King studio in Barcelona, known for developing Candy Crush. The cuts are part of broader global restructuring efforts affecting Xbox and Activision Blizzard divisions. The company has not specified the number of jobs affected in Spain but confirmed that the Barcelona office will be partially impacted

BBVA launched a crypto trading and custody service for retail customers in Spain, becoming the first major traditional bank in the country to do so under the EU’s MiCA regulation. Clients can now buy, sell, and securely store bitcoin and ether directly from the BBVA app

Iberdrola launched Niba, a new startup positioned as Spain’s first fully digital “neoenergy” company. Aimed at millennials and Gen Z, Niba offers electricity and gas services through an app-first model, with transparent pricing and flexible plans

Mango invested in The Post Fiber, a startup focused on recycling post-consumer textile waste

Interesting reads 🤓

Jose Ramon Perez Agüera (Mercadona Tech) published “MCP: La revolución silenciosa que está transformando la gestión de productos”

Ignacio Arriaga (ex-Acumba) wrote “Por qué la moda indie está matando a las empresas pequeñas”

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