A year in review: 2024
What 2024 taught us about investing in early-stage B2B SaaS
At Abac Nest Ventures, 2024 was a transformative year marked by significant achievements. We successfully launched our new VC Fund, Abac Nest II FCRE, with nine investments already in the portfolio by year-end 2024. We are building an early-stage portfolio focused on B2B AI-enabled SaaS that enhances competitiveness by transforming key points in value chains. Our investments span multiple industries, reflecting the broad and transformative impact AI will have across sectors.
This year also brought key milestones that underscore the growth and impact of Abac Nest Ventures. One notable achievement was the exit of Cobee, a standout from our first portfolio (Abac Nest I). We take immense pride in witnessing how the Founding team we supported in their early days built a high-impact company. Cobee has emerged as one of Spain's most successful scale-ups, revolutionizing employee benefits for mid-market companies. This milestone is a testament to the potential of visionary founders and their ability to transform access to employee benefits for hundreds of thousands of people.
From our perspective, Cobee’s exit further solidified Abac Nest I exceptional performance, securing a top quartile VC performance in Spain and delivering attractive liquidity and returns to our investors.
Another highlight of 2024 was securing support for Abac Nest II FCRE from Fond-ICO. Being recognized in a highly competitive selection process, where only a few funds were awarded, affirms our commitment to excellence. This achievement, coupled with the backing of top-tier private investors and the DeepTech Fund of Funds led by the Barcelona City Council, significantly enhances our ability to drive meaningful impact in the venture capital ecosystem in Spain.
As we look ahead, these accomplishments fuel our determination to continue empowering exceptional founders and fostering innovation across diverse industries.
A Transformative 2024 for Venture Capital in Spain
As we reflect on 2024, three key themes have shaped the venture capital (VC) landscape in Spain:
AI - The Cornerstone of Innovation: Artificial intelligence has dominated the investment landscape globally, especially in B2B SaaS where it has seen widespread adoption. In 2024, worldwide spending on AI is projected to reach $184 billion, with an anticipated annual growth rate of 28%. A significant portion of the investment is directed towards generative AI foundational models and infrastructure. However, AI applications are also experiencing rapid growth as the market increasingly adopts AI technologies. Startups in our portfolio leveraged AI to unlock operational efficiencies and create new growth opportunities across industries.
Resilience in Early Stage: After a period of reduced liquidity in the VC market during 2022 and 2023, the early-stage ecosystem has continued to produce high-potential startups. As Spain's entrepreneurial ecosystem matures, an increasing number of talented founders persist in launching ventures, undeterred by external challenges. These founders consistently exhibit a disruptive and global mindset, highlighting the resilience of early-stage entrepreneurship. We believe this period of reduced liquidity has fostered stronger founders who are well-positioned to lead the next wave of high-potential startups in Spain.
Sustainable growth at its core: In my view, a more rational approach to growth has taken hold. Founders now prioritize operational efficiency over premature scaling, focusing on disciplined execution and strong fundamentals. This enables them to deploy capital effectively to scale rapidly when startups demonstrate the right market indicators and unit economics—but not before.
The latter two 2024 themes mentioned earlier—resilience and a sustainable growth mindset—are closely tied to cyclical trends in the VC industry and the continued maturation of the VC space in Spain. The global VC industry experienced rising interest rates and tighter liquidity during 2022–2023, prompting a more disciplined and resilient approach in 2024. As a result, early-stage funding has increasingly focused on fostering resilient businesses capable of enduring these macroeconomic pressures.
However, among these 2024 trends, AI stands out as the persistent and transformative force.
A year marked by AI
While conversations around AI have been ongoing for years, 2024 witnessed the explosive impact of generative AI (GenAI) through AI Applications. This technology has not only raised expectations for medium-term societal transformation but has already begun delivering tangible results in the short term.
In my opinion, AI is not the originator of trends but the enabler, accelerator, and magnifier of existing social dynamics. For example:
The growing demand for personalized consumer experiences;
The pressure for sustainable solutions; and
The drive to improve productivity in a more competitive world
All of these are deeply rooted in social trends. AI becomes indispensable because it provides tools to address these challenges, but its relevance is intrinsically linked to these underlying societal shifts. This perspective reminds us that true disruption is not technological but social. The way people, businesses, and institutions adopt and leverage AI will determine whether it amplifies aspirations or exacerbates challenges.
This underlines why AI must be approached with both excitement and caution, as it brings its own new set of challenges, such as:
Sustainability: Scaling AI systems requires significant computational resources, raising questions about energy efficiency and environmental impact;
Governance: The ethical and regulatory frameworks surrounding AI are still in their infancy and will require significant development; and
Foundational model Bias: Generative AI reflects its training data, risking the perpetuation of inaccuracies and biases.
In the face of such challenges and opportunities, we firmly believe that entrepreneurs have a unique chance not only to respond to present needs but to define the future.
We take pride in partnering with founders who go beyond merely leveraging AI to transform industries. By deeply understanding the human, cultural, and economic contexts that give AI its relevance, they embody the entrepreneurial spirit to create solutions that matter.
At Abac Nest Ventures, we are inspired by their vision and remain committed to supporting them in building the future.
Expanding Our Portfolio: 7 New Investments in 2024 with Abac Nest II
In 2024, we proudly expanded our portfolio with seven new investments, reinforcing our focus on supporting B2B SaaS startups addressing critical industry needs. This achievement solidifies our position as the most active fund in our segment during 2024. These investments span sectors such as AI governance, digital health, fintech, and computational chemistry, all aligned with our mission to transform the SME ecosystem through AI-enabled SaaS.
March 2024 - We invested in Nextmol's Seed Round. Nextmol provides computational chemistry solutions, enabling R&D teams in specialty chemicals to reduce time-to-market by two-thirds, innovate faster, lower costs, and assist in the transition to sustainable solutions at scale.
May 2024 - We invested in Punto Health's Pre-Seed Round. Punto Health develops AI-powered digital solutions for Alzheimer’s and dementia care, enabling remote cognitive monitoring and enhanced support for patients and caregivers through AI voice-based biomarkers.
June 2024 - We invested in Honei's Seed Round. Honei provides a mobile-first order and payment platform for restaurants, focusing on improving operational efficiency and customer retention. Hundreds of restaurants already use Honei to personalize the end-user experience, enhancing cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.
July 2024 - We led Hoola's Pre-Seed Round. Hoola leverages AI to optimize customer interactions, transforming support data into automated workflows and actionable sales opportunities for e-commerce.
August 2024 - We invested in Anyformat. Anyformat uses generative AI to streamline workflow automation, extracting and structuring data from emails, PDFs, scans, reports, images, customer calls, and more with unprecedented accuracy.
November 2024 - We invested in Galtea AI’s Pre-Seed Round. A spin-off from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Galtea provides technology for AI governance. Galtea scores compliance, bias, and hallucination rates, enabling companies to understand their performance in these dimensions when using generative AI for processes or end-customer interactions.
December 2024 - We are closing a lead investment in the Seed Round of a market intelligence platform. This will be our final investment in 2024 and will be publicly announced in the coming days.
These seven investments in 2024 bring the Abac Nest II portfolio to nine companies by year-end, establishing us as the most active investing fund in our segment during the year. Several of these companies are already working to incorporate international VCs into their next funding rounds. Meanwhile, Abac Nest I maintains a portfolio of 20 companies that continue to perform strongly, positioning us among the top quartile of VC investors in Spain.
Our combined portfolio in Abac Nest I and Abac Nest II has continued to outperform
We are also especially proud of the companies in our portfolio that during 2024 have grown significantly. Big shout out to:
Cobee (Abac Nest I): The acquisition of Cobee by Pluxee Group is a proud milestone for Abac Nest Ventures. Cobee’s success is a testament to the exceptional talent and dedication of its top-notch team, who have redefined employee benefits and financial wellbeing. This achievement not only validates our investment strategy but also fuels our ambition to continue backing transformative startups led by outstanding entrepreneurs. A big thank you to everyone who made this possible!
Flipflow (Abac Nest II): Enhanced its competitive intelligence SaaS platform with advanced features. Doubled its revenue growth, acquiring top-tier clients and expanding its customer base, and partnered with Gartner to improve its distribution strategy.
Roiward (Abac Nest II): Announced new deals with top-tier fintech companies, such as Scalapay, expanding its product into travel incentive solutions and strengthening its product as a Digital Value Payout Infrastructure.
Punto Health (Abac Nest II): Was accepted to AD Moonshot Accelerator, supported by the Gates Foundation, to further innovation in dementia care. Initiated clinical trials for its digital biomarker technology in partnership with Fundación ACE Alzheimer’s Center.
Nextmol (Abac Nest II): Successfully signed leading beauty and specialty chemicals players as subscription clients. Introduced advanced molecular modelling capabilities to support R&D teams in the specialty chemicals sector.
Honei (Abac Nest II): Expanded its order and payment SaaS platform for restaurants, achieving a 21% increase in average ticket size and saving up to 200 work hours per month for its clients.
Hoola (Abac Nest II): Achieved rapid growth by automating customer service workflows and integrating support data into sales processes. Developed strong traction in the e-commerce space, improving sales conversions and client retention with AI-driven engagement tools.
Abac Nest II Institutional Investors
In 2024, we proudly announced new commitments with valuable support from key institutional investors, including the Instituto de Crédito Oficial (ICO) and the DeepTech Fund of Funds led by the Barcelona City Council. These strategic partnerships complement our strong base of private investors, further enhancing our ability to invest in early-stage startups across sectors such as B2B SaaS, fintech, digital health, the future of work, and artificial intelligence applications.
In 2024, we continued to build on our strategy of investing in early-stage startups. Our focus remained on Pre-Seed and Seed stages, with initial ticket sizes ranging from €200K to €500K and follow-on capacity of up to €1M per company. This allows us to support a diverse selection of promising startups at different stages of their development.
Dealflow focus and investment thesis
With over 100 deals received each month, we’ve built a structured analysis funnel that allows us to conduct deep dives into companies while maintaining agility in decision-making. Being in close contact with accelerators, incubators, tech transfer centers, and proprietary sources of dealflow origination helps us identify the best opportunities to invest in. This disciplined approach ensures we evaluate the best opportunities and move quickly to support promising startups.
We want to be the go-to VC for ambitious founders building B2B SaaS solutions. We have tracked every early-stage funding round in Spain to review the opportunities we analyzed but chose not to invest in —and to spot the ones we missed entirely. For us, it is important to understand why we do what we do and why we choose to pass on other opportunities. Since January 2024, 145 early-stage startups closed funding rounds, raising a total of €32m. Nearly 35% of these were B2B SaaS startups, and we had access to almost all of them. This means we met with many of their founding teams and got to dive deep into nearly every B2B SaaS startup that raised a pre-seed or seed round in Spain. We’re proud of our reach and will keep working to strengthen our connection with the ecosystem, ensuring we access and invest in the best opportunities in our region.
Thank you for being part of the Abac Nest Ventures Community!
As we wrap up 2024, we want to thank our growing community of founders, co-investors, and partners for being an integral part of this journey.
Reflecting on the 2024 achievements motivates us to keep backing bold entrepreneurs and scaling tech innovation. We look forward to sharing more news, insights, and success stories in the coming months.
Stay connected by subscribing to our Substack and following us on LinkedIn. And if you are an early-stage founder building something extraordinary, we would love to hear from you!
Here is to another year of bold ideas and exceptional teams!
Abac Nest Ventures Team
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