A Year in Review: 2025
2025 confirmed that disciplined investment in outlier founders still compounds.
At Abac Nest Ventures, we look back at 2025 proud of having played a leading role in the Spanish pre-seed and seed venture capital ecosystem. Throughout the year, we maintained a strong investment cadence and close, hands-on involvement with early-stage founders. Key highlights for the year are:
Portfolio construction: Following the successful launch of Abac Nest II FCRE, the fund completed its first 24 months of investment with a portfolio of 15 companies. These companies operate across key targeted verticals within B2B SaaS, with a strong focus on AI-enabled applications, frontier tech, vertical software, and mission-critical tools for SMEs.
Doubling down: Out of the first 9 companies we backed during the first 12 months, five have already completed significant uprounds with international and tier 1 investors in 2025, representing one of the highest graduation rates (from pre-seed to seed) in our industry (55% for Abac Nest II vs. 23% European average). This outcome reflects the fund’s disciplined selectivity and hands-on support during the critical 0-to-1 phase, partnering with teams that combine ambition with an execution-driven mindset to build category-defining businesses. The remaining investments are more recent and reflect the fund’s continued pace and conviction.
Talent development: 2025 was also a year of team consolidation. We continued shaping a culture that balances entrepreneurial experience with investor discipline, strengthening our ability to support founders consistently. During the year, Tristan Conde was promoted to Associate, Victoria Moretti joined the investment team, and María Mas came on board to lead Fund Operations. In parallel, Anna Pellicer, a long-standing reference within the fund, began a new academic chapter at Harvard, marking an important transition in the Abac Nest Ventures journey.
All in all, we believe the progress made across both the portfolio and the team provides a solid foundation to keep investing at pre-seed and seed, staying close to founders, and fostering innovation across prominent industries.
Looking back at 2025
As we reflect on 2025, three key themes have shaped the VC landscape in Europe and Spain:
European Renaissance: 2025 marked one of the strongest periods of capital deployment since 2022, with $57bn invested and the creation of 16 new unicorns across diverse industries. A new generation of category-defining companies emerged, including Legora, n8n, Zama, IQM, Neko Health, and Tines. Europe also produced several standout breakout successes, such as Lovable and ElevenLabs, both reaching $6.6bn valuations with over $200m in ARR, alongside Mistral, which achieved a $13bn valuation, all within less than three years of launch. In parallel, established European champions continued to scale globally, with Revolut reaching a $75bn valuation and over 60 million users. Together, these milestones underscore Europe’s growing ability to build globally competitive technology companies.
Exits in Spain: At the same time, M&A activity in Spain is clearly recovering, supported by a series of relevant exits including Onum (acquired by CrowdStrike for €300m), Wallapop (acquired by NAVER for €600m), CoverManager (acquired by ZenChef for c.€200m), vLex (acquired by Clio for €850m), Samy Alliance (acquired by Bridgepoint for €300m), and The Hotels Network (acquired by Lighthouse for an undisclosed amount). After several years with limited liquidity, these transactions are beginning to generate capital distributions and recycle experienced talent back into the ecosystem. We believe this renewed exit momentum, combined with sustained investment levels, sets the stage for stronger distributions ahead and a healthier startup flywheel, with further exits likely to follow in the coming years.
Artificial Intelligence: AI investment and adoption accelerated significantly in 2025, but unevenly across the stack. Capital and higher valuations remain concentrated in foundational models, infrastructure, and select middleware players, where scale, capital intensity, and structural defensibility can support outsized exit outcomes. In contrast, while AI applications are seeing rapid usage growth (especially in B2C), enterprise adoption is progressing more gradually, constrained by integration, compliance, and management shift. As a result, valuations in AI-based software companies are increasingly driven not by technical sophistication alone, but by the ability to scale distribution, embed deeply into workflows, and translate AI capabilities into sustained, measurable business impact.
Looking ahead: What we expect in 2026
We believe AI will be the foundation upon which the next generation of software companies will be built.
AI-driven vertical software: The next wave of value creation in Europe will emerge at the intersection of AI and vertical SaaS, particularly in the mid-market. SMEs remain the backbone of the European economy, yet are still under-digitised, creating a structural opportunity for AI-native, industry-specific software that delivers clear productivity gains. We see the application layer as the most attractive entry point, where winners will be defined less by model sophistication and more by distribution, workflow embedding, and the ability to build defensible moats through domain expertise, integrations, and proprietary data that compound over time
Cybersecurity: As enterprises adopt AI at speed, the attack surface is shifting toward data stored in SaaS tools, collaboration platforms, and business applications. At the same time, the window to detect and contain threats is shrinking. We see AI as a powerful enabler on the defensive side: not to replace security frameworks, but to remove bottlenecks by prioritising what matters most. This includes using AI to surface and classify sensitive data automatically, focus human effort where it reduces risk most, and apply the same level of protection to modern SaaS environments as to traditional “crown jewel” systems
Flywheel momentum: This opportunity is reinforced by strong ecosystem tailwinds, including increasing regulatory pressure across Europe to digitalise core operations and a growing cohort of experienced, second-time founders with global ambition, particularly in Spain. Together, these forces are accelerating the recycling of both talent and capital, raising the quality of new company formation. As a result, we believe the 2026 vintage is well-positioned to generate 2–3 category-defining companies with unicorn potential within the next few years.
Expanding Our Portfolio
In 2025, we expanded our portfolio with six new investments, reinforcing our focus on supporting B2B SaaS startups addressing critical industry needs. These investments span multiple sectors and are aligned with our mission to transform SME day-to-day operations. Our 2025 investments at Abac Nest Ventures include:
In May 2025, we led Kuik’s €500k pre-seed round. Kuik turns customer data into personalised video creatives at scale, cutting production friction and improving ROI performance for growth teams.
In May 2025, we invested in Steryon’s €1m pre-seed round. Steryon is building the operational backbone that industrial operators need to secure and govern Operational Technology (OT).
In June 2025, we invested in Centinel’s €1m pre-seed round. Centinel automates invoicing, reconciliation and collections for small and medium-sized businesses.
In June 2025, we invested in Vixiees’s €810k pre-seed round. Vixiees helps B2C sales teams automate workflows and boost conversion efficiency
In October 2025, we led Uxia’s €750k pre-seed round. Uxia enables product and design teams to run fast, precise, and affordable user testing at scale
In December 2025, we approved to lead a €800k pre-seed round in a Stealth startup operating in the AI application for Ecommerce tech stack
These six additions bring Abac Nest II to 15 companies by year-end 2025. This achievement solidifies our position as one of the most active funds in our segment as we get closer to reaching our objective of backing 35-40 high-performing teams.
Our combined portfolio continues to outperform
We are especially proud of the portfolio companies that, during 2025, raised follow-on rounds and attracted capital from international Tier-1 VC funds. Notably, five out of the first nine investments made in our initial 12 months have already completed significant up-rounds (from pre-seed to seed), representing a 55% graduation rate and positioning Abac Nest II performance well above the European average of 24%. This performance reflects the fund’s disciplined selectivity and hands-on support during the critical 0-to-1 phase, partnering with teams that combine ambition with an execution-driven mindset to build category-defining businesses. In parallel, Fund I has reached a 30% graduation rate from pre-seed to Series A.
Konvo: 13 months after we led the €800k pre-seed round, Konvo raised a €3.5m Seed round in September 2025, led by Samaipata to transform eCommerce customer service into a sales engine.
Anyformat: 15 months after we invested in the €500k pre-seed round, Anyformat raised a €3.3m Seed round in November 2025, led by Kibo to build the next generation of document data infrastructure powered by generative AI.
Punto Health: 16 months after we invested in the €650k pre-seed round, Punto Health raised a €2.3m Seed round in December 2025, led by Plus Partners and Shilling VC to scale its AI-powered platform for dementia care.
Undisclosed: We will soon announce two €3m pre–Series A rounds, led by a tier-1 Spanish VC and a leading European deeptech VC.
Tacmind: Raised €2.4m in November 2025, led by Cusp Capital and Stage 2 Capital to help brands understand how they appear inside AI-generated answers such as ChapGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and others.
Payflow: Raised €10m led by Cusp Capital and Wille Finance to become a market leader in Spain and LATAM, while continuing to scale across Europe as the company reached €6m in ARR with more than 1,000 clients.
TaxDown: Raised a €5m Series A led by Bonsai Partners to expand its AI-powered tax-tech product suite and accelerate go-to-market in LATAM, as the company reached €10m in revenues.
Combined, companies across Abac Nest I and II raised nearly €30m in 2025, providing the capital required to accelerate international expansion, deepen product development, and scale toward category leadership.
Dealflow focus and high conviction
With over 120 deals received each month and an investment rate of under 1%, we have built a highly structured analysis funnel that enables deep diligence while preserving speed and decisiveness. Supported by a strong founder and investor network, we benefit from early access to a robust and largely proprietary dealflow. This disciplined approach allows us to consistently identify the highest-quality opportunities and move quickly to support the most promising teams.
In 2025, 145 early-stage startups closed funding rounds in Spain, raising c.€400m. Nearly 65% of these were B2B SaaS companies, and we had access to 95% of them. This means we met the founding teams and conducted in-depth discussions with nearly every B2B SaaS startup that raised a pre-seed or seed round in Spain. This breadth of access strengthens our conviction, enhances selectivity, and positions us to back the best opportunities as they emerge, reinforcing our ambition to be the go-to VC for ambitious founders building B2B SaaS companies.
Thank you for being part of our Community!
As we wrap up 2025, we want to thank our growing community of founders, co-investors, and partners for being an integral part of this journey.
Reflecting on the 2025 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!