Postcard from South Summit Madrid, Spain’s leading innovation conference

Oakley Partner Sascha Günther and Seedtag founders Jorge Poyatos and Albert Nieto Riera recently took to the stage at South Summit Madrid, Spain’s leading business and innovation conference, to share fundraising tips and to discuss opportunities in the region.

Seedtag is Oakley’s fourth investment in Iberia following idealista, Southern Europe’s leading property portal, Ekon, and Portugal’s Primavera, which was combined with Ekon to create the region’s largest independent provider of business software. Here, Oakley’s Sascha Günther shares some key insights from their discussion at South Summit.

A land of opportunities

Spain is a great market for investors such as Oakley. An economy with almost 50 million consumers and increasing digitalisation make it a very interesting prospect if you’re an investor looking to back digital businesses. The Government launched its Digital Spain 2025 agenda last year. The country has become a hub for tech entrepreneurs and a great place to launch and grow your company, either organically or through M&A. Spain is also the ideal springboard for international expansion into regions such as LATAM and North America.

Seedtag is our fourth investment in the Iberian region following idealista, Ekon and Primavera, and you can see the digitalisation theme playing out across our various investment strategies here.

The contextual advertising market is growing fast as consumer privacy and GDPR rules drive a shift away from third-party cookies. Seedtag was already demonstrating incredible performance metrics, but what clinched it for us was the opportunity to work with the founders. Jorge and Albert are incredible entrepreneurs and have assembled a formidable team. We saw the opportunity to partner with them and apply our expertise and playbook from two decades of investing, particularly in M&A and internationalisation.

Top fundraising tips for entrepreneurs

Get ready for what can be an arduous, mentally-tough process. Make sure you can evidence your business’ track record, and articulate a clear picture of what your financial needs and strategic goals are. Be ready to defend your business plan in the face of tough questions from would-be investors. Valuation is important, but so is picking the right partner with the right expertise, track record and cultural fit. This is a 5+ year journey and things can go wrong- you want someone who is aligned with your vision and who you can trust. Sealing a deal during a global pandemic is an even harder process since you cannot meet in person. Jorge and Albert were very collaborative and transparent throughout the process. They remained calm and rational even through the trickier parts, which to us is a sign of inspirational, professional leaders we want to partner with.

What's next for Seedtag?

Jorge and Albert have ambitious plans for Seedtag. Together with Oakley’s help, the plan is to scale up the business to reach unicorn or $500 million revenues, and become a global leader in contextual advertising. To do that we want to expand Seedtag into the US, always a big challenge for European companies, but a huge opportunity given the size of their advertising market. But we also want to consolidate Seedtag’s position in its core European markets including the UK, Germany and France where we see huge potential to strengthen our existing position in these very large ad markets. And lastly, we want to support Albert and Jorge to continue scaling up their business further, hiring and retaining the best talent.