Adara Ventures' Summer 2023 Review

As we head into the second half of 2023, we wanted to take a moment to highlight some of the accomplishments within our portfolio over the past few months.

2023: A quick recap

It’s been four years since we launched AVIII, our €80m third fund, to continue backing the best early-stage enterprise tech founders in Europe. We’ve now invested in 17 exceptional teams solving complex problems for the modern enterprise.

It has been a challenging year for startups; however, we continue to be impressed by the resilience and resourcefulness of the founders in our portfolio and their teams as they work to bring transformational technologies to life and reach new milestones.

In April, we announced our pre-seed investment in Kimera Technologies, a new startup from Valencia, Spain that has developed a computer vision AI solution to transform visual content into more valuable business data.

In May, 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.

In June, we also welcomed XONAI to the Adara portfolio, a UK-based cloud optimization startup that helps enterprise organizations reduce data infrastructure costs at scale.

The Adara team is also growing, and we recently welcomed Alberto Echeverri as Partner to co-lead our investments in startups enabling the energy transition. Alberto has strong technical domain expertise, industry knowledge, and senior management capabilities. At both Siemens Energy and earlier in his career at General Electric, he held global roles with P&L responsibility, managing teams across EMEA and other regions. In addition to developing talent, Alberto also led business development and investment programs within the energy space.

We believe technology will play a critical role in creating a balanced energy system, and we are excited to explore the energy sector further. If you’re a founder developing innovative solutions for the energy transition, you can get in touch with us here.

We also welcomed new team member Andrea Cabanillas as an Investment Analyst.

More growth stories we celebrated across the portfolio

Caravelo announced a number of new deals with leading airlines, including Wizz Air, FlyArystan, Avianca, and Jazeera Airways, a testament to the strength of its platform and the increasing airline industry interest in subscription services.

Cyber Guru achieved 10x growth in less than two years, helping more than 260+ 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 launched a new brand identity, 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.

Freeverse announced its Living Assets™ technology will help power Metahype, a new metaverse experience launched by the sports car company CUPRA.

Quibim has quickly become a global leader in AI medical imaging analysis, achieving 5x revenue growth over the past year and securing partnerships with 70+ hospitals and 11 clinical trials.

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

Looking ahead

In a challenging economic environment, strong fundamentals are key. We remain committed to supporting founders and look forward to announcing more new investments soon, as well as sharing more insights into our new investment focus. As always, if you’re an early-stage founder who is building something extraordinary, we'd love to hear from you.