2024-02-04 09:22:49
The doctor and historian of ancient Greece who left evidence of it for the first time said that they lived in India. Therefore, it would not be surprising if the strange four-legged animal with a horn on its forehead about which so many legends had come was really a rhinoceros. The same mysticism that made the unicorn a symbol of purity and fantasy throughout history has crept into the territory of start-ups, where this mythological creature has acquired a new meaning. A being so special and hard to find that he now gives his name to technology companies valued at more than $1 billion in a sea of projects that are born and die.
As we have explained in the pages of this newspaper several times, Catalonia does not escape the phenomenon. Although the criterion for making the selection is debatable. Should we include companies founded by Catalans, but based abroad? Should those that have been bought by foreign competitors appear? Internet pioneers should be considered unicorns or is it a title reserved for the new batch? Do they cease to be when their valuation falls or when they go public?
“If we talk about Barcelona or Madrid, there are few and far between to find one unicorn that can double every year the results is even less frequent. You can have a valuation of $1 billion, but often investors have put more than that amount into it. There are very good companies that grow by 20% every year and it’s already a good dynamic, but we all love superstars and that’s why there’s this fascination”, remarks Jan Brinckmann, professor at Esade and researcher at Esade Entrepreneurship Institute. At Emprenem we have counted up to five Catalan unicorns that, as in any good fable, have stories that are not without happy chapters and others that are more truculent.
There are very good companies that grow 20% every year, but we all love superstars”
Jan Brinckmann Professor d’Esade
The dean of this selection is the online travel agency that you’ve probably ended up looking for plane tickets with at some point. The last fiscal year of eDreams – in its accounts ended at the end of March 2023 – ended up with less loss and more revenue. Although the final figure was 43.3 million euros marked in red, 34% less than the previous year, its sales soared 47%, up to 621 million euros. You have to go back to 2018 to find a profitable year for the company led by American Dana Dunne. In fact, in 2019, the year before the covid pandemic arrived, eDreams was already losing 40.5 million euros, a figure even lower than the last one. Even so, if we look at the last partial publication of results, the financial situation of eDreams glimpses a less dark horizon. During the first half of its fiscal year, which ended on September 30, it lost 1.6 million euros, when in the same period of the previous year it was 24 million in the negative.
The company – which moved its headquarters from Madrid to Luxembourg, although its operational base is in Barcelona – is quite focused on its travel subscription program Prime, which at the end of October had 5.2 million customers . This route brings them more than half of the income and the company is already defined more like a Netflix or a Spotify of tourism than a simple flight and accommodation search engine. eDreams would fit into this drawer ofunicorns that have already gone public and, although the share is not at its historical highs, the titles have indeed been revalued in the last year.
Contacted by Emprenem, the company recalls that in 2024 they celebrate “25 years of innovation and transformation” and that they continue to expand their global presence and technological capabilities: “Looking towards the future with optimism, given the forecast of growth and opportunities expansive”.
All the evils of Glovo
If the travel platform is still haunted by losses, Glovo’s case is even more pronounced. Added to this are fines, court rulings and problems with the legality of which the Catalan home delivery application has never been resolved. His life as a unicorn, a status it achieved in 2019, three years before its acquisition by Delivery Hero, has not been smooth sailing. That same year – the last full financial year with available data – the Barcelona-based company recorded losses of 421 million euros (13% less than in 2021), although sales were 970 million ( 65% more). Glovo is the perfect portrait of the start-up which grows at a frenetic pace, but both in turnover and in red numbers, until investors – in this case through new owners – start to worry and demand profitability.
Delivery Hero already calculates that the cost of the labor sanctions that the company is facing can reach 400 million euros. In fact, while the Social Security circle on the app is getting tighter and tighter, Glovo has managed to get justice to grant it an oxygen balloon. The National Court confirmed last month the suspension of a payment of 64 million euros for fines and settlements on its labor model, which it continues to use today riders autonomous The company then alleged that dealing with this amount would create an “extreme situation” and “short-term liquidity problems”. Glovo assured the court that in 2023 it had still accumulated 209 million euros in losses and that the plummeting of Delivery Hero’s shares “puts at risk the contributions it can make to the company”. A few days before he had announced the closure of its ghost supermarkets in six Spanish cities and the Labor Inspectorate had fined him for breaking the law rider.
“Investors are now much more afraid of losing money with these unicorns. They are burning so much money per month that it is almost impossible to survive without this rate of funding. That is why they have had to reduce expenses and many times these are labor costs. We’ve seen significant staff reductions: I thought these waves were over, but it seems not yet”, remarks Brinckmann. In their opinion, profitability is more important than valuation and without efficiency the money you manage to capture is less important.
Wallbox figures
the condition ofunicorn nor has it made the Catalan brand of electric chargers stop losing money. Wallbox closed 2022 with a turnover of 146.9 million euros, more than double the previous year, but it also more than doubled operating losses, to 136.7 million. There is just over 10 million euros of difference between what the company entered and the red numbers in its annual balance sheet. In addition, last year the manufacturer suffered a drop in sales: if they grew by 24% in the first quarter, they decreased by 16.5% in the second and 26.3% in the third. To gain muscle in difficult times they have incorporated a new partner. We will not know the full picture until February 28, when Wallbox will present its results for 2023, which explains why the company is choosing to keep a low profile in its public interventions and has preferred not to make statements to Emprenem . Wallbox’s stock market valuation has also suffered in recent months: it is now around 270 million, a figure far removed from the more than 1,300 that made it unicorn the fall of 2021.
L’unicorn Catalan that has been more celebratory in recent months is TravelPerk. The business travel platform closed at the end of last month an investment round of 95.4 million euros, which raised its valuation to 1,285 million. “TravelPerk became one unicorn at a crucial moment in the history of the travel industry, at the beginning of 2022, when the pandemic was showing the first signs of decline”, reminds Emprenem its CEO, the Israeli Avi Meir. The truth is that the company has continued to interest its investors after overcoming the deepest downturn in the tourism industry and turned “lemons into lemonade”, as the entrepreneur says. “To become unicorn only accelerated that growth, and the funding allowed the company to invest even more in people and its mission to be the platform for human connection”, highlights Meir.
Becoming a ‘unicorn’ only accelerated this growth and the funding allowed the company to invest even more in people”
Avi Meir Managing Director of TravelPerk
Still, the mystery of TravelPerk remains the numbers. The company was born in 2015, has so far raised 400 million euros, has 1,200 employees and a presence in both Europe and the United States. As they explained, the annualized travel booking volume on their platform for 2023 was about $2 billion, with an increase of more than 70% of revenue and 90% of gross profit, but they do not put numbers to these last two matches. In the Mercantile Registry, we only find the 2022 results of its Spanish subsidiary, with 35 million euros in turnover and 65 million losses, but this information does not represent the overall business of the platform.
The last Catalan ‘unicorn’
The latest company to join the list ofunicorns Catalans was the human resources platform Factorial, which managed to enter it at the end of 2022, when it closed an investment round of 120 million euros. Its CEO, Jordi Romero, assures Emprenem that last year they continued to “grow a lot”, but relatively less than in other years. The reason is that “the environment has changed” and that the ease of getting bigger and bigger will not always be the same as before. As they grow in size, it is expected that the unicorns continue to double the turnover multiple times, but this logic does not always apply. Romero does not share specific figures of what his 2023 was like. The company had set out to reach 90 million euros in turnover, triple the nearly 30 million in the previous year. “We continue to grow a lot in relative ratios, but we value efficiency much more, we’re not settling for scale,” he says.
Last year, Factorial grew for the first time by buying another company, Madrid-based Fuell, which has developed a solution to manage company expenses. With this move, Romero makes it clear that what he is looking for is to get closer and closer to being a platform that solves any of the daily problems of a business, from payroll and vacation requests to time control. “We are still open, we have a small team that continues to look for companies”, says the entrepreneur. He also explains that they are stable both in terms of staff – there are around 1,000 workers – and in the markets where they operate – Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil and the United States – and for now they don’t want to grow geographically. Their goal is to be much more efficient and he assures that for now they are “zero dependent on looking for financing”: “Almost all the money from the round is in the bank”. The profitability dreamed of by all of them unicorns loss-prone has not yet arrived, but Romero is confident they are getting there.
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