Kibo Ventures

Kibo Ventures

Kibo Ventures was founded in 2011 by Aquilino Peña, Javier Torremocha, and Juan López Santamaría—operators who had previously built, scaled, and sold companies including Sentido and Amena. Peña brought experience from Ericsson and a personal track record as an angel investor. Rather than positioning as a generalist Iberian fund, the founders deliberately structured Kibo as a technology-focused early-stage investor that could write meaningful first checks—typically €1–5 million—when domestic venture capital in Spain remained scarce. The firm raised its debut fund of €45 million that year, at a time when few Spanish-domiciled funds had credible commitments from European institutional LPs. Kibo deploys capital across enterprise software, AI/ML, fintech, digital health, and mobility. The strategy centers on leading or co-leading Series A rounds in Spain, Portugal, and Israel, with selective exposure to other Southern European ecosystems. The firm's partnership model emphasizes syndication with top-tier international funds—confirmed co-investors include Accel, Balderton Capital, and Insight Partners. Portfolio companies have included Flywire (payments), Carto (geospatial analytics), Devo (cybersecurity/SIEM), and Jobandtalent (digital staffing). Kibo typically reserves substantial follow-on capacity to support portfolio companies through Series B and beyond, often maintaining pro-rata rights alongside larger global funds that arrive at later stages. Kibo manages a fund family that has grown from €45 million to over €300 million in aggregate commitments across multiple vintages, per public record. The firm operates from Madrid with a compact partnership group. In 2021, Kibo launched its third flagship vehicle, underscoring continued institutional backing from LPs including the European Investment Fund and various Spanish corporates. Alongside fund commitments, the firm has occasionally structured deal-by-deal vehicles for specific co-investment opportunities, though its core operation remains the flagship early-stage fund series. Kibo occupies a specific structural niche: it functions as the institutional-quality Series A platform in a region where that role was historically filled by a mix of angel syndicates, small national funds, and occasional opportunistic checks from London or Berlin. By concentrating the partnership's own operating experience in telecoms, SaaS, and marketplaces, Kibo offers portfolio companies operational guidance that many pure-finance VC firms in the region cannot match. The partnership's continuity—co-founders still active after a decade—provides stability that matters to institutional LPs allocating to Southern Europe for the first time.