Loogic English

A good piece of has arrived for Oportunista, the website for online promotions and discounts, that has recently received an investment from a group of various business angels including Gustavo Garcia, founder of BuyVip, and Albert Feliú of InfoJobs. The founders of the project, Rodrigo Giménez-Rico and Alexandra Klein, plan to use the funds to expand the list of businesses in the health and leisure sectors in Spain that are already present in the portal. They also plan to make significant usability improvements to the website and are set to come out of beta in September.

We first wrote about Oportunista.com last October and since then have had the opportunity to speak with the founders in various occasions and at events such as SeedRocket that have been important for them to meet private investors including the ones that finally bet on their idea. The project is quickly nearing a time when it can compete with other big players like Cuponeo, that we spoke of recently.

There is already 28.5 million dollars invested in the web classifieds site OLX, led by Fabrice Grinda and Alec Oxenford. OLX is now closing on its third round of financing put together by General Catalyst Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Founders Fund and DN Capital for a total of 5 million dollars.

As noted by TechCrunch, OLX is quickly becoming recognized as a global competitor of Craigslist with the site already translated in 39 languages and presence in 87 countries. The site’s popularity is greatest in countries including Spain, India, Portugal, Mexico, China and the Phillipines.

With the continuing growth of this project and additional infusion of capital they have received, we might soon be able to say that OLX is the leader in this sector. Moreover, OLX has stated that the funds from this investment will serve in their efforts for new acquisitions (like the purchase of Chinese classifieds portal Edeng), improvements in the website, further global expansion and to continue with marketing initiatives.

The race continues between Privalia and BuyVip. On this occasion, the competition is not in the growth of users or revenues, but in the amount of funding received. A little more than a month ago, we covered the news of the investment of 14.9 million euros in BuyVip by Kennet Partners and now we get the news of Privalia receiving 8 million euros from Insight Venture Partners and Highland Capital Partners.

Our take on it: Two American investment funds investing in a Spanish startup is a great news for us. This investment confirms the fact that the business of online outlets is perhaps the most promising internet business in Spain today.

Amongst the initial investors who betted for the project are Luis Martin Cabiedes who confirmed me that he has sold his sold his stake in the company, something that fits well with his investment philosophy: “I think that a business angel should know when to enter and exit”. Luis participated until the third round of funding which was also participated by Nauta Capital and fetched 4 million euros. Now we expect that with the returns from this exit, he will continue to invest in internet startups, something that he has done with a lot of success until now.

Seen in Expansion.

We have talked about Vinogusto (available in English) on other occasions and now we return to it as it has closed its third round of funding with 355.000 euros that add up to the 150.000 euros received in 2007 and 200.000 euros received in 2008.  With 705.000 euros of total investment, the project has achieved a good base of funding that should help it become the leader of the social networks on the subject of wines, at least in Europe.

It’s interesting to see the comparison with other wine related social networks that we know of here: snooth, vinogusto, vinix.it, yvinos and descorchados. The competition is clearly between Vinogusto and Snooth which has just received an investment of one million dollars as mentioned by François Derbaix, and who practically double the investment received by Vinogusto but the traffic is about the same.

The 355.000 euros of investment in Vinogusto come from the previous investors in the company and new individual investors who enter into the business as partners.

It’s good to set ambitious goals but multiplying revenues by 10 times from last year perhaps doesn’t fit with the current state of advertising in these times of economic crises and with the estimated levels of investment in advertising in Spain. Will we start seeing banner ads all over Tuenti? Will they start using Adsense? Until now, the advertising campaigns on the site have been few and far in between and have been mainly based in the events section. Not sure if that way of managing advertising can scale to multiply revenues by 10.

Since long we haven’t talked about Tuenti and taking advantage of the publication of Tuenti’s revenue figures quoted by Zaryn Dentzel in BusinessWeek, let’s go through some things about Tuenti that didn’t get a mention in 2008.

The most relevant without doubt is the one related with their last round of investment in September. We have learned more details since then about the investment. Sources at Tuenti haven’t disclosed but it seems that related investors or companies haven’t had much problem in filtering information. From what has been published until now, the closest account is the one published by Cotizalia in December, which said: Grupo Timon, the parent company of Grupo Prisa, has become the latest investor in Tuenti through its venture capital arm Qualitas Equity Partners and that Borja Perez Arauna, director of investments in Grupo Timon, will take one of the six seats on the company’s board of directors, as per sources close to the deal. Qualitas Equity Partners thus takes a 16.98% stake in the company with an investment of about 10 million euros.

Around the end of 2008, there was also a lot of talk about the competition between Tuenti and Facebook, mostly about the evolution of the global giant of  social networking which has already taken one of the top positions in Alexa for Spain. Regarding this, I think we will see important migrations of users in the future between Tuenti and Facebook, surely in funtion of one social network becoming popular in different cities or as per user types. But both the social networks will continue to grow, although perhaps not with the same intensity as they have throughout 2008. Without a doubt, this year will be a year to search for profitability now that the critical mass of users has long been reached.

Photo credit: Tuentiadictos.