More than three million workers in Spain already benefit from corporate pension plans. The vast majority work for large companies. For the millions employed by small and medium-sized businesses, those plans have remained practically inaccessible: blocked by manual processes, fragmented administration, and the operational cost of running them.<\/p>\n
Seville-based Arca Digital was built to fix that. The startup has raised \u20ac1 million in a seed round co-led by Spanish fund DraperB1<\/a> and Berlin-based Robin Capital<\/a>, with additional participation from Belgian fund Newschool.vc<\/a> and a group of fintech angels, including Fernando Cabello-Astolfi<\/a>, founder of Aplazame and Devengo, Iv\u00e1n Pe\u00f1a, founder of Ritmo, and Juan Montero, founder of Fence.<\/p>\n API-first model removing complexity<\/p>\n The founding team brings direct experience across the sectors that Arca Digital aims to connect. Sergio Rodrigues Valcarce<\/a>, the CEO, previously did VC deals at Telef\u00f3nica Ventures before dropping out to start the company. Gonzalo Concepci\u00f3n Meg\u00eda<\/a> is a former backend engineer at CoverManager, the hospitality tech platform acquired by Zenchef. Adri\u00e1n Esteban Pag\u00e9s<\/a> was Risk Lead for Casavo\u2019s Spanish operations. Two of the three founders are Spanish; one is Portuguese.<\/p>\n The company operates as an API-first infrastructure layer between pension fund managers and SMEs, automating the core operations, including employee enrollment, contributions, withdrawals, and transfers, that have historically made these plans too burdensome for smaller companies to offer.<\/p>\n Asset managers gain a new distribution channel without incurring additional operational complexity. HR software and payroll platforms can embed pension products directly into their existing workflows.<\/p>\n The Spanish pension tech market has so far produced only partial solutions, according to the founders. Traditional managers, such as Caser Seguros, CaixaBank, BBVA, and Mapfre, have built technology almost entirely around their own back-office operations, leaving employers to treat pension plans as an administrative chore and employees largely sidelined from the experience.<\/p>\n Arca Digital\u2019s pitch addresses all three sides of that problem at once. \u201cOur competitive edge lies in our ability to solve the friction points across the entire value chain, spanning the fund managers, the employers, and the employees, to create a model that is both profitable and truly employee-centric,\u201d Valcarce says.<\/p>\n What are the future plans?<\/p>\n The company plans to consolidate in Spain over the next few years before expanding the model to other Southern European markets facing similar structural gaps in retirement savings coverage.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are building the go-to ecosystem where companies can empower their workforce and where employees can finally consolidate their fragmented retirement savings into a single, high-tech platform,\u201d concludes Valcarce.<\/p>\n \u201cRetirement plan infrastructure has remained stagnant for decades, leaving millions of employees underserved,\u201d says Robin Haak,<\/a> General Partner at Robin Capital, which is making its first investment in Spain with this deal. It has previously backed pension tech companies Penzilla and Xaver in Germany, suggesting a deliberate thesis being built across European markets where occupational pension reform is accelerating.<\/p>\n DraperB1, the Valencia-based fund that is part of the Draper Venture Network, cited the company\u2019s early traction. \u201cTheir initial traction and clear product orientation reinforce our conviction in this young and ambitious team,\u201d adds Jon Etxeberr\u00eda<\/a>, VC Investor at DraperB1.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than three million workers in Spain already benefit from corporate pension plans. The vast majority work for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":384105,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[114,63,268,1494,1756,85,46,43,266,267,303],"class_list":{"0":"post-384104","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-personal-finance","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-finance","11":"tag-fintech","12":"tag-funding","13":"tag-il","14":"tag-israel","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-personal-finance","17":"tag-personalfinance","18":"tag-startups"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=384104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/384105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}