Raise, Build, Repeat: founders stories
At this edition of Bits & Pretzels Valencia, Andrés Nieto (weVLC) and Martine Rooth (Smiler, Solvo) share the unpolished version of their founder journeys: how they raised millions, built teams and scaled, what actually worked, what didn't, and what they'd do differently today. After the talks there's time for honest conversations and high-quality networking with founders, operators, angels and investors from Valencia's startup community, with drinks and bites included (thanks to our dear sponsor Helloprint!).
About the speakers:
Andrés Nieto’s entrepreneurial journey started far from home, as a business development intern at Helloprint in Rotterdam, where he worked on new business models across teams. Within six months he was offered a move to the company’s Valencia office as Growth & Sales Manager for Spain, leading the Spanish sales and customer service teams. In Valencia he kept seeing the same problem: the young international talent moving to the city struggled to find a good, well-managed home. So he decided to build the solution himself. In 2021 he founded weVLC, which buys undervalued apartments, renovates them and runs them as coliving homes. weVLC brings local and international investors together with in-house execution and keeps operating the homes it creates, with community at the centre. In five years he has grown the company from an idea into a team of 15+ people, brought more than 50 apartments back to life and invested over €30M of investor capital, with a roadmap towards €100M.
Martine Rooth’s entrepreneurial journey started in healthcare, not in tech. Trained as a physiotherapist, she kept seeing how much better care could be with the right technology, so she decided to build it herself and bootstrapped her first company for five years. In 2018 she sold her shares to Solvo, a Dutch group that combined an online healthcare marketplace, some of the largest health content platforms in the Netherlands (around 6 million organic visitors a month) and an agency, and she became its CEO and shareholder of the group. She took Solvo from loss-making to break-even, and in 2019 it was acquired by Fortune 500 company Ahold Delhaize. She then co-founded Smiler, an online photography marketplace that partners with brands such as Booking.com Viator and Heineken. Smiler closed three funding rounds in two years and raised €15M. With more than 15 years as an entrepreneur, two successful exits and over €20M raised from top VCs, she now lives in Valencia, where she helps founders with fundraising, go-to-market and scaling as an advisor, coach and angel investor, and chairs Code-V's entrepreneurs panel.