Two of the companies tied to Alejandro Betancourt López drew money from the same Swedish fund. One is a payments startup and the other a padel booking app.
Optimizer Invest, a Swedish investment fund with a base in the southern Spanish city of Marbella, was among the earlier backers of Easy Payment Gateway before Betancourt and Andreas Mihalovits led the company’s funding round in July 2017, Baker Tilly reported. Two years later, the same fund put money into a €6 million round in Playtomic, which counts Alejandro Betancourt López among its founding partners according to his résumé.
How the Overlap Formed
Easy Payment Gateway was founded in 2014. It built a single connection to more than 200 international payment options for online merchants and had raised €11 million over four rounds by 2017. Its earlier backers also included Ran Tushia, an angel investor in Wix.com, and Wix founder Avishai Abrahami.
Playtomic shares no customers or products with the payments company, yet both drew money from a fund that kept coming back. Optimizer Invest returned for the app’s €56 million Series C in December 2021, a round that GP Bullhound led and the U.K.’s Claret Capital Partners joined, EU-Startups reported. The 2019 round also brought in private investors including Andre Lavold, Félix Ruiz and Magnus Gottas.
Mihalovits was already an investor in Easy Payment Gateway and “significantly increased his shareholding” in the 2017 round, SBC News reported. He was doubling down on the company.
What Founders Ask Alejandro Betancourt López For
“They ask me a lot to put in, to get put in touch with other companies I’m related to so they can interchange ideas and exchange ideas,” he told an interviewer in 2023.
Founders ask “what I think about where the market is going,” Alejandro Betancourt said. “They really want to show me their capabilities,” he added. Much of their time with him goes to explaining the plans they are putting in place and asking what feedback he can give them.
Alejandro Betancourt López manages those relationships through O’Hara Administration, which his résumé names as the holding group for his investments in Spain and abroad. “I always like to invest where I get to meet the key people,” he said. A founder at one company can reach a founder at another through him. Funds tend to travel the same route between his companies, too.