We are pleased to announce its investment in Smart Protection, the intellectual property protection company.

Nauta has just led the €5.2M Series A round in Smart Protection, alongside existing investors Wayra (Telefonica’s open innovation hub), JME Ventures, Bankinter Innovation Foundation and Big Sur Ventures.

Smart Protection is a cybersecurity SaaS solution that protects intellectual property (IP, e.g., live events, audiovisual content, written publications) and branded products and services online.

They did not know it was impossible, so they did it

Back in 2015 Manuel Moregal and Javier Capilla noticed that finding the unauthorised distribution of a film online was easier than finding the authorised version, but there were very few tools worldwide for IP owners to solve such a puzzle.

Keen to help, they founded Smart Protection, developing innovative technology and were selected by Wayra, Telefónica’s accelerator, which seemed like a dream to them in those early days. Soon after they were joined by Javier Perea, a successful entrepreneur and accomplished manager. This combination of ingenuity and experience, down-to-earth attitude and global ambition formed a world-class team.

Yes, they are Nautable!

Besides the usual guidelines for venture capital investments (awesome, ambitious team; significant job to be done; large and/or rapidly growing market; sustainable competitive advantages), we at Nauta specially like those companies that can prove capital efficiency, i.e., companies where the value proposition and business model can be validated by using a moderate amount of capital, provided as per the company’s actual phase of development. This is both to help founders protect their equity and also to improve our fund returns.

When we performed our deep-dive research into Smart Protection they ticked all the boxes in our checklist.

‍Market Opportunity: Piracy and counterfeiting severely impact both revenues (global losses c.$1Tn in 2020) and brand reputation of companies that produce intellectual property or branded products. The internet is the preferred channel of pirates and counterfeiters given its worldwide reach and the low chance of getting punished. We found that there is a limited number of technology-based competitors for online brand and IP protection.

Team: The team from the management to the operators is hard-working, unassuming, experienced and very capable, as well as committed and ready for scaling Smart Protection into a dominant player of the industry.

Sustainable competitive advantage: Smart Protection has developed a world-class tech platform able to take down illegal content from the internet in an efficient and broad manner that, we think, matches or surpasses its competitors. Their solution has earned the trust of partners such as Google and Facebook and the clients speak positively of its speed, efficiency, transparency and reach in removing pirated content.

Capital Efficiency: The company has built a promising business by using a small amount of capital. This was possible by their delivery exceeding their clients’ expectations, resulting in great figures in acquisition, retention and expansion of their client base.

In summary, we are very happy to count Smart Protection as part of Nauta’s portfolio and to support them in their challenge to fend off the online pirates. We hope it becomes a great success story for the fund.