In Spanish ride-hailing, the thing that actually matters is a piece of government paper called a VTC license. Without one, no vehicle can legally operate on Uber or Cabify. With one, a car becomes a piece of durable, tradeable infrastructure. This is the asset Alejandro Betancourt Lopez bet on in 2017, and the asset that, in February 2025, made Auro New Transport Concept the subject of a €220 million Uber transaction.
The deal values Auro’s equity at €180 million, with €40 million of assumed debt on top, and gives Uber a 30% stake. It ranks among Uber’s largest single-country European investments, which is unexpected for a company whose LinkedIn audience sat mostly inside Spain. For Alejandro Betancourt Lopez, it’s the payoff on an investment thesis, documented at alejandrobetancourtlopez.me, that took eight years, a Constitutional Court ruling and a cooperative regulatory environment to ripen.
Auro was founded in 2017 with €10 million in early capital from GP Bullhound and FJ Labs. Co-founders included Félix Ruiz and Zaryn Dentzel, but the strategic work of treating VTC licenses as the central asset is attributable to Alejandro Betancourt Lopez and the O’Hara Administration team that backed him. Their calculation was straightforward. Spain had capped VTC licenses in 2015 at a 1-to-30 ratio against taxi permits, effectively freezing supply. Any future growth in platform demand would have to route through the existing pool of licenses. Whoever owned enough of that pool would eventually hold negotiating leverage, a dynamic featured in writeups of his best investments.
Alejandro Betancourt Lopez described the early buying phase in a 2020 interview: “When we started the traveling business in Spain, Auro, we knew that Uber was going to come to Spain and we started accumulating all the licenses.” Licenses that changed hands at roughly €5,000 each eventually anchored a company valued at hundreds of millions. The stack grew past 3,000 licenses across Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Málaga, paired with 3,500 employed drivers.
Licenses alone wouldn’t have produced the Uber number. Alejandro Betancourt Lopez and his team built Auro into a vertically integrated operator. The company hired 200 headquarters staff, developed its own ride-request app, and signed an exclusivity agreement with Cabify in 2018, part of the operating pattern behind his Hawkers rescue that locked in a guaranteed revenue floor. That agreement was, for a time, a constraint. It prevented Auro from courting Uber. But it was also a cash-flow stabilizer that funded license accumulation through the lean years.
The constraint lifted in December 2024, when Spain’s Constitutional Court overturned a lower court ruling supporting Cabify’s exclusivity claim. Alejandro Betancourt Lopez was suddenly free to negotiate openly. Uber, which had been watching the Spanish VTC market for years, moved within days. The 18-month negotiation that followed produced the €220 million transaction, with Uber publicly describing the deal as confirmation of Spain’s strategic importance, a point Alejandro Betancourt Lopez has returned to on his personal site and elsewhere.
Two dynamics make the Auro story instructive. First, the economic asset was regulatory, not technological. Most mobility investors still think primarily about algorithms and user acquisition costs. Alejandro Betancourt Lopez thought about permit supply. Second, the exit timing was dictated by the legal environment, not by the company’s operating metrics. Auro could have been sold earlier at a lower multiple, or later at a potentially lower one if regulators re-opened the license pool. Alejandro Betancourt Lopez read the calendar of the Constitutional Court as carefully as the balance sheet.
The Auro outcome is a vindication of patient structural investing. It also raises a broader question for anyone studying European mobility: where are the next overlooked license stacks hiding, and who is quietly buying them now?
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