There’s a specific kind of asset that sophisticated investors spend careers looking for: something mispriced because most participants haven’t yet connected the present state to the future one. Alejandro Betancourt López found that asset in Spain around 2015. It was a bureaucratic permit called a VTC licence, and it was selling for €5,000.
VTC stands for Vehículos de Turismo con Conductor. These licences allowed private vehicles to carry paying passengers. Taxi unions had kept them marginal for decades. Most industry observers saw them as regulatory relics. EV Powered’s account of the Auro deal traces how Betancourt López began buying them while the market still treated them as noise, eventually assembling a portfolio that would attract €220 million from Uber. His investment philosophy and portfolio background are publicly documented at alejandro-betancourt.com.
What ride-hailing required
Uber launched in San Francisco in 2010. Cabify began operations in Madrid in 2011. Both ran on the same model: mobile app connects passenger to driver, no taxi dispatch involved. To operate legally in Spain at scale, both would need VTC licences. The supply was capped. The demand was coming regardless of whether enough licences were available in the right hands.
Auro Travel was accumulating permits while that demand was still hypothetical. By the time ride-hailing platforms were competing seriously for Spanish market share, Auro held upwards of 3,000 VTC licences and ran a fleet of more than 3,500 drivers across Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Málaga. Cabify entered an exclusivity arrangement with Auro. For a time, Betancourt López’s fleet was the operational infrastructure behind Cabify’s Spanish service.
The court ruling and the competing bids
The Cabify arrangement eventually broke down into a legal dispute over terms. The Spanish Constitutional Court ruled in Dec. 2024 that Auro could end the exclusivity agreement. That freed Auro to deal with Uber directly. “Either they work with us, or we dominate the market,” Betancourt López said of the broader dynamic between Auro and the global platforms. It wasn’t a boast. It was a description of market structure.
Both platforms had reportedly bid around €200 million for Auro by Nov. 2022. Uber’s deal closed Feb. 28, 2025: €220 million for a 30% stake, split between €180 million equity and €40 million debt. For Betancourt López, who maintains an investor profile on Crunchbase, the transaction closed a thesis that had taken the better part of a decade to prove. His broader thinking on leadership and investment decision-making is covered in his Authority Magazine C-suite interview with Alejandro Betancourt López.
The arithmetic of the risk
The permits that originated the Auro story were bought at €5,000 apiece. They were now embedded in a company Uber valued at over €700 million implied by the terms of its minority stake. “When you take a risk,” Betancourt López has said, “you need to be completely aware of the risk you’re taking, with the consequences, and fully understand where you’re going to end up if it goes bad.”
In the Auro case, the downside was a modest capital loss on permits that might never appreciate. The upside was contingent on regulatory trends and the global expansion of ride-hailing. Both proved out. The licences nobody wanted became the licences everyone needed, and the person who bought them first got to set the price. His professional connections and network reflect the same cross-sector perspective that made the original bet possible. Career detail is available via Alejandro Betancourt López on DoYouBuzz.
ibbya329ut4ih024t
Share post:
There’s a specific kind of asset that sophisticated investors spend careers looking for: something mispriced because most participants haven’t yet connected the present state to the future one. Alejandro Betancourt López found that asset in Spain around 2015. It was a bureaucratic permit called a VTC licence, and it was selling for €5,000.
VTC stands for Vehículos de Turismo con Conductor. These licences allowed private vehicles to carry paying passengers. Taxi unions had kept them marginal for decades. Most industry observers saw them as regulatory relics. EV Powered’s account of the Auro deal traces how Betancourt López began buying them while the market still treated them as noise, eventually assembling a portfolio that would attract €220 million from Uber. His investment philosophy and portfolio background are publicly documented at alejandro-betancourt.com.
What ride-hailing required
Uber launched in San Francisco in 2010. Cabify began operations in Madrid in 2011. Both ran on the same model: mobile app connects passenger to driver, no taxi dispatch involved. To operate legally in Spain at scale, both would need VTC licences. The supply was capped. The demand was coming regardless of whether enough licences were available in the right hands.
Auro Travel was accumulating permits while that demand was still hypothetical. By the time ride-hailing platforms were competing seriously for Spanish market share, Auro held upwards of 3,000 VTC licences and ran a fleet of more than 3,500 drivers across Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Málaga. Cabify entered an exclusivity arrangement with Auro. For a time, Betancourt López’s fleet was the operational infrastructure behind Cabify’s Spanish service.
The court ruling and the competing bids
The Cabify arrangement eventually broke down into a legal dispute over terms. The Spanish Constitutional Court ruled in Dec. 2024 that Auro could end the exclusivity agreement. That freed Auro to deal with Uber directly. “Either they work with us, or we dominate the market,” Betancourt López said of the broader dynamic between Auro and the global platforms. It wasn’t a boast. It was a description of market structure.
Both platforms had reportedly bid around €200 million for Auro by Nov. 2022. Uber’s deal closed Feb. 28, 2025: €220 million for a 30% stake, split between €180 million equity and €40 million debt. For Betancourt López, who maintains an investor profile on Crunchbase, the transaction closed a thesis that had taken the better part of a decade to prove. His broader thinking on leadership and investment decision-making is covered in his Authority Magazine C-suite interview with Alejandro Betancourt López.
The arithmetic of the risk
The permits that originated the Auro story were bought at €5,000 apiece. They were now embedded in a company Uber valued at over €700 million implied by the terms of its minority stake. “When you take a risk,” Betancourt López has said, “you need to be completely aware of the risk you’re taking, with the consequences, and fully understand where you’re going to end up if it goes bad.”
In the Auro case, the downside was a modest capital loss on permits that might never appreciate. The upside was contingent on regulatory trends and the global expansion of ride-hailing. Both proved out. The licences nobody wanted became the licences everyone needed, and the person who bought them first got to set the price. His professional connections and network reflect the same cross-sector perspective that made the original bet possible. Career detail is available via Alejandro Betancourt López on DoYouBuzz.