On June 11, Madrid hosted the first edition of Puentes de Capital: Family Offices Iberia & Latinoamérica 2026, a gathering driven by Kreab España with institutional sponsorship from ICEX and in collaboration with Deale. The event had a clear goal: to bring together single- and multi-family offices, private capital managers, and institutional investors from both sides of the Atlantic to discuss three themes — cross-border investment, philanthropy and impact investing, and new ways to energize the economy through venture capital and SMEs.
Our CEO, Gerard García, had the pleasure of moderating the day's first panel, “New Ways to Energize the Economy: Spain, the Great Opportunity for Private Capital and the Business Community in Europe,” with Carlos Fisch (Seaya), Raúl Royo (Invext), Rafael Alberca (Family Enterprise Partners), and Manuel Serna Igual (Skypointer Venture Partners).
Three ideas from that conversation are worth holding on to. Each offers a different reading of the moment the Spanish market is going through and the role family capital is playing.
Spain is an opportunity: a bridge to Europe and a destination for Latin American capital
The first idea that ran through the entire panel was the confirmation of Spain as a strategic hub between Europe and Latin America. It's not a new message, but it's coming back with more force and institutional backing. The balanced growth of the Spanish economy, combined with the increasing professionalization of private capital managers and the country's European leadership in sectors such as deep tech and impact investing, has turned the Spanish ecosystem into a market where limited partners with family business roots can grow and expand their ties between Europe and Latin America.
For Latin American family offices, Spain is an operational bridge to Europe: a market with cultural affinity, a stable regulatory framework, competitive taxation for certain structures, and an SME landscape that needs patient capital. For European family offices, Spain and Latin America are a natural combination: the former as an operating base, the latter as an expansion destination.
And yet — and this was one of the recurring observations of the day — there is still a long way to go. Cross-border capital flows between Iberia and Latin America are far from their potential, and events like this exist precisely to accelerate them.
Family offices want technology (and it's no longer an investment vertical)
The second idea was perhaps the most relevant in terms of what is changing in family capital's investment mandate. The panel's conclusion: technology is no longer an investment vertical; it's horizontal and cuts across everything.
A few years ago, a family office might have had a “tech pocket” separate from the rest of its asset allocation — an allocation to tech venture capital that sat alongside investments in real estate, industrials, agribusiness, or services. Today that separation has become artificial. An industrial company can be an investment opportunity specifically because it has a defensible data platform. A professional services business can be acquirable today because it has hidden operating margin that can be captured with AI. A retailer can be valuable because it has a customer data asset that a buyer can activate.
The consequence for Spanish business owners is direct: your company's digital maturity is no longer a nice-to-have in a pitch to a family office; it's a central pillar of the valuation. And that holds regardless of the sector you operate in.
Local access, professionalization, and patience: the differentiating advantage of family capital
The third idea returned to what sets the family office apart from the classic institutional fund. European and Latin American family offices don't compete with funds for the same deals — they compete with a different value proposition.
Local access: trust isn't built from a distance. The best opportunities come from proximity, from understanding local realities, and from cultivating long-term relationships with business-owning families where they make their decisions. A Latin American family office that wants to invest in a Spanish SME based in Valencia needs bicultural teams, trusted local partners, and a physical presence on the ground.
Professionalization: the modern family office is not a wealth pool managed by hand. It's an asset manager with investment processes, clear metrics, structured governance, and, increasingly, integrated philanthropy and impact investing agendas. The next generation is playing a decisive role in that professionalization.
Patience: the differentiating lever. Whereas a private equity fund must deliver an exit within 5–7 years under its limited partners' mandate, a family office can sustain holding periods of 10 to 20 years. For family businesses that value continuity and a long-term project, that difference is decisive.
This combination — access, professionalization, and patience — is what explains why, in the Spanish market, family offices are currently paying an average multiple of 5.02x EBITDA, second only to strategic buyers. It's a figure that shows how they have established themselves as one of the most active and best-positioned buyers in the lower mid-market. If you want to better understand the role of the family office and other buyer profiles, we've published a guide on types of investors in M&A. And for how EBITDA multiples by investor type are built, see the detailed analysis with data from the Spanish market.
The takeaway: an extraordinary business community, but you have to go out and find the capital
The line Gerard used to close the panel sums up the feeling of the whole day: we have an extraordinary business community, but we have to go out and find the capital and explain how good our companies are.
Spain has opportunities. Capital — family, institutional, patient — is available and looking. But the connection between the company that wants to grow or sell and the investor who wants to deploy capital still depends too much on personal networks, opaque intermediaries, and manual processes. Accelerating that connection, professionalizing it, and opening it up is exactly why platforms like Deale exist — and why initiatives like Puentes de Capital are necessary.
Capital already has a way across. What's missing is for Spanish companies to cross over too.
Puentes de Capital: Family Offices Iberia & Latinoamérica 2026 was organized by Kreab España with institutional sponsorship from ICEX and in collaboration with Deale. The event featured three panels, an institutional presentation by Elisa Carbonell (CEO of ICEX), and closing remarks by Jordi Colgan (Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Spain's Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and José María Blasco Ruiz (ICEX).
