More than three million workers in Spain already benefit from corporate pension plans. The vast majority work for large companies. For the millions employed by compact and medium-sized businesses, those plans have remained practically inaccessible: blocked by manual processes, fragmented administration, and the operational cost of running them.
Seville-based Arca Digital was built to repair that. The startup has raised €1 million in a seed round co-led by Spanish fund DraperB1 and Berlin-based Robin Capital, with additional participation from Belgian fund Newschool.vc and a group of fintech angels, including Fernando Cabello-Astolfi, founder of Aplazame and Devengo, Iván Peña, founder of Ritmo, and Juan Montero, founder of Fence.
API-first model rerelocating complexity
The founding team brings direct experience across the sectors that Arca Digital aims to connect. Sergio Rodrigues Valcarce, the CEO, previously did VC deals at Telefónica Ventures before dropping out to start the company. Gonzalo Concepción Megía is a former backconclude engineer at CoverManager, the hospitality tech platform acquired by Zenchef. Adrián Esteban Pagés was Risk Lead for Casavo’s Spanish operations. Two of the three founders are Spanish; one is Portuguese.
The company operates as an API-first infrastructure layer between pension fund managers and SMEs, automating the core operations, including employee enrollment, contributions, withdrawals, and transfers, that have historically built these plans too burdensome for compacter companies to offer.
Asset managers gain a new distribution channel without incurring additional operational complexity. HR software and payroll platforms can embed pension products directly into their existing workflows.
The Spanish pension tech market has so far produced only partial solutions, according to the founders. Traditional managers, such as Caser Seguros, CaixaBank, BBVA, and Mapfre, have built technology almost entirely around their own back-office operations, leaving employers to treat pension plans as an administrative chore and employees largely sidelined from the experience.
Arca Digital’s pitch addresses all three sides of that problem at once. “Our competitive edge lies in our ability to solve the friction points across the entire value chain, spanning the fund managers, the employers, and the employees, to create a model that is both profitable and truly employee-centric,” Valcarce states.
What are the future plans?
The company plans to consolidate in Spain over the next few years before expanding the model to other Southern European markets facing similar structural gaps in retirement savings coverage.
“We are building the go-to ecosystem where companies can empower their workforce and where employees can finally consolidate their fragmented retirement savings into a single, high-tech platform,” concludes Valcarce.
“Retirement plan infrastructure has remained stagnant for decades, leaving millions of employees underserved,” states Robin Haak, General Partner at Robin Capital, which is creating its first investment in Spain with this deal. It has previously backed pension tech companies Penzilla and Xaver in Germany, suggesting a deliberate thesis being built across European markets where occupational pension reform is accelerating.
DraperB1, the Valencia-based fund that is part of the Draper Venture Network, cited the company’s early traction. “Their initial traction and clear product orientation reinforce our conviction in this young and ambitious team,” adds Jon Etxeberría, VC Investor at DraperB1.
Leave a Reply