Sometime around 2015, a pile of bureaucratic paperwork sat uncollected in a Spanish government office. VTC licences, the permits that allowed private vehicles to carry paying passengers, were selling for as little as €5,000 each. Taxi unions had kept them marginal for decades. Most of the transport industry ignored them entirely.
Alejandro Betancourt López didn’t ignore them. He began buying, quietly and steadily, long before anyone else recognised what these permits might become. EV Powered’s feature on how Betancourt López built the fleet Uber paid €220M to access sets out the full arc: over months of accumulation, his company Auro Travel assembled more than 2,000 VTC licences. Uber was going to enter Spain. Cabify was already there. Both needed licences. The supply was capped. Whoever held a commanding share of that supply would dictate the terms.
The calculated bet
“When we started the travelling business in Spain, Auro, we knew that Uber was going to come to Spain and we started accumulating all the licences,” Betancourt López has said. “It was a gamble, but it was a calculated gamble because we knew that the market was going to shift to the private riding industry instead of taxis.”
The logic was drawn from a principle he’d applied across other investments: identify the chokepoint in the value chain before anyone else sees it. Standard Oil controlled refineries, not wells. Onassis owned ships, not oil. The VTC licences occupied an analogous position. Every vehicle a platform wanted on Spanish roads had to be covered by one of those permits. Control the permits, and the pace of market entry was yours to set. His full investment track record across these kinds of structural bets is documented in his Alejandro Betancourt López investor profile.
Building the fleet
Buying licences was step one. Auro then matched each permit to a vehicle and a driver, with operations established in Madrid and Barcelona before the company expanded to Valencia and Málaga. By full scale, Auro employed more than 3,500 drivers and held upwards of 3,000 licences across Spain’s four largest cities. The company built a division called Arrow to lease VTC permits to other operators. Arrow generated revenue from the licence portfolio regardless of how many Auro cars were moving passengers on any given day, which made the business considerably more defensible.
The complexity involved in building Auro’s infrastructure served as a natural barrier. Replication would have required years even for a well-funded rival, given the one-to-one regulatory matching between permit and vehicle, driver certification requirements, and multi-jurisdictional compliance across four cities. His broader approach to finding and holding these kinds of structural positions is detailed in a C-suite interview on Authority Magazine.
Cabify, competition, and the court
Cabify entered an exclusivity agreement with Auro. For a time, Auro supplied the cars and drivers operating under the Cabify brand across multiple Spanish cities. The arrangement eventually collapsed into a legal dispute over terms. A ruling came from the Spanish Constitutional Court in Dec. 2024: Auro was free to end the exclusivity agreement. That decision cleared the path to engaging Uber directly.
“Either they work with us, or we dominate the market,” Betancourt López said. The statement wasn’t bravado. It reflected the structural reality of a regulated industry where licences were scarce and demand kept growing. His professional background and range of ventures are profiled on LinkedIn.
The Uber deal
Both Uber and Cabify made acquisition offers around Nov. 2022, each reportedly around €200 million. The deal that closed came on Feb. 28, 2025: Uber acquired a 30% stake in Auro for €220 million, comprising €180 million in equity and €40 million in debt. Uber secured access to a fleet, a driver network, and the largest VTC licence portfolio in Spain. For Betancourt López, who describes himself as Auro’s founder and leading shareholder, the transaction closed a thesis that had taken the better part of a decade to prove. The full scope of his investment activity is compiled in his profile on DoYouBuzz.
Permits that had traded at €5,000 each were now embedded in a company Uber valued at over €700 million implied. “Nothing risked, nothing conquered,” Betancourt López has said. The Auro deal is the most public illustration of what he means.