Few investors would have looked at Spain’s heavily regulated taxi market in 2017 and seen opportunity. Ride-hailing services faced steep barriers to entry, with vehicle-for-hire licenses strictly capped and fiercely protected by incumbent taxi operators.
Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López saw something different: a chance to build value precisely because the barriers were so high.
That contrarian bet led to the founding of Auro Travel, now Spain’s largest fleet operator for private hire vehicles. What began as a license-acquisition play has grown into a company that attracted buyout offers reportedly worth €200 million from both Uber and Cabify in late 2022. The journey offers a case study in how regulatory arbitrage, executed with patience and precision, can create substantial enterprise value.
Reading the Market Before It Existed
Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López had watched Uber’s expansion across Europe and Latin America with interest. Spain, however, presented a unique puzzle. Unlike the United States or United Kingdom, where ride-sharing companies could launch with relatively few regulatory obstacles, Spanish law required operators to hold specific licenses for each vehicle offering private transportation services. Madrid alone had roughly 8,000 such licenses, and their number was fixed.
“We foresaw a time, like today, when these licenses would be very desirable,” Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López explained. “It was a high-risk bet because we weren’t certain that market conditions would change in our favor, but we felt it was an important bet.”
The logic was clear, even if the execution was not. If global ride-hailing giants eventually entered Spain—and there was every reason to believe they would—they would need these licenses to operate. Someone who owned a critical mass of permits would hold a valuable asset, whether as an operator or as a supplier to larger platforms.
Auro began accumulating licenses methodically. At the time, many permit holders viewed them as secondary assets with limited standalone value, making acquisition possible at reasonable prices. Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López moved before the market recognized what he saw coming. “The advantage we had is the vision before it happened in Spain and we acquired these licenses before the market consolidated,” he noted. “The cost of entry or the barriers of entry were much higher for them because they were late.”
The Arrow Strategy: Turning Licenses Into Infrastructure
Owning 2,000 ride-sharing licenses created options, but the question remained: how best to monetize them? Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López and his team developed a two-pronged approach that would prove essential to Auro’s growth. Rather than simply operating as a direct competitor to Uber and Cabify, the company created a division called Arrow to lease permits to those same multinational platforms.
The model was elegant in its simplicity. Arrow would license Auro’s ride-sharing permits to companies seeking to operate in major Spanish cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Malaga. This allowed global ride-hailing apps to expand their Spanish footprint without tackling the complex and time-consuming process of acquiring licenses themselves. For Auro, it meant steady revenue regardless of which consumer-facing app ultimately won market share.
“Shortly after the founding of Auro, the company created a division called Arrow to lease its licenses to partner companies such as Uber and Cabify that wish to have a presence in major Spanish markets,” reported The American Reporter. Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López had effectively positioned his company as infrastructure rather than just another app competing for riders.
The approach reflected a broader investment philosophy. “It’s the way you place yourself in any industry that can capture that margin and create that value for yourself or for the investors,” Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López said in a 2025 interview. He drew parallels to historical shifts in the oil industry: “At the beginning, the refiners were the ones making the profit. Then oil became a scarcity, and then the value was in the producer. Then shipping, when war came—who had the means of transporting goods made his fortune.”
Auro’s license portfolio functioned similarly. While ride-hailing apps fought expensive battles for customer loyalty and driver recruitment, Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López controlled a resource they all needed. The company grew to directly employ approximately 100 staff while coordinating activities for over 3,000 drivers.
Building the fleet to match the licenses required significant capital. Auro secured more than $10 million in a 2019 funding round, with investors including GP Bullhound, FJ Labs, and several Spanish entrepreneurs with transportation industry experience. By 2020, the company had assembled over 2,000 vehicles—Spain’s largest private car fleet—ready to deploy once pandemic restrictions lifted.
From Supplier to Operator
The pandemic tested Auro’s model severely. With travel demand collapsed, the company’s 2,000 vehicles sat idle. “We have more than 2,000 vehicles, all of which are parked because there’s been no demand for travel,” Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López acknowledged during that period. “Managing our resources in this challenging environment is our primary focus right now.”
But the downtime provided opportunity. Auro used the pause to develop its own consumer-facing mobile app, transforming the company from a pure B2B license provider into a direct competitor. The app launched in late 2021, allowing riders to book Auro vehicles without routing through Uber or Cabify. “I see many ways we can grow,” Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López said at the time. “We’re in the process of launching our own app, which will create opportunities for us to be an operator ourselves, not just providing licenses to other operators.”
The dual model—supplying competitors while also competing against them—created leverage. When Auro’s fleet of 1,100 drivers threatened to switch from Cabify to Uber or Bolt in early 2022, the Spanish unicorn faced the prospect of losing ground in its home market. Reuters reported that the shift could push Cabify to second place in Madrid, where it had operated for a decade. Auro had become powerful enough to reshape competitive dynamics simply by choosing which platform to prioritize.
That leverage attracted serious acquisition interest. Both Uber and Cabify reportedly submitted bids of approximately €200 million to acquire Auro in November 2022. The offers validated Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López’s original thesis: licenses acquired before the market matured had become extraordinarily valuable assets.
Lessons in Regulatory Arbitrage
Auro’s trajectory illustrates principles Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López applies across his portfolio. Identifying where value will migrate within an industry—and positioning capital there before others recognize the shift—has driven returns at Hawkers, his sunglasses venture, and across earlier energy investments.
“Where the value in the chain is going to be next, we like to be there first,” he explained. “Anything where we see we’re going to be where the revenue’s going to be, we want to be first there and have that vision.”
For Auro, that meant treating regulatory constraints not as obstacles but as moats. Spain’s strict licensing regime, which deterred many potential entrants, became the foundation of a business worth nine figures to global competitors eager to buy their way in.
Read more:
What Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López Learned From Building Spain’s Answer to Uber
