Before Uber entered Spain, the private hire vehicle license market there was close to inert. VTC permits — required for any app-based mobility operator to function in the country — were available for roughly €35 each. Taxi associations that held them in small quantities treated them as incidental supplements to their core taxi operations. There was almost no secondary market, no competitive bidding, and no perceived future utility.
Alejandro Betancourt López and his partners began buying those licenses before Uber had established a presence in Spain. They purchased from holders who did not see what was coming. The accumulation took place not on the basis of existing Spanish demand data, but on the basis of what had already happened in the United States and other markets further along the same transition.
Reading the Cycle From Outside the Market
Betancourt’s analytical approach was cross-market rather than local. He had observed the taxi-to-app-mobility shift play out in the U.S. and other developed markets. Spain had not yet undergone that transition. The question was not whether the shift would arrive, but when — and whether licenses could be accumulated before demand converted them from worthless permits into scarce infrastructure.
His summary of the thesis: “We started accumulating the licenses and it was a gamble, but it was a calculated gamble because we knew that the market was going to shift to private riding industry instead of taxis and it was going to get a lot of hype from it.” The calculated element was the cross-market precedent. The gamble was the timing. Betancourt believed: “It’s already happening in the U.S. and other countries that were more advanced. It was a matter of time that it arrived in that specific country.”
How Regulation Locked In the Position
Spain’s government set the VTC-to-taxi ratio at 1:30 in 2015, per Inline Policy. That cap converted Betancourt’s early accumulation into a structurally permanent position. After the ratio was fixed, new entrants could not build a comparable portfolio from scratch. The regulatory environment had closed the window that Betancourt had used to acquire licenses for effectively nothing.
According to PYMNTS, ride-hailing services struggled for years to unlock the Spanish market precisely because city authorities had capped available licenses. Uber and Cabify — the two largest app-mobility operators in the world — arrived to find that the position they needed to operate at scale was already held. The path to meaningful Spanish market share ran through Auro’s license portfolio.
The €200 Million Result
According to Wikipedia, Uber and Cabify placed competitive acquisition bids of approximately €200 million for Auro New Transport in November 2022. Two global operators had determined that buying the assembled license portfolio was worth nine figures. Building a comparable position organically had become structurally impossible after the regulatory cap hardened.
The Auro outcome required three specific conditions: reading the cross-market cycle before it was priced locally, identifying the license as the bottleneck asset that would be hardest to replicate once demand arrived, and holding a patient capital structure that could absorb years of regulatory contestation without exit pressure. O’Hara’s family office architecture satisfied the third condition. Without it, the position would have been difficult to maintain through the uncertainty period that preceded validation.
