A regulatory instrument that Spanish taxi unions had spent decades marginalising became, between 2015 and 2025, one of the most valuable assets in European transport. The story of how that happened runs through Alejandro Betancourt López, a company called Auro Travel, and a thesis about where ride-hailing was heading before most of the industry had worked it out.
VTC licences, or Vehículos de Turismo con Conductor permits, were the legal vehicle through which private cars could carry paying passengers in Spain. They existed in the shadow of the taxi monopoly, kept marginal by regulatory design and lobbying pressure. The EV Powered feature on Auro and the Uber deal chronicles how Alejandro Betancourt López’s investment approach to mobility led him to start acquiring these permits around 2015, when they were changing hands at roughly €5,000 each. The secondary market was thin. Most serious investors weren’t paying attention.
The setup
Betancourt López was looking at the same facts as everyone else and drawing a different conclusion. Uber had been operating since 2010. Cabify started in Madrid in 2011. Both were going to need a legal mechanism to put vehicles on Spanish roads, and the VTC licence was the only one available under existing law. The supply was capped. Demand was going to arrive. The question was whether to own the licences before the platforms needed them or after.
Auro started buying and kept buying. By the time the fleet had reached full scale, the company held upwards of 3,000 VTC licences and operated more than 3,500 drivers across Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Málaga. A subsidiary called Arrow turned the licence portfolio into a separate revenue stream by leasing permits to other operators. The licences were kept productive regardless of how many Auro vehicles were generating fares on any given day. His full investment record, which includes this and other structural bets across multiple sectors, is documented on Alejandro Betancourt López’s Crunchbase page.
Cabify, a court case, and Uber
“When we started the travelling business in Spain, Auro, we knew that Uber was going to come to Spain,” Betancourt López has said. “It was a calculated gamble because we knew that the market was going to shift to the private riding industry instead of taxis.”
Cabify secured an exclusivity arrangement with Auro, effectively making Betancourt López’s fleet the infrastructure underlying Cabify’s Spanish operations. The arrangement broke down into a legal dispute over terms. Spain’s Constitutional Court ruled in Dec. 2024 that Auro was free to terminate the exclusivity agreement. That removed the last obstacle to engaging Uber directly. His broader thinking on leadership, positioning, and investment is explored in Authority Magazine‘s C-suite interview.
The investment framework
Both platforms had reportedly bid around €200 million for Auro by Nov. 2022. The deal that closed was with Uber, on Feb. 28, 2025: a 30% stake for €220 million, structured as €180 million equity and €40 million debt. Betancourt López had converted a portfolio of €5,000 permits into a business that one of the world’s largest technology companies valued at over €700 million implied.
He’s described his broader approach in terms of value chain positioning: “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.” Standard Oil controlled refineries. Onassis owned ships. Auro held licences. In each case, the asset was the single point of passage, owned before anyone else recognised its value. His perspective on this approach is elaborated in a mobility and investment interview on YouTube. His broader professional network and career history span multiple sectors where the same chokepoint logic has been applied.