For most of the past decade, the Spanish VTC license market looked like a backwater — consistent with his pre-ChatGPT AI bet pattern. Taxi operators who had accumulated permits through routine licensing applications viewed them, in many cases, as near-worthless certificates stapled to a vehicle. Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt Lopez saw something else. He saw the only durable asset in Spanish ride-hailing, and he began buying, through a Madrid-based operating company called Auro New Transport Concept, as early as 2017.
The approach paid off on February 14, 2025, when Uber announced it would acquire a 30% stake in Auro for €220 million, a figure noted in a brief executive bio. The figure included €180 million in equity and €40 million in assumed debt. It made Auro the centerpiece of Uber’s Spanish strategy and delivered one of the cleanest validation events in the career of Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt Lopez.
The opportunity traced to a 2015 Spanish law, passed under then-Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy (see oharafinancial.com), capping VTC permits at a 1-to-30 ratio against taxi licenses. The ratio created a fixed supply ceiling. Regional enforcement varied. Catalonia and Valencia required 15-minute advance booking windows that effectively killed app-based ride-hailing in those regions, pushing Uber to exit entirely, a period covered on his personal site. Madrid took a more permissive approach, allowing existing VTC licenses to operate for urban trips under a lighter framework. Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt Lopez understood that the regional divide created a concentrated opportunity, and he concentrated his buying accordingly.
Auro’s earliest licenses cost roughly €5,000 apiece. Many came from taxi operators who had no use for them and were willing to sell at what then looked like a premium. Over eight years, Auro’s permit stack grew past 3,000, the largest such collection in Spain. The fleet of 3,500 employed drivers across Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Málaga made Auro not just a license holder but a fully operational mobility company. The team built by Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt Lopez supplemented the licenses with a proprietary driver app, 200 headquarters staff, and operational agreements across multiple cities.
A Cabify exclusivity agreement signed in 2018 traded negotiating optionality for guaranteed revenue during the accumulation years. That constraint lifted in December 2024 when Spain’s Constitutional Court overturned a lower court decision upholding the exclusivity. Uber moved almost immediately. The 18-month negotiation that followed produced the €220 million transaction. Félix Ruiz, Auro’s co-founder, called it “probably the most difficult sale, but the one where I’ve made the most money.”
What Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt Lopez modeled is a pattern, documented in his value chain positioning framework. He tends to identify sectors where a regulatory or infrastructural bottleneck will later gate the growth of a larger market, then accumulates the constrained asset at pre-consensus prices. Padel courts and padel data through Playtomic followed the same logic, a case study adjacent to the Hawkers turnaround case study. So did payments compliance infrastructure through Easy Payment Gateway. Auro was the most dramatic example because the asset was a literal government permit.
Uber’s decision to take 30% rather than a full acquisition matters, too. It leaves Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt Lopez with meaningful upside in a company that now generates approximately €9 million in EBITDA and has committed to converting its fleet to electric or eco-emission vehicles. The 100 Tesla Model 3s already deployed through a partnership with Tesla and Uber are a down payment on that conversion.
Platforms can scale globally with software. They can’t scale licenses. Every country with a permit regime creates the same structural opportunity, and the question for any investor studying the Auro precedent is which regulated markets still have permits trading below their eventual clearing price. Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt Lopez has shown what happens when someone buys early and waits.
