Spain caps the number of private hire vehicle licenses at one for every thirty taxi drivers. That ratio, fixed by the government in 2015, turned a regulatory footnote into one of the more profitable asset plays in recent Spanish business history. The supply of permits was sealed at the moment demand was just beginning to build.
Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López understood what that meant before most investors did.
Before Uber had established a meaningful presence in the Spanish market, Betancourt López and his partners began accumulating VTC licenses, the permits required to operate app-based private hire vehicles in Spain. Taxi operators were selling them at low prices, viewing the credentials as a minor ancillary to their core business, with no obvious buyer waiting on the other side. Betancourt López bought them anyway.
“We started accumulating the licenses and it was a gamble, but it was a calculated gamble,” he said in an interview, “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. And people were selling this license for nothing because they were like a compliment to the taxi drivers that they see at the time, no purposes or no purpose for it.”
The company that emerged from that accumulation, Auro Travel, grew into one of the largest private hire vehicle operators in Spain. When Uber and Cabify eventually needed to scale their own operations in the country, they encountered a market where the permit supply was fixed and Betancourt López held a substantial share of it. In November 2022, an acquisition bid from the two companies valued Auro New Transport at approximately €200 million. Uber followed by investing €220 million into Spanish operations in 2025.
The structure of the opportunity was simple in retrospect. A government-imposed ceiling on supply, set at the precise moment demand was beginning to accelerate, meant the asset had one direction to move. The licensing friction that discouraged most outside capital created the scarcity that ultimately generated the return.
Betancourt López has been direct about what distinguishes this approach from conventional investing. He looks for markets in transition, identifies the asset that will become a bottleneck, and takes a position before the thesis has been proven by results. The discomfort other investors feel around regulatory uncertainty isn’t a deterrent in his framework; it’s the mechanism that keeps the entry price low.
Auro Travel didn’t require a technology breakthrough or a distribution innovation. The business held government permits in a country whose regulatory structure made those permits more valuable the more the ride-hailing market expanded. Being early, and staying patient while the market caught up, was the essential move.
This was also, in a meaningful sense, a preview of how Betancourt López would approach later investments. ThroughO’Hara Administration, the international investment group he founded in 2014, he placed what he has described as a significant bet on an artificial intelligence company around 2019 or 2020, years before the sector became a destination for large institutional capital flows. By early 2025, that position had returned approximately twenty times its original cost, a figure Betancourt López confirmed publicly while declining to name the company.
The common thread running from VTC licenses to early AI equity is patience combined with a specific kind of contrarian conviction. Both positions looked unconventional at the moment of entry. Both were grounded in a read on where economic activity was heading, not where it currently sat.
Betancourt López has described his investment methodology as exhaustive and repetitive by design: examining a problem from every angle, repeatedly, until the thesis is either confirmed or disqualified. “Drive everybody crazy, drive yourself crazy, look at things 10,000 times, and make sure that you have the goal in sight, and it will happen.” In the case of Auro, it happened at a €200 million acquisition bid.
His leadership philosophy extends the same principle to people: execution matters more than the idea, and the right team is the non-negotiable variable. He has built a public profile across multiple industries on that thesis, and he follows developments across his portfolio through channels including Instagram and Facebook. His business recordacross energy, fashion, mobility, and technology reflects the same pattern repeated across different sectors and geographies.
The Spanish ride-hailing story is, at its core, a lesson in what regulatory friction can produce when you’re on the right side of it. Supply caps don’t favor the cautious. They favor whoever was willing to accumulate before the caps mattered.
