Nuda was born in Uruguay with a simple idea: help older people live better from the value of their home.

They sell bare ownership of their house and keep the right to live in it for life, while a younger buyer gets a future home at below-market prices.

During the pandemic, the startup was one of 9 projects selected from 186 across 26 countries by the Inter-American Development Bank’s innovation lab for the silver economy.

Investors showed interest. For Constanza Boix, co-founder and CEO of Nuda, raising money meant moving abroad.

The natural market to grow into was Spain given that selling the bare ownership of your home was about 10 years more developed than in Latin America

However, going alone would have meant relocating, starting from scratch with no clients.

So Nuda found a Spanish partner, Vitarenta. The two set up a joint venture and joined the EU-LAC Digital Accelerator with Ventia, a Uruguayan technology startup.

In a new episode of the EU-LAC Digital Accelerator podcast, Constanza talked to two mentors of the acceleration programme:

• Miguel Rodríguez, from Octantis,
• Naiara Uribe, from Tecnalia.

So, what does a Uruguayan startup learn from expanding to Europe with a corporate partner?

1. 2 years later, the PoC still serves the sales team

In the acceleration programme, Nuda, Vitarenta and Ventia ran a proof of concept on artificial intelligence for sales.

Ventia, a Uruguayan startup, already supplied Nuda’s customer relationship management platform:

1. The team started from Nuda’s own customer conversations, anonymised.
2. It studied which conversations ended in a sale, and why.
3. With this know-how, the AI agent suggests answers, builds commercial proposals and calculates prices, thus supporting the sales team. 

One line was never crossed: the agent does not talk to clients.

Nuda’s sales staff work with older people, often worried about pensions that fall short.

“We are not going to put a bot in the middle,” says Constanza. For her, listening well is already part of improving a client’s life.

Constanza ranks the proof of concept as the most valuable service: “It was the foundation for everything we developed afterwards.”

Two years on, it is still the programme’s main legacy: “Everything we did with Tecnalia on the proof of concept for this agent is now helping our sales team.”

2. A corporate partner opened Spain without a move abroad

Setting up the business abroad was tempting: Spain was about 10 years ahead of Latin America on the bare ownership model.

But setting up the business abroad was also daunting: Barcelona and Madrid were already crowded.

The answer was a partner already on the ground: Vitarenta, a Spanish company Constanza had studied for years as a reference.

After six months of regular meetings with its CEO, Marc Cucala Puig, the two sides set up a joint venture on 24 January 2025.

Constanza calls it a story of “partners at first sight”.

What Vitarenta brought:

1. Structure and market knowledge. “It was very plug and play.”
2. Financial backing that Nuda did not have.
3. A known brand and established networks.
4. Sales profiles that worked, and a model to replicate across Spain.

“With the local partner, we did not have to move,” Constanza says.

To finish off, some anecdotes that show how essential a local partner is for cultural fit:

• Constanza remembers a Spanish colleague told her that people there rarely say “ladrillo” (brick) when talking about property.
• Older clients in Spain should never be addressed with the informal “tú”, very common in Latin America.

3. The hard conversations come first

Before working together, Nuda and Vitarenta put the uncomfortable topics on the table:

1. Dedication: how much time each partner commits.
2. Pay and equity: who earns what and owns what.
3. Cash flow: how to decide in a crisis and in good times.
4. Governance: who decides, and how often the partners meet.

Each side also needs a clear role: 

• She brought startup methods: an operating plan, objectives, a budget. 
• Marc and Vitarenta, on the other hand, brought decades of experience in family businesses.

For Constanza, the hardest question is always the same: what happens when things go bad?

“Not having these conversations at the start is one of the main causes of failure,” she says.

The reason is simple. “When you are in the difficult moment, it is harder to reach agreements.”

Children are born, couples change, illness strikes, a pandemic hits. Partners who agreed early face those shocks with less conflict.

Her advice: ask the “what if” questions before you need the answers.

▶️ Watch the full podcast with Constanza Boix: