Portugal’s capital is consolidating its rapid rise as a tech hub – and, according to Faber Ventures partner Pedro Carmo Costa, seeding ecosystems in Porto, Coimbra and Braga.
The Portuguese government’s Golden Visa program, aimed at attracting startups from across Europe, follows moves by Mercedes and Volkswagen to create an innovation and incubation centre in the capital – and the talent is showing up. "Young Portuguese graduates are choosing to stay here, and highly qualified workers are coming in from abroad,” says Clara Armand-Delille, who moved from London to found PR agency ThirdEyeMedia. “Today, Portugal is a startup nation,” Costa says.
Prodsmart
For decades, production processes have barely evolved for the majority of small businesses who make up Europe’s manufacturing industry, says Gonçalo Fortes, Prodsmart’s co-founder and CEO. His company sells a layer of virtual automation software which converts smartphones and tablets into sensors, to transform any manufacturing plant into a digital “smart factory”. Its real-time process-tracking collects data directly from the shop floor, eliminating the need for paper and providing real-time analytics to inform waste reduction and efficiency improvements. Prodsmart raised $150,000 (£112,000) from 500 Startups at launch and secured a seed funding round of $1.5 million in February 2018 from Join Capital, Caixa Capital, Innovation Nest and angel investors. prodsmart.com
James
Founded in 2013 by João Menano, Samuel Hopkins and Pedro Fonseca, James (formerly CrowdProcess) allows credit-risk managers and banks to create, validate, deploy and monitor regulation-ready, high-performing predictive models. Menano argues that it has become harder and harder for lenders to constantly update systems to cope with new regulations and new software developments, so James attaches itself to existing systems to provide constantly updated machine-learning software specialising in pattern detection. The company has raised $3.9 million in funding from private investors and VCs and opened offices in New York. james.finance
Talkdesk
Talkdesk co-founders Cristina Fonseca and Tiago Paiva were inspired by success at a Twilio hackathon to base Talkdesk on the Silicon Valley model of “being truly disruptive with a capacity to scale fast”, says Fonseca. The company provides call-centre software that allows new centres to launch without the traditional expensive big switches and routers. Talkdesk customers require no hardware, phones, coding or downloads – just an internet connection. Backers, include Salesforce Ventures, DFJ and Storn Ventures, have helped funding for the San Francisco- and Lisbon-based company rise to $24.5 million. talkdesk.com
Codacy
Codacy was born from co-founders Jaime Jorge and João Caxaria’s frustration at having to manually review endless lines of code in previous software development and engineering jobs. Its automated platform integrates into existing systems and syncs with tools such as GitHub Enterprise to constantly review lines of code and search for mistakes – helping, according to Jorge, developers work faster. An August 2017 funding round of $5.1 million, led by Seedcamp, Faber Ventures, JOIN Capital, EQT Ventures and Caixa Capital, takes total investment to $6.7 million. The company now counts PayPal, Adobe, Cancer Research UK and Deliveroo among its customers. codacy.com
Veniam
Co-founders João Barros and Susana Sargento developed technology to turn vehicles into wireless hotspots during their time as professors at the Universities of Aveiro and Porto respectively. They then partnered with former Zipcar CEO Robin Chase and CTO Roy Russell to roll out Veniam’s in-vehicle Wi-Fi service across Porto and Singapore. The company now plans to provide cloud-based software linking and guiding autonomous vehicles. “AVs [autonomous vehicles] can scan the road and surrounding vehicles, but they can’t know about what’s ahead or what the surrounding vehicles intend to do unless they’re connected,” Barros explains. The company has raised $26.9 million, led by Verizon Ventures. veniam.com
Sensei
Sensei founders Vasco Portugal, Joana Rafael and Paulo Carreira took their fledgling business-intelligence platform for retail from the Technical University of Lisbon to the Techstars METRO Retail Accelerator Berlin in 2017. This resulted in February 2018’s €500,000 pre-seed funding from German retailer METRO and Portugal’s Sonae. The company turns any installed camera into a powerful sensor to capture and raw in-store digital data. The big idea, according to the founders, is to build customer profiles to increase sales. sensei.tech
WHERE TO EAT: Copenhagen Coffee Lab, Escolas Gerais 34, Alfama. Founded in Denmark in 2013, Lisbon’s mini-chain of Scandinavian-style coffee shops has Wi-Fi – despite some tables having a “no laptops” policy. The venue’s regulars love its understated Scandi cool for meetings and coffee breaks. copenhagencoffeelab.com
WHERE TO WORK: Second Home, Time Out Market, Mercado da Ribeira. This upmarket shared workspace is at the heart of the city’s tech community and the centre of the Cais do Sodre district. The nearby Pink Street is great for bars, restaurants and clubs.
DefinedCrowd
With most of the attention in AI focused on developing algorithms, its weak spot – and DefinedCrowd’s USP – is in collating high-quality data that’s properly labelled to train those AIs quickly and efficiently. Founded in 2015 by Amy Du and Daniela Braga, a data scientist and natural-language-processing expert, the company combines its crowd platform Neevo – where anyone can earn money helping label data – with a user interface and an API to search for and select appropriate datasets. The company raised $1.1 million in 2016 – including funds from Amazon and Sony – but has since relied on customer contracts to grow finance. definedcrowd.com
Heptasense
Heptasense co-founders Ricardo Santos and Mauro Peixe started out developing AI software that learns human gestures and emotions to help their elderly relatives navigate modern life. Their pivot was rapid. Launched in January 2017, Heptasense connects to cameras, motion detectors and touchscreens to measure human responses. The company is working with BMW, among others, on hand-gesture controls for drivers and a security company in the US on airport monitoring and threat detection. Santos and Peixe bootstrapped the company, relying on customer contracts for cashflow. “Investors wanted us to focus on three-year projections and follow the footsteps of other companies, but we were doing something different,” says Santos. heptasense.com
Aptoide
Proving the Portuguese appetite for tricky journeys didn’t end with Ferdinand Magellan, Aptoide CEO Paulo Trezentos launched against Google – building a third-party app store for Android and positioning it as an alternative to Google Play. It now hosts more than 750,000 apps, including the likes of Facebook, Instagram and Clash of Clans. Seed funding of €750,000 from Portugal Ventures led to a €3.7 million Series A round in 2015, followed in November 2017 by an $16.8 million Initial Coin Offering using AppCoins – an in-app currency for purchases, game upgrades and paying other users. Coin miners are paid if they engage with advertising – strengthening Aptoide’s ad revenue. aptoide.com
Probe.ly
Nuno Loureiro, Probe.ly’s founder and CEO, spent 15 years fighting hackers. He found testing security complicated – white-hat penetration-testing and bug bounties are the gold standard, but few companies employ both on a daily basis. Probe.ly’s software runs continuously on apps and sites, searching for flaws and launching attacks to analyse their response. Unlike its competitors, Probe.ly is aimed at developers, not security professionals. Founded in 2016, the company raised €620,000 through winning the Lisbon Challenge acceleration programme and 2017’s Caixa Empreender Award. It launched in private beta in 2017 and, in March 2018, raised €435,000 from investors including Caixa Capital. probe.ly
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
