Let’s continue our European startups landscape tour with Portugal and Lisbon!! Bem vindo!

Portugal, and in particular Lisbon and Coimbra, has a rising name in the European startup community. Portugal comprises of 10.5mill inhabitants and its capital Lisbon, one of Europe’s oldest cities, is going to host the next Global Web Summit.

In terms of funding, in the past 12 months, the Portuguese startup community has been successful in raising approximately €32mill and at latest count has 300 technology startups and 40 scale-ups (who have raised above a million Euros). Looking further and you’ll find some investors such as Pathena, Vallis Capital Partners, Caixa Capital, Faber Ventures, Octopus, Atomico, Amazon Alexa Fund and Portugal Ventures. Over the last year, nine companies exited in an IPO.

Technology firms and organisations in Portugal employ just over 100.000 individuals.

So who are the Portuguese start-ups to watch?

Whilst Portugal has not produced a unicorn yet, there are certainly some interesting companies to watch.

DefinedCrowd is a next-generation data science company focused on building data refinery platforms for machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Unbabel is an artificial intelligence powered human translation platform.
GetSocial is a content analytics platform that helps publishers and marketers measure, feature and promote their best content.
attentive.us provides actionable alerts about commercial leads, competitors, partners or investors on any CRM used.
movvo.com who is a Behavioural Analytics and Location Based Marketing Company, with a focus on retail and Retail Real Estates.
WiseCrop acts as a centralised dashboard for your farm.

Here is our selection of co-working spaces in Portugal:

CoWork Lisboa
My Coworkspace
Village Underground Lisboa
Barrio CoWork

And here are some Accelerators/Incubators (there are around 70)

Startup Pirates
Lisbon Challenge
Invest Braga

Talent Pool

Lisbon has sometimes been called *the new Berlin*, and one of the reasons is due to its talented pool of developers. The government has supported the education system through the development of a technology training program and early indications look successful.

And what about the level of tax?

Corporate Tax: The average set rate for corporate tax is 25%. A local tax is usually charged at a rate of 1.5%, bringing the total to 26.5%.

What else does Portugal have?

Certainly a lot of sun, Porto, football, and a good quality of life!

Next time we will study Brexit… Why did not they called it Britain? … Anyway … see you next time!

Sources:
Startup Overseas
Teleport
Portuguese Chamber of Commerce in the UK 
Portgual Startup

Sophie Cohen runs our satellite office in London. If you’re in Europe (or elsewhere) get in touch with MitchelLake about creating your Unicorn, hiring your team, or finding your new role. Let’s chat!

Author

Sophie Cohen is Head of Research and Delivery for the MitchelLake Group. She has over 15 years experience in executive search across various industries including industrial, pharmaceutical, finance and digital.

Sophie is a trained Psychologist and has lived and worked in France, the UK, the US and Australia. She speaks French and English fluently.

SophieCohen

sophiec@mitchellake.com