Rich history, innovative art, beautiful scenes and super friendly, laid-back locals! Just like its tourism, startup ecosystem has been cruising on a wave of success in Portugal, a small country that faces the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula.
Emerging as a nestling hub for the global startup community, Lisbon is one of the few favourite places to start a new business in Europe. Often seen as the next haven, it is becoming a creative and tech startup hub, helped by accelerator funding, tech incubators and others.
Notably, Lisbon (previously held in Dublin) is the home to Web Summit, the largest startup, and tech event of the world. According to a few reports, Portugal’s startup ecosystem is now growing twice as fast as the European average.
A significant factor here is the number of foreign companies using Portugal as a more convenient and affordable base to establish their digital platforms. There are various factors contributing to this cause are better stability and security for young families, affordable cost of living, renting (office or house) is 80% to 66% cheaper, connectivity and more.
And so, here is the list of startups we collected through Dealroom where you can work in 2019.
Huub
Funding: €4.4M
Founders: Luís Roque, Pedro Santos, Tiago Craveiro, Tiago Paiva
Founded in 2015, HUUB is a logistics and tech platform for Fashion brands. This platform supports all sales channels: eCommerce, wholesale, own and franchising stores and marketplaces. More than 30 brands, from 3 continents, in Fashion & eCommerce industries, already have their full supply chain being orchestrated by HUUB.
Zaask
Funding: NA
Founders: Kiruba Shankar Eswaran, Luis Pedro Martins
Based out of Lisbon, Zaask is an online marketplace for services that helps people hire the right professionals to accomplish their projects. Also, the company helps professionals, freelancers and micro companies to grow their revenues and to give visibility to their talent, by presenting them to potential clients interested in their services.
Landing.jobs
Funding: €750K
Founders: José Paiva, Pedro Carmo Oliveira, Pedro Oliveira
Landing.jobs is a tech recruitment marketplace dedicated to matchmaking top tech talent with top tech employers. The company’s algorithm suggests the best jobs based upon users experiences, and interests.
Unbabel
Funding: €28.3M
Founders: Bruno Prezado, Hugo Silva, João Graça, Sofia Pessanha, Vasco Pedro
With “Translation as a Service” platform, Unbabel helps modern enterprises to understand and be understood by their customers in dozens of languages. Powered by AI and thousand of linguist around the world, the company helps global brands like Booking.com, Facebook, Skyscanner, easyJet, Under Armour and Rovio.
YouClap
Founder: José Alberto Rocha, Luis Portela Afonso, Renato Almeida
YouClap is the mobile app to challenge and be challenged by friends and others. Users can challenge each other, publicly, in order to reach all of their followers, and privately, selecting friends or group. Recipients can then either accept your virtual challenge or simply leave a small “clap”. Notably, with this platform, users can send a challenge to their favourite brands.
REALTIME.CO
Funding: €90.9M
Founders: André T Parreira
Founded in 2014, this platform creates apps for the e-commerce and advertising verticals allowing website visitors to interact in real-time with web servers.
Uniplaces
Funding: €26.8M
Founders: Ben Grech, Leo Lara, Mariano Kostelec, Miguel Santo Amaro
Uniplaces is a student accommodation platform, helping millions of students around the world to find and book their accommodation when going abroad.
SWORD Health
Funding: €12.1M
Founders: André Santos, Márcio Colunas, Virgílio Bento
SWORD Health develops a digital therapy solution that addresses the growing demand for physical therapy while reducing costs, empowering patients with faster recovery and providing data for clinical teams and decision makers. Furthermore, it also combines our digital therapist with real physical therapists and clinical team to provide a practice treatment in musculoskeletal disorders.
Coimbra Genomics
Funding: €4.7M
Founders: Carlos Faro, Carlos Fiolhais, Gonçalo Quadros, Nuno Arantes-Oliveira
Founded in 2013, the company has developed ELSIE, a first-in-class digital platform that allows physicians of any speciality to use the information on their patient’s genome during a regular medical appointment. Through this digital platform, the company works closely with healthcare units, labs and physicians.
Hole19
Funding: €3.7m
Founders: Anthony Douglas
Hole19 helps the golfers top optimise their game from start to finish. This platform helps the player to plan & track rounds with GPS and scoring in the middle and help them review performance and connect with like-minded golfers.
Stay tuned to Silicon Canals for more updates in the tech startup world.
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