Serial Entrepreneurs Mila Suharev, Nils Henning and Mitya Moskalchuk had been involved in the German startup scene for over 15 years, successfully exiting four companies valued at over €100 million (about $98.5 million) before deciding to launch their new startup into launch the Portuguese capital. “Lisbon has several ingredients that make it a unique and efficient tech ecosystem,” said Suharev, CEO of proptech company CASAFARI, listing factors such as quality of life, government programs designed to attract foreign entrepreneurs, and its Silicon Valley-like business mentality.
Lisbon is increasingly becoming the tech hub of choice for many European entrepreneurs: of the 10 CEOs profiled here, half are expats. “A new ecosystem like the one growing in Lisbon is fascinating to experience first hand,” said Amir Bozorgzadeh, CEO of Virtualeap. “It is a melting pot of foreigners and Portuguese, working hand in hand in a very sunny environment where work-life balance is always a priority for founders.” This influx of talent contributes to Portugal becoming more and more known as ‘unicorn country’ – the country has launched more unicorns (seven) than Spain, Italy and Greece combined.
At a distance
Remote’s mission is to simplify how companies around the world can hire talent. “It used to be extremely complex and expensive for a company to hire employees and contractors living abroad,” says CEO Job van der Voort. “The company should be equipped to handle international taxes and compliance, offer benefits in the other country and pay employees in their local currency.”
Founded in 2019 by van der Voort and Marcelo Lebre, the startup simplifies the process with a platform that allows customers, including DoorDash, GitLab, HelloFresh, Loom and Arduino, to onboard, pay and manage employees and contractors in more than 150 countries. .
“One of our core services is serving as an employer of record for clients in countries where they do not have legal entities. A big difference between Remote and competitors is that we never outsource these domestic legal entities to third parties.” In April 2022, it announced a $300 million Series C financing round with a valuation of nearly $3 billion, led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 with participation from existing investors, including Accel, Sequoia, Index Ventures and others. Remote has now raised a total of $495 million. remote.com
anchorage
In December 2021, Anchorage Digital became the first Portuguese crypto unicorn after raising a total of $487 million dollars from investors including KKR, Andreessen Horowitz, GIC (Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund), Goldman Sachs and Visa. Anchorage Digital, launched in 2017, came about after co-founder Diogo Mónica helped an investor who lost access to $15 million worth of bitcoin. He was able to get the money back, but it dawned on him that this issue shouldn’t have happened in the first place. The solution he came up with with co-founder Nathan McCauley was Anchorage, a regulated crypto platform that enables institutions to offer crypto products and integrated financial services such as safekeeping, regulatory compliance and customer service. Launched in 2017 by Mónica and McCauley – who met when they were early employees at Square, where they built payment platforms that are still in use today – Anchorage, which is also the first federally chartered crypto bank in the US, is now valued at more than $3 billion. “We believe that every bank will be a crypto bank and every business will be a crypto company,” says Mónica. anchorage.com
Artpool co-founder, Pauline Foessel.Photo: Goncalo F Santos
artpool
Before launching Artpool, CEO Pauline Foessel worked in the art world for over 13 years, both as an artist and curator. “I see the power of art, the importance of the role of the curator connecting the work of the artist and the public, and I believe that the digital space is the solution to finance the art in a better and more efficient way “, she says. “I think NFTs are a great solution for removing friction in the sale of art editions, and a great solution for increasing revenue in the art world.”
Launched in 2019 with co-founder Willy Bardiot, Artpool is an NFT marketplace and social network for the art world where artists can sell their NFTs – often their first – curated by a community of more than 900 professional curators. artpool.xyz
large market
João Batalha, his brother Luís and Micael Oliveira are former computer scientists from MIT. Their successes include writing software that runs on the International Space Station and developing a platform for annotating academic papers. Their new project: “We apply the scientific method to sales,” says Batalha. “We’ve seen first-hand the challenges of scaling B2B sales in businesses and realized that the existing point solutions were not addressing the core issues. The goal is to turn a cumbersome set of tasks into a simpler solution that puts a strain on productivity.” Their startup, Amplemarket, aims to do just that by using AI-driven workflows that help sales teams find and engage with new customers. Amplemarket was founded in late 2019 and has raised $12 million from investors including Comcast Ventures and Armilar Venture Partners. spaciousmarket.com
detech.ai
Detech.ai is a reliability intelligence platform that helps organizations reduce failures and other reliability issues. “I am obsessed with this space,” says CEO José Velez. “My father is an IT director at a large Portuguese company and I grew up talking about the problems the companies had. Reliability was one of the biggest challenges they faced.” His startup solves those problems by taking monitoring and observability data from tools like AWS and turning it into insights and automations that ease the work of IT departments. “It lowers the barrier to adopting leading site reliability engineering practices, which were previously only accessible to FAANGs,” he says. To date, it has raised $620,000. detech.ai
Virtualleap
Virtuleap builds VR applications to improve your brain, with the help of USC psychologist Skip Rizzo and memory champion Nelson Dellis. According to CEO Amir Bozorgzadeh, the company has built apps that can train and test the cognitive skills of its 43,000+ users. It also has four clinical trials underway with partners such as Roche, with whom it is testing a VR training tool for dementia. “In 10 years, our solution will not only serve as the gold standard for cognitive assessment and training for at-risk groups, but also become part of the everyday life of the general population, as a ‘gym for the mind,’” says Bozorgzadeh. virtualap.com
coverflex
“People are the most important capital of companies,” said Miguel Santo Amaro, CEO of Coverflex. “For the first time in history, five generations will soon be working side by side, and employees want smarter, more transparent and more flexible models to enjoy their compensation.” Coverflex provides that by giving companies a single operating system that allows them to manage their employees’ compensation, including salaries, stocks, bonuses and benefits. More than 1,500 Portuguese companies currently use the software. Founded in 2019 by Amaro, Luis Rocha, Nuno Pinto and Rui Carvalho, the company is expanding into Italy and Spain this year. coverflex.com
sound particles
Dune, Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Frozenand Fortnite were all produced using software developed by Sound Particles. The startup founded by Nuno Fonseca, which developed the software that adapts CGI techniques to sound, will soon launch its headphone technology to enter the VR and gaming market. According to Fonseca, the company will also soon open an office in LA to bolster its presence in Hollywood. In May 2022, it raised €2.5 million in a seed round raised by Indico Capital Partners and Iberis. soundparts.com
Mila Suharev, co-founder of Casafari, a centralized database for real estate agents.Photo: Goncalo F Santos
CASAFARIA
Founded in 2017 by Mila Suharev, Nils Henning and Mitya Moskalchuk, CASAFARI aims to build the most complete centralized brokerage database using machine learning, empowering more than 30,000 professionals across Europe, including Sotheby’s International Realty, Savills, Century21 and Keller Williams – to close deals and accelerate transactions. The idea came to them in Spain when they were involved in several real estate buying transactions and could not find a single source that contained all the properties available. It was a problem they had to solve: “We now index every home listing found on the web and build the history of each home by deduplicating listings describing the same property into one property and tracking all changes in real time,” says suharev. caafari.com
Exclusive
Web3 platform Exclusible didn’t have the most favorable start. Launched in July 2021 by Thibault Launay, Olivier Moingeon, Olivier Bureau, Artur Goulão and Pierre Guigourese as an NFT marketplace for luxury brands and real estate developments in the metaverse, its aim was to simplify the purchase of digital assets and introduce new customers dealing with the digital luxury market. “Initially, nobody wanted to work with us because we didn’t have a track record,” said Launay, CEO of Exclusible. “Instead, we decided to launch our first NFT project under our own brand as a proof of concept.” That project was called the Exclusible Alpha Collection, an NFT series that works as a membership pass for upcoming drops. It generated €2.4 million in sales of 3,000 NFTs in less than 48 hours. Today, Exclusible has a community of 182,500 active users and has raised $2.2 million. exclusive.com
