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Portugal Startup Scene | August 2020

Startup Portugal Activity - August 2020

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This newsletter is curated by Pedro Almeida and João Duarte Leite. Share interesting news with us here.

Highlights

  • Bright Pixel strategy changed and now is focused on investing directly in new startups (vs. creating startups/being a startup Lab). As a result, Celso is stepping down and joining the Cloudflare team and Alexandre is the new captain. Congrats to both! Bright Pixel is part of Sonae IM, which invests directly in series A and beyond startups. So it will be interesting to see the strategy of the 2 investment companies. On a personal level, we admire Celso’s work and we hope to continue to see him around. “It takes a village” to build a startup ecosystem
  • Ricardo Normand is joining Tomahawk as Venture Partner for Portugal. Congrats Ricardo! Great to see another international Venture Capital firm with a local presence. Tomahawk invests €100k-1M in B2B SaaS and decentralized startups and in pre-seed to series A rounds. (check here for international funds interested in the Portugal Startup scene)
  • Portugal Ventures is expected to launch a new call for tourism in September (Check Portugal Ventures open calls here). Also, Portugal Ventures will be supporting Glintt in launching an accelerator program next year.
  • This month, we came across a great article about Venture Capital Landscape in Portugal – thanks Miguel Alves for sharing it on LinkedIn. If you haven’t done it already, you can read the article here (we can wait for you – FYI it is in Portuguese only). Multiple great insights
    • Starting with the good news. Portugal Venture Capital funds have enough dry powder to invest in new opportunities over the next 12-24 months!
    • On the negative side, the window for new Venture Capital funds seems to be closed for now. If these market conditions continue for some time, it might be a problem in the near future (particularly for an emergent ecosystem as Portugal), as it takes ~2 years to raise a new Venture fund. As such, we call all potential LPs, both public or private, to support early-stage investing during this time. We believe that some of the best investment opportunities are ahead of us.
    • In addition and not referenced in the article, we also see a potential bottleneck on pre-seed/seed as IFD financial lines (public incentives for business angels syndicates and Venture Capital funds) are coming into the final of the investment period at the end of 2020.
    • Finally, in the article, there were also interesting references related to Armilar Venture Partners and Indico Capital Partners fund execution. At the beginning of 2019, Armilar and Indico raised new funds with similar sizes (€60M and €54M) and, since then, have invested in a similar number of startups (8 and 9 startups, respectively). But the 2 funds seem to have very different investment thesis. Armilar has been investing in deep tech startups at early stages, Seed and €500k per startup, while Indico has been focusing on late seed/series A software startups, investing €2.4M per startup. Also, Armilar seems to be dedicating much more capital for the next years, for new investment opportunities and/or as reserves for future rounds of portfolio companies, as it has only invested €4M (7% of the fund) vs. €22M (41% of the fund) invested by Indico. This year, both Venture Capital firms have launched new funds – €10M and €12M – so we expect both firms to continue to be active on pre-seed.
  • Crisis creates opportunities! Now you can work from anywhere and we, but also top VCs such as Harry Briggs, have been noticing an increase in foreign entrepreneurs moving to Portugal. Have you also noticed it too? We think this can be a positive lever for Portugal – great entrepreneurs willing to relocate to places with good quality of life, affordable, with coronavirus “under control” and high-quality infrastructure and entrepreneurial ecosystem. What can be done to further accelerate this trend?
  • Finally, Felipe, from Infraspeak, did a great job during his vacation and publish multiple posts about pre-seed, seed, series A, series B, and late-stage Venture Capital funds actively in investing in Portugal.

Accelerator deadlines, pitch competition and events

Resources for entrepreneurs

If there is any great resource for Portugese based entrepreneurs, we are happy to had them.

Funding round

Startup: PICadvanced (https://picadvanced.com/)

Amount: €4M

TAGs: B2B, Hardware, Internet of Things,Telecommunications

Investors: Verizon Ventures, 200M

Startup: Loop Co. (https://www.theloop.pt/)

Amount: €370k

TAGs: B2C, e-commerce, Marketplace, Social

Investors: Fundo Bem Comum, Fundo para a Inovação Social

Startup: Trivial Castle

Amount: €161k

Investors: Team Play Ventures, Pausa Ventures

Startup: Probely (https://probely.com/)

Amount: Unknown

TAGs: B2B, Cyber Security, Information Technology, Internet, Location Based Services, SaaS, Software, Web Apps

Investors: Portugal Ventures

Startup: LiMM (www.limmtx.com)

Amount: Unknown

TAGs: B2B, Biotechnology, Health Care, Medical Device, Therapeutics

Investors: Portugal Ventures

International funding rounds participated by Portuguese investors

  • Summertime… no news 🙂

Portuguese startups, Venture Capital and Business Angels activity report

See also

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