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Highlights
- 7 months after announcing a €10M Seed round, Remote announced a $35M Series A(!!) led by Index Ventures with participation from Sequoia! Impressive!
- Faber just announced the first closing of its fund II, targeting €30M to invest in pre-Series A and early-stage artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science startups. It’s great to have Faber back in the game!
- Armilar launched a continuous fund aiming to offer a liquidity option to its LPs
- I have put together the latest fund announcements in Portugal. Some interesting findings
- During 2020, 12 Venture Capital firms and Business Angels Syndicates have announced new funds, targeting >€80M. This number can further increase to €130M, with Magnify inception fund (vs. 5 funds and €180M in 2019)
- In January 2021, there will be ~15 active early-stage funds (vs. >40 in January 2020). The main reason for a lower number of active funds is the end of IFD’s financial lines – Venture Capital I, Business Angels I and II – investment period, which terminates next month. 200m also terminates this year. Both IFD and 200m have been at the core of early-stage investment in the past years. Hope these programs are renewed/revamped over the next months, now under the roof of Banco do Fomento
- The above analysis doesn’t include private equity players that recently raised sizeable funds for R&D, leveraging SIFIDE tax incentives, and that are now investing in Startups. Examples of such funds are (i) Iberis with over €120M fund (and already invested in Bizay/360imprimir and Sensei) and Explorer, which is targeting €75M fund. Looking forward to seeing how current stakeholders, founders and early-stage investors, will adjust to these new players. If you are interested in knowing more about SIFIDE, feel free to reach out
- Demium, an international accelerator present in Portugal, raised €30M to back the startups in the program
- Sonae IM has a new unicorn on the portfolio, Arctic Wolf
- Startup Lisboa announced a new Entrepreneur in Residence, Sean Tierney, Sales expert and founder of Charity Makeover
- BGI announced 2020 Top 25 Scaleups in Portugal. Congrats to all, particularly to BGI, the organizer
- 2 cool things I came across this month
- Pedro Ribeiro Santos, Partner at Armilar Venture Partners (and one of my mentors in VC), participated in a podcast with Jaime Novoa, from KFund, covering several topics including the Portuguese startup ecosystem. PS – Jaime has a great newsletter about the Spanish ecosystem
- António Miguel, the Managing Partner from Mustard Seed Maze (and also someone I deeply admire), shared some interesting insights with Sifted about how ‘tech for good’ can grow further and become more mainstream. Mustard Seed Maze is also hiring a program manager
- I regularly publish highlights about the Portugal Startup Scene, but rarely what needs to be improved. And the Cloudflare CEO’s tweet last month was just a reminder that there are several things to improve. PS- if you need immigration support, I strongly recommend you Rita Ferreira Lopes 🙂
- In this newsletter, and throughout this year, I have been sharing several success stories. But for each success story, there are many more founders struggling. Typically you don’t see it online, in your social networks or newsletters. For the ones struggling, know that you are not the only one – I am struggling as well. The last few weeks have been quite challenging for me. I feel like I have been failing all the time. And failing s*cks! I am still trying to figure the path back for success and don’t have any magic recipe (though in the past reading Hard things about Hard things helped to put things into perspective). Lately, I have been trying to do more of the things I enjoy – and writing this newsletter and backing entrepreneurs are some of those. 2020 was a crazy year! Looking forward to 2021. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and your loved ones!
Accelerator deadlines, pitch competition and events
- December 11: From start-to-table Demo day
- December 21: Maze X | Application for cohort 3
- January 8: Portugal Ventures – Tourism call
- January 21: KFounders
- Always open: Startup Lisboa incubation; CTT 1520 startup program
Resources for entrepreneurs
Aiming to support Entrepreneurs and with contributions from many of you, I put together resources for Startups based in Portugal. Visit the Resources summary page here. It includes information about investors, Term-sheets, among other resources.
Contributions with additional resources are welcome!
New resources added this month
- Co-investment by Portuguese VCs and business Angels investors
- Latest Portuguese Venture Capital funds Announcements
- Hot Startups in Portugal | by Felipe from Infraspeak
- Startup Exits in Portugal | by Felipe from Infraspeak
- Venture Ways Podcast | by João from DocDigitzer
- Scaleup reports | by BGI
- 2019 Venture Capital report | by Beta-i
- One month PM
- Diversity and Inclusion in tech | by Atomico
Funding round
Startup: Remote (https://remote.com/)
Amount: $35M
TAGs: B2B, Remote Work, Human Resources
Investors: Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Aaron Levie, Zach Weinberg, Kevin and Julia Hartz
Startup: Eneida (https://eneida.io/)
Amount: €4.5M
Tags: Clean Energy, Energy Efficiency, Power Grid, Wireless, IoT, B2B
Investors: Korys, 200M, HCapital Partners, Portugal Ventures, Innoenergy
Startup: Hijiffy (https://hijiffy.com/)
Amount: €1M
Tags: B2B, Travel, Hospitality, Customer Service, Artificial Intelligence, Chatbot, Tourism
Investors: Portugal Ventures
Startup: Mintbase (https://mintbase.io/)
Amount: $1M
Tags: B2C, Blockchain, NFTs, Marketplace
Investors: Sino Global, D1 Ventures, Block Oracle Capital, Arweave
Startup: Zero P (http://www.tudecides.pt/)
Amount: €150k
Tags: B2B, Impact, Education
Investors: Finy Ventures
Startup: 360Hyper (https://www.360hyper.pt/)
Amount: €100k
Tags: B2C, Marketplace, e-commerce, Retail
Investors: Indico Capital Partners
Startup: Grocere (http://www.mygrocere.com/)
Amount: €62k
Tags: B2C, e-commerce, Marketplace
Investors: Finy Ventures
Startup: Solarwood (http://www.solarwood.pt/)
Amount: Unknown
Tags: B2B, Energy
Investors: Finy Ventures
Startup: Smart Secure Technologies (https://sstech.pt/)
Amount: Unknown
Investors: Finy Ventures
Startup: Emotai (https://www.emotai.tech/)
Amount: Unknown
Tags: B2B, Consumer Electronics, Education, Human Resources, Gaming, Hardware
Investors: Faber Ventures
Startup: Safeway (https://getsafeway.com/home)
Amount: Unknown
Investors: Olisipo Way
Exits
Startup | Type of transaction | Value of the transaction
Update to previously reported data
- Vawlt | Initially reported: Investment from Olisipo Way; Updated to: No investment
- Eneida | Initially reported: January €1.15M from HCapital; Updated to: Deal in November and reported above
- Nutrium | Initially reported: Investment from Portugal Ventures in June; Updated to: No investment (Investment consolidated and announced last month, in a Series A)
- Knok | Initially reported: Unknown; Updated to: €1.7M + FascinanteFólio, Fundo para a Inovação Social, Ryse Asset Management participation
- YData | + Faber Ventures participation
- Blue Economy Fund | Initially reported: only 2 funds would receive funding; Updated to: isn’t restrict to 2 funds only
International funding rounds participated by Portuguese investors
- EDP Ventures | Yotta Energy – USA
- Sonae IM | Deepfence – USA
- Sonae IM | Cellwize – Singapore
- Core Angels | Biohope – Spain
Portuguese startups, Venture Capital and Business Angels activity report
See also