Portugal startup ecosystem
Portugal — especially Lisbon — has quickly become one of Europe's most popular startup destinations. Affordable living, a welcoming visa regime for tech workers, and marquee events like Web Summit have attracted international founders. Strengths include SaaS, travel tech, and sustainability, with growing VC activity and government-backed startup incentives. The directory currently lists 91 organisations across 9 cities.
Showing 61–80 of 91 Portugal
Cities in Portugal
Types in Portugal
Portugal results
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Nutrium
Nutrium is a Portuguese nutrition-practice software company that builds tools for dietitians and nutrition professionals to manage client care. Its platform pairs a practice-management system for dietitians with a consumer app, and its Nutrium Care product is sold to companies and health plans as an employee nutrition benefit combining technology, dietitians and corporate workshops. The company serves clients internationally alongside its home market of Portugal.
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OutSystems
OutSystems is a Portuguese-founded low-code and agentic-development platform company that lets enterprises build and orchestrate applications and AI agents. Its platform spans agentic systems engineering, enterprise orchestration, industry-specific solutions, workflow automation and a data fabric layer, and it has grown into a global enterprise software vendor with a dual base in Portugal and the US.
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Porto Tech Hub Conference 2026
Porto's annual tech conference showcasing the city's growing engineering community, with talks on software architecture, AI/ML, DevOps, and product management from local and international speakers. 2,000+ attendees. Tickets EUR 30-100.
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Portugal Tech Week 2026
Portugal's largest decentralised innovation festival — 250+ mostly-free events across 15+ cities, themed on AI, Web3, sustainability, and the future of work, anchored around Web Summit week. The single best week for a founder to tap the whole Portuguese ecosystem at once, with pitch sessions, tech days, and investor meetups nationwide.
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Portugal Ventures
Portugal Ventures is Portugal's principal state-backed early-stage venture firm, established in 2012 through the merger of Inovcapital, AICEP Capital Global Ventures and Turismo Capital. Headquartered in Porto with a Lisbon office, it operates within the Banco Português de Fomento group and manages roughly €288M across 16+ funds. Its mandate is to stimulate Portuguese entrepreneurship with risk capital at pre-seed, seed and Series A, writing tickets of €50K–€1.5M across digital and technology, industry, healthcare and tourism. Since inception it has deployed over €230M into 256+ companies. Its portfolio has produced unicorns including BitSight (cybersecurity), Fever (live entertainment, exited 2026 at 15x) and Glovo, alongside exits in OutSystems and Farfetch (NYSE IPO, 2018). Other notable holdings include Feedzai, Aptoide, Codacy, JScrambler and Sword Health. New leadership for the 2025–2027 term is led by CEO Marco Neves.
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Pragma Lisbon 2026
Pragma Lisbon is a curated single-track Web3 summit organised by ETHGlobal, featuring high-signal talks from industry leaders for founders and builders. Held the day before the ETHGlobal Lisbon hackathon as part of the Onchain Lisbon week, it focuses on protocol design, scaling and the future of onchain applications.
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Probely
Developer-first Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) and API vulnerability scanner. Founded 2016 in Portugal; raised EUR 7.7M Series A in 2022; acquired by Snyk in November 2024.
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Product Circle
Product Circle organises small, application-only, operator-led sessions for product managers and product leaders across European cities. Each intimate gathering focuses on product strategy, discovery, AI-era decision-making and growth for startup and scaleup operators.
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Productized Conference 2026
A two-day product conference — a workshops day plus a talks day — at the Museum of the Orient on Lisbon's riverfront, for product managers, designers, founders, and leaders. Practical, craft-focused content on building better products, teams, and strategy, strong for early-stage founders refining product discovery and delivery.
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Remote
Global employment platform offering Employer of Record (EOR), global payroll, contractor management and compliance across 100+ countries on owned infrastructure. Founded 2019 in Lisbon; a Portuguese unicorn.
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Ricardo Torgal
General Partner and CFO of Indico Capital Partners, which he co-founded after a career at Caixa Capital. He leads fund operations and investments across enterprise software, fintech and deep tech in Portugal, Spain and Italy.
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SBC (Sports Betting Community)
SBC (Sports Betting Community) is a global media and events company organising large-scale gaming, betting and igaming-technology conferences. Its SBC Summit in Lisbon is one of Europe's biggest industry gatherings, bringing together operators, suppliers, payments and technology companies for exhibitions, conference tracks and networking.
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SBC Summit Lisbon 2026
SBC Summit is Europe's largest gaming, igaming and sports-betting industry conference, hosted across the Feira Internacional de Lisboa and MEO Arena in Lisbon's Parque das Nações. It convenes thousands of operators, technology suppliers, payments providers and investors for exhibitions, conference tracks, a startup and investment angle, and large-scale networking.
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Second Home Lisbon
Second Home Lisbon is a design-forward coworking and community space located in the Time Out Market building at the Mercado da Ribeira in Lisbon's waterfront Cais do Sodre neighborhood. Part of the London-founded Second Home network, the Lisbon location opened in 2016 and provides workspace and community programming for startups, creatives, and remote tech workers in a distinctive plant-filled, architecturally acclaimed environment. Beyond desks, Second Home Lisbon hosts cultural events, startup workshops, speaker series, and cross-disciplinary programs bringing together founders from technology, design, and the arts. The space has become a gathering point for Lisbon's international startup community, particularly attracting founders from the UK, US, and Northern Europe who have relocated to Lisbon for its quality of life, timezone advantages, and growing tech ecosystem.
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Semapa Next
Semapa Next is the corporate venture capital arm of Semapa Group, one of Portugal's largest industrial conglomerates (pulp, paper, cement). Launched to invest in industrial tech, environmental solutions, mobility, and fintech, Semapa Next deploys EUR 1-5M at Series A in startups aligned with the group's strategic interests. The fund provides portfolio companies with access to Semapa's industrial operations for piloting and commercial partnerships, focusing on sustainability, circular economy, and digital transformation of traditional industries.
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Sensei
Sensei is a Portuguese startup that builds autonomous, checkout-free retail stores using computer vision and artificial intelligence. Its proprietary platform combines cameras, sensors and AI algorithms to automate both new and existing stores, letting customers shop without queues or manual scanning while their cart updates automatically for a ready-to-pay checkout. Founded in 2017, the company is headquartered in Castelo Branco, Portugal, with additional offices in Lisbon, São Paulo and Milan, and works with partners including Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Mastercard. In October 2024 Sensei raised a €15 million Series A round to expand its autonomous retail technology.
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Shilling
Shilling (Shilling VC) is a Lisbon-based early-stage venture capital firm, running a fund of around 52 million euros that backs entrepreneurs from pre-seed and seed stages. Known for a founder-friendly model that shares fund profits with its portfolio founders, it invests primarily in Portuguese and Southern European technology startups and supports them as they scale internationally.
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Smartex
Smartex is a Portuguese deep-tech company building AI-based fabric-inspection systems for the textile industry, aiming to automate quality control on manufacturing lines. The company publishes information on careers, grants and corruption-risk-prevention policy, consistent with a manufacturing-facing enterprise vendor operating in regulated industrial markets.
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Startup Braga
Innovation hub and accelerator supported by Microsoft, nurturing deep-tech startups in biotech, nanotech, and digital sectors. Provides acceleration, access to University of Minho labs, and corporate partners; backed 120+ companies. Scope: Regional (Northern Portugal).
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Startup Lisboa
Startup Lisboa is a key incubator in Portugal’s capital, established in 2012 as a public-private initiative to boost entrepreneurship in the city. Situated in downtown Lisbon’s Baixa district in renovated historic buildings, Startup Lisboa provides mentorship, workspace, and networking for early-stage startups across sectors. It was launched with backing from the Lisbon City Council, bank Montepio, and IAPMEI (the Portuguese SME agency), reflecting strong civic support. Over an incubation period of up to 3 years, startups receive guidance on refining their business model, access to strategic partners, and help connecting with investors. Office space is a big draw: Startup Lisboa offers subsidized offices and co-working spots to dozens of startups, easing a major burden in early stages. The incubator runs several vertical programs, including dedicated tracks for tourism, social innovation, and fintech in partnership with corporates. Lisbon’s booming tourism industry spurred Startup Lisboa to create initiatives for travel-tech and “Smart Tourism” – alumni in this space include Unbabel (AI translation for customer service, now a scaleup with $90M+ raised). Other success stories from Startup Lisboa’s portfolio are EatTasty (food delivery, expanded to Madrid) and Hole19 (a golf app with millions of users). Besides incubation, Startup Lisboa manages events like the Lisbon Challenge (an international acceleration program) and interfaces with Portugal’s Startup Visa program to attract foreign founders. They also collaborate with Web Summit (the major tech conference hosted in Lisbon) to showcase local talent. A distinctive project is the “Made of Lisboa” community brand, which Startup Lisboa spearheads to unite the city’s tech scene. The incubator has supported over 300 startups, which have created an estimated 3,000+ jobs. Startup Lisboa also played a role in rejuvenating Lisbon’s downtown, turning it into a lively startup hub. With Lisbon now on the map as a startup-friendly city (helped by initiatives like €200M VC fund of funds from the government), Startup Lisboa continues to be at the heart of it – fostering new companies in an open, founder-centric environment, and solidifying Lisbon’s reputation as a launchpad for international startups in Southern Europe.
