Portuguese Startup Scene Report 2022
Data on the Portuguese venture investment ecosystem
We are excited to share the 2022 edition of our Portuguese Startup Scene Report!
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2022: the “new normal”?
Having been in the industry for the past 23 years, we, at Armilar, have been fortunate enough to observe — and, hopefully, to positively impact — the growth of the Portuguese ecosystem. Throughout our journey, we’ve had the privilege to invest in some of Portugal’s most successful companies and in others that, while not as successful, have played a crucial role in developing the ecosystem.
For being around for so long, we know that markets have many “ups and downs”. We started investing right in the middle of the “dotcom” bubble burst. We lived the 2008 crash and the “tech boom” that followed it. We’re conscious that we are currently undergoing an important correction — from a very high peak, that is — but VC is a long-term investment strategy that outlives the ups and downs of economic cycles.
In general, tech companies faced a challenging year, mostly due to a high inflation environment and rapidly rising interest rates. This led to a significant impact on the valuation of publicly-listed high-growth technological companies (which are more sensitive to the “discount rate”): in the US, tech stocks fell more than 30%, 10 p.p. worse than the overall market. As a result, late-stage rounds in private markets were highly affected, given their proximity to the IPO window, which ultimately cooled down early-stage VC activity.
This trend was also noticeable in Portugal, with a decrease in overall investment activity, translating into a 26% overall drop in the number of announced deals and a 41% decrease in invested amounts. Despite this market contraction, we observed a rise in both the number and investment amount of Seed and Series A rounds, driven by a diverse ecosystem of local and international investors that have extended their support to early-stage startups.
Overall, our enthusiasm for the future of the Portuguese ecosystem remains high. The country has been producing an abundance of startups and scale-ups that are not only capable of competing globally but also attracting top-tier international talent and securing substantial venture capital investments. With this in mind, we are continuously dedicated to identifying promising opportunities in the ecosystem and partnering with ambitious innovators who will “rock the world”.
To download the report, click here. You can access the corresponding data via our Rows spreadsheet. We encourage you to take advantage of the handy duplication feature offered by Rows to copy the data to your own workspace and use it as you deem.
A reminder of why we decided to build this report
For a series of reasons, it is not uncommon that many startups decide to establish their headquarters in other countries, which can obscure the accurate metrics of VC investment in Portugal. As a result, Portugal is often underrepresented in widely-used VC data sources that many of us in the industry use.
To address this issue, we have developed our own dataset of the Portuguese startup scene by gathering information from public sources on all deals involving startups “with a Portuguese origin”. Although this is primarily an internal tool, it may prove useful to the ecosystem as a whole. It is important to note that the dataset is not exhaustive and may contain occasional inaccuracies. Nevertheless, we have decided to share some of the data we have collected in the hopes that it will be beneficial to others.
It’s worth noting that this report is not intended to compete with or replicate other reports published about the Portuguese ecosystem. Instead, we see it as a complementary tool to those reports. It is important to keep in mind that we are not a data insights platform, so the information presented here should not be taken as absolute truth. We encourage you to review the note about the methodology for further information. The data in this report is simply what we have gathered and estimated as part of our role as a Portugal-based international VC.
Queries, constructive criticism and suggestions are very welcome. Please direct them to info@armilar.com.
Authored by Pedro Almeida, with contributions from Pedro Ribeiro Santos, Inês de Macedo Santos and Pedro Castel-Branco.
