It has been already one week since the new batch startups joined us in Lisbon for this edition of TheLisbonChallenge and time is literally flying.
Last Thursday we were at Culturgest for the Investment Day in collaboration with Mini Seedcamp Lisbon & Caixa Tech Tour. For those of you who didn’t make it, yeah, you lost a great opportunity to meet all the main players in the Lisbon startup scene. But don’t worry, we’ll make a little recap here to give you the idea.
For breakfast, instead of a normal croissants and coffee, we had VC scrambled eggs. Carlos Espinal, Seedcamp partner, gave us some great advice on how to get your company founded and he kept us busy with his experiences until lunch.
The official event started on the words of Kirsty Hayes, UK ambassador to Portugal that highlighted the incredible number of Portuguese startups that were successfully founded through Seedcamp in the past editions.
Then, 11 startups – most of them from of Lisbon Challenge - had the opportunity to pitch for 3 minutes in front of Carlos Espinal, Dave Haynes and Ricardo Schäfer from Seedcamp. So one after another the lucky ones B-GUEST, doDOC, Earthindicators, Feedcruncher, Ignidata, Legal Flow, Skilleo, Trip Dashboard, Vitalidi, Weclipse and Wonnova had the opportunity to pitch their business concept.
After talking about fundraising for so long what’s better than an investment panel? With Harry Briggs from Balderton Capital, Carlos Espinal from Seedcamp, Sofia Hmich from Index Ventures, Nick Brito from Fidelity Partners, Tushita Ranchan from Masdar and Stephan Morais for Caixa Capital on stage representing 12 Billion in funds. This was a great opportunity to understand the dynamics behind fundraising.
We had just the time for a nice coffee and José de Matos, President of Caixa Geral de Depósitos, introduced Caixa Tech Tour Iberian, a 3 days program that aims to allocate direct investments on health care, IT and media through Caixa Capital’s venture capital portfolio and different initiatives.
Immediately after that António Pires de Lima, Minister of Economy, was on stage to share some insights into the improvement of the Portuguese, thanks to some of the participants that are making innovation happening in Portugal.
And last but not least a full hour Panel with some of the most successful iberian entrepreneurial stories. On stage there were Bento Correia, CEO of VisionBox, Carlos Oliveira founder of Mobicomp (and former Secretary of Sate for Entrepreneurship), Carlos Silva, CEO of Seedrs and CristinaFonseca, Co-founder of TalkDesk.
If you were there, let us know your feedback on it.
Andrea Fabianni