HomePortugal-StartupsPepito, Beaunity and MiniMobil awarded prizes at 'Startup Pirates @ Porto'

Pepito, Beaunity and MiniMobil awarded prizes at ‘Startup Pirates @ Porto’

It’s Saturday morning and the second edition of ‘Startup Pirates @ Porto’ is coming to an end. One week of business modelling, branding, pitching, mentorship and teamwork is over and it’s time to let the team’s ideas shine.

The jury has voted that Pepito should win this edition. Pepito is a virtual parrot that wants to act as a replacement for FAQs. The parrot, or should we say, the Natural Language Processing algorithm behind it, takes a question from a user and tries to answer it with its current knowledge base. The bird seems kinder than the question and answers with a list; I guess that if these guys tweak the data model and the algorithm right, they might get some cookies. The team behind Pepito is working on the beta invite version and will start testing in a couple of months. The question is, will they have to spend $34,020 to buy pepito.com from the Russian cybersquatters that own it? By the way, there were no pirates involved in the jury, so a parrot winning is just a coincidence, or maybe good marketing.

Second place was taken ex aequo by Beaunity and MiniMobil. Beaunity stands for ‘beauty community’ (Update – March 2023: The startup seems to be no longer in business under this website, and we therefore deactivated the original link), a new venture by the people behind asunhasdecoradas.com, a Joomla-based community of 76,000 Portuguese-speaking nail decoration lovers. The team wants to broaden its experience to all segments in the beauty market and is already working on the concept to launch a beta phase within a couple of months. They should manage to take on this Christmas.

MiniMobil is a ‘rent-a-scooter’ service for those with reduced mobility. Drop-off drop-on bicycle renting is quite common in many cities, but these guys bet on two essential issues. The first is that not everyone is capable of riding a bike safely, for example many elderly and disabled people. The second that not every city is like Copenhagen or Amsterdam, as it’s the case of Porto’s steep slopes. That’s why it makes some sense to start a pilot in Porto and fine tune the business model, based on renting fees and advertising. These guys should piggyback on their excellent partners and smart small, aim big, move fast. They’re also another cybersquatting victim, this time for an unknown amount to be paid to some South Korean guy.

The three winners get 6 months of pre-incubation, or 3 months of incubation, at UPTEC, the University of Porto’s Incubator, among other prizes. There are some pretty interesting projects coming from UPTEC, with the more visible being Tuizzi (Update – March 2023: The startup seems to be no longer in business under this website, and we therefore deactivated the original link) and Uniplaces, in addition to some other 80 or so blossoming projects.

Other teams did nice presentations, thanks to the pirates’ excellent programme. It’s for this reason that next up to conquer are Zaragoza, Poznan, Macau, Cape Town, Barcelona, Braga and Rio de Janeiro by the end of the year, with many more locations to come. We can think of around 500 cities that should also take part, so if anyone reading this wants to make it happen in their town, do it! If nothing else, it’s great for your CV.

I am thinking that some Portuguese companies should have been present in the audience today. They wouldn’t have needed to be big companies; they could have been small, but with an interest in innovating. I recently wrote a book on this topic, called “Tech Days – enterprises, innovation, technology” (in Portuguese). There are startups that will look for an IPO and most of them will fail. There are many startups that will get an investor but fail to deliver. There are startups that will make it to the market and will implode from lack of usage. And there are thousands of established companies out there that would benefit from a special deal, a seed contract, a joint venture or even an early investment in these innovative, micro teams that move faster than their pinky finger. I know if I were one of them I could have finished the day with something new in my pocket. For these companies and all wannabe entrepreneurs that stayed at home sleeping on Saturday morning, I invite you to drop in at the next Startup Pirates event.

By the way: If you’d like to stay up-to-date with acquisitions, funding and other interesting opportunities, make sure to subscribe to our free weekly EU-Startups Newsletter!

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Reinaldo Ferreira
Reinaldo Ferreira
Reinaldo Ferreira is a serial entrepreneur and investor in technology companies. He lives in Porto and writes mostly about Portuguese startups and technology topics.
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2 COMMENTS

  1. So great! I was really rooting for pepito to win this. They have an excellent idea and business model. I sure this guys are going to pull it off.
    Congratulations to the organization and to the rest of the teams. great work!

    PS: best of luck to your book and I want a signed copy! 😉 heheh

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