At the beginning of this year, we took a look at the largest European countries and tried to come up with a list of 5 startups for each country to watch in 2015.
In the case of Portugal and a few other countries, it has been very hard to narrow down this list, but we’ve decided to go with just 5 promising Portuguese startups from different sectors. All of them have entered the market within the last two years and each of the listed startups has something special to add to the web or app economy in 2015.
1. Xhockware: This Porto-based startup is mainly focused on creating innovative retail solutions. Founded in 2014, Xhockware’s goal is to solve the most common complaints about grocery/supermarket shopping in a natural way, increasing the quality experience for consumers and saving money for retailers. There is money to be saved in effectively reducing checkout time! At the beginning of 2014, Xhockware secured €245K of seed funding in a financing round with Portugal Ventures, PNV Capital and a few other investors.
2. Unbabel: Founded in 2013, Unbabel’s mission is to enable seamless, trustworthy written communication in different languages. The Unbabel platform combines a novel approach to machine translation with a community of bilingual people and freelance translators, resulting in human-quality translations, at a fraction of the cost, and much faster. Customers enjoy peace of mind while communicating in their native language to natives of other countries, secure that communication barriers are not damaging their business. In July 2014, the Lisbon-based startup closed a seed financing round of $1.5 million.
3. MeshApp: Chats, social, messages, news, emails, professional and personal matters – MeshApp helps you to prioritise your life. Founded in 2013, Meshapp is a tool that allows you to access your content and interactions in a better way, via an application that transforms your digital chaos into an organised experience. MeshApp aggregates the information you need to stay up-to-date and helps you take only the best of your web, social and email accounts. So far the Aveiro-based startup has secured $375K in seed funding (Update – May 2023: The startup seems to be no longer in business under this website, and we therefore deactivated the original link).
4. Sensefinity: The Lisbon-based startup Sensefinity connects the physical world with your IT, creating the Internet of Things. Via Sensefinity’s simple to use and relatively inexpensive sensor-platform and their scaleable cloud-platform, the young company can find fast and easy ways to integrate machine-data into today’s IT systems, to uncover hidden value. Founded in 2013, Sensefinity aims to provide Internet of Things for the masses.
5. Getsocial.io: This Portuguese startup helps websites analyse their social sharing activities. By tracking every share made on your website, GetSocial is able to identify which users shared and how many visitors plus conversions were generated by shares. The Lisbon-based startup also enables you to analyse shares by product, shares by social network, and more. As Getsocial tracks everything on the user level, their solution helps you to find influential users who bring traffic/conversions, top converting social networks and engaged users who didn’t convert yet. Getsocial was founded in 2013 and funded with €315K by Portugal Ventures and Faber Ventures.
By the way: If you’re a corporate or investor looking for exciting startups in a specific market for a potential investment or acquisition, check out our Startup Sourcing Service!
