Yesterday, MagniFinance won the first edition of Caixa Empreende Award, an initiative organized by Caixa Capital, the VC arm of Caixa Geral de Depósitos, that brought together the best startups from Lisbon Challenge, COHiTEC and Building Global Innovators. MagniFinance took home €100K in convertible note.
MagniFinance is a Lisbon-based startup that promises to reduce the time that companies spend managing their finances to just 5 minutes daily. The €100K they won yesterday, come after receiving another €100K last week from Caixa Capital.
But yesterday’s event was more than a startup competition. After the 7 pitches and before the announcement of the winner, there was a roundtable about incubation and acceleration in Portugal with panelists from COTEC, BGI, Startup Braga, Beta-i and Startup Lisboa. They shared the latests accomplishments from their startups and for the numbers they mentioned of money raised, startups incubated and international founders, there is no doubt that the portuguese startup ecosystem is thriving and going into the right direction.
https://twitter.com/pt_startups/status/560114944541458433
Then, two more roundtables. One with portuguese investors and another one with international investors. Here, the message was clear: Portugal has the talent to create global and multimillion dollars startups. There is money in Portugal for pre-seed and seed rounds, but startups with global ambitious need to go abroad to find investors for series A and so on.
https://twitter.com/pt_startups/status/560129795384938497
Right before the announcement of the winner, Stephan Morais from Caixa Capital interviewed Mike Butcher about startups in general and his opinion of the portuguese startup ecosystem. Once again, the message was clear: The portuguese startup ecosystem is small, but talented and it can be the Berlin of tomorrow.
This was the biggest event of the year so far and showed the vitality of the portuguese startup ecosystem.
Magnifinance wins! An extra 100k convertible note from @caixa_capital #caixaempreender #thefuturefromscratch pic.twitter.com/ISRIdz9Qdo
— Stephan Morais (@StephanMorais) January 27, 2015