Ukrainian start-ups in Portugal follow two speeds
Valentina Rakitina moved to Portugal in April, a few weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, her homeland and where since 2014 she was creating an academic career in entrepreneurship, as academic director of Startup Ukraine and, later, founder of the first innovation park in the country, Unit.City. She quickly rolls up manga in Lisbon accelerator Uplift and launched Ukrainian start-ups to continue their businesses and raise funds to develop them.
Why the other end of Europe? “All Ukrainian startups know Portugal because of the Web Summit. We used to participate and introduce ourselves. That’s why many companies find themselves here. I love Portugal and I feel like I’m at home. But frankly speaking, it is difficult at first to look for a job and it is very difficult to plan for the future, the next few weeks. So I decided to just get my students to normalize my emotional state, learn more about the environment, meet several players and start organizing an initiative”, says Valentina Rakitina to the initiatives NEWadmitting that he is still “trying to understand” the Portuguese dynamics.
In the same month, Vital Laptenok, CEO of Flyer One Ventures and co-founder of BetterMe, a subsidiary of the Genesis Media group, one of the largest advertising and marketing companies in Ukraine, arrived in Portugal. The investor and entrepreneur reveals to JE that he plans to open a technology hub in the Portuguese capital, which will join the Kiev and Warsaw offices. “The start-up ecosystem in Lisbon is very vibrant, it is growing fast because some international companies have offices here, there is a good technical education, a large number of start-ups are emerging. Here we also have Russians and entrepreneurs, which are many for Portugal and I think the atmosphere is certainly guaranteed.
Despite the fever with blockchain and companies that operate with decentralized technologies (Web3), Vital Laptenok assures NOVO that his society does not finance this industry, because he feels that he still does not see “good applications in the real world” of these tokens. “Apart from that, we invest in almost all conditions. We are completely agnostic in terms of sectors: B2B (Business to Business) or B2C (Business to Consumer), SaaS (Software as a Service)… Everything is fine with us, because what matters most are the founders and the important market where it operates, if it is growing”, he explains.
Vital Lapteno that the cranial-optimized average entrepreneurs “definitely, but that the scenario is reversed at the moment, but that the scenario is reversed in the or short term with the potential for appreciation of the beginning or even closing because of the general context of the capital market being a right effect of war. “2021 was a very good year for start-ups, we were raising a lot of money and everything was ok and then everything changed abruptly in a month. It’s a tricky time for anyone looking for financing because investors aren’t willing to invest in risky businesses and everyone wants rental companies. If it is not profitable and there will be problems to be filed, sometimes it will reach capital”, warns the expert.
Read the full article in the issue of NEW which is this Saturday, August 27th, on newsstands.