From Tesla to Lisbon: How Techstars Discovered Portugal?

Launched last year, the first edition of Techstars’ acceleration program conquered foreigners from all over the world. Some even decided to remain in Portugal.

Olivier Le Lann lost himself counting the number of people he contacted with during the three months of the acceleration program. The idea of creating EVA was born in Seoul, South Korea when Olivier was in charge of bringing Tesla to that market. On his baggage, he was taking already not only loads of experience but also the ambition of establishing a company on his own.

“I had my eyes in Portugal for a long time, but the program Techstars was the trigger to make it happen. We found not only a great work environment as well as great engineers but also an investment opportunity to create a startup in a cheaper way than in London or in Paris”, Le Lann explains to ECO.

Le Lann’s company was one of the nine foreign companies, among the total ten, to integrate the first edition of Techstars and Semapa’s acceleration program, launched last year in Portugal. Techstars, which is one of the largest accelerators worldwide, choose Lisbon not only because of previous investments it has done there before (i.e. Outsystems, Farfetch, Sensei, among others) but also due to Websummit’s presence and the city’s natural attractiveness.

“Part of this attractiveness has to do with the fact of companies knowing they have conditions to remain in the country”, Hugo Augusto, Techstars program manager for Portugal. Once a Portuguese entrepreneur in the US, Hugo returned to Portugal in July 2017. The opportunity of managing the program in Portugal happened around that time.

Hugo believes the country counts with various attraction’s factors that persuade foreigners to move and, eventually, remain living and working there. “Since the beginning that we thought Portugal is a fast-growing tech hub, thus being quite attractive for building global startups there. That was the reason why we decided to use Lisbon’s attractiveness in our favor”, told.

 

 

 

Source: ECO News