Shilling Founders Fund is Portugal’s newest VC, with $35.6M to spend on early-stage startups –
Summary
The fund is also launching what it dubs the “Shilling Platform” — a pool of learnings and resources for startups. In a statement, Pedro Santos Vieira, managing partner at Shilling said: “We call it experience-based acceleration. This twofold approach fully aligns incentives between Shilling, LPs and portfolio founders.” Founded by Hugo Gonçalves Pereira, António Casanova, Diogo da Silveira, João Coelho Borges, Juan Alvarez and Pedro Rutkowski in 2011, Shilling was later joined by tech founders Ricardo Jacinto (Elecctro), Miguel Santo Amaro (Uniplaces), Pedro Ramalho Carlos (IP) and Pedro Santos Vieira (GoodGuide) in the last five years. Since 2011, it has invested in a number of breakout hits from the country, including Unbabel, Bizay, Uniplaces, and Best Tables, acquired by TripADvisor. Hugo Gonçalves Pereira, founder of Shilling, added: “We are a Portugal-based, globally ambitious, VC fund, with a founder-friendly approach to early-stage investing… and when we say founder-friendly we truly mean it: in our pre-seed program, ventures go from first call, to money in the bank, in less than 30 days.” As we noted earlier this year in our Extra Crunch survey of Lisbon, Portugal, the city is gearing up to join other significant tech hubs.