Startup World Cup Portugal – fifty competitors; one winner

If you wanted to get an overview of the startup ecosystem in Portugal than you couldn’t have done better than immerse yourself in the two-day Startup World Cup Portugal competition held at the city’s Unicorn Factory on Wednesday and Thursday this week. (September 10-11).

The event was a pitch battle or rather a battle to pitch technological innovations and creative ideas involving 50 startups based in Portugal for a chance to compete for a US$1 million prize in the US later this year.

And the first edition had a winner and that winner, announced at 5pm on Thursday had a name and a very proud CEO and founders – LoopOS and Ricardo Morgado and João Bernardo Parreira – a company in five markets focused on the circular economy.

The circular economy startup will represent Portugal at the Grand Final, in San Francisco, on October 16 e 17 to compete for a prize of  US$1 million of direct investment from Pegasus Tech Ventures.

LoopOS had already raised €3 million at the start of this year for its circular economy project to invest in its operation in Portugal and expand to Spain and France thanks to Portuguese venture capital investors 3XP Global’s Impact Fund, Beta Capital and Fundbox.

“LoopOS was created to revolutionise the way companies adopt the circular economy, allowing them to transform complex processes into simple and efficient solutions,” said João Bernardo Parreira, CEO of LoopOS, in a statement at that time. “This investment is an essential step in bringing our technology to more markets and promoting a positive environmental and economic impact.”

The capital injection is being used to accelerate the development of AI tools with a focus on advanced pricing algorithms, computer vision and the creation of automatic prompt-based channels, and at the same time enable the startup to expand its presence in other parts of Europe, with a focus on Spain and France.

LoopOS has developed a modular and scaleable platform that allows companies to manage “any type of circular economy channel such as recoveries, repairs, returns, rentals and C2C in a flexible and traceable way.

Insurer Fidelidade, food distributors MC Sonae and Auchan, retailer Fnac, postal service CTT and sports retailer Decathlon are some of LoopOS’ 100 customers, whose platform operates in more than 50 product categories, and is estimated to have “generated a circular economy of more than €1.5 million with a significant environmental impact, avoiding about 20.6 tons of CO2 emissions.

Essential Business asked Ricardo Morgado after he had received his trophy if he had had any idea that the company stood a strong change of winning the competition?

“We had no idea. We decided to apply because on the last day before the application deadline out investor told us about the competition and we hand’t known about it. We sent our pitch and got through to the final and I just delivered the pitch that I normally present to prospective clients and investors”, he said.

“We were up against 50 amazing companies” said the co-founder whose company currently employs 35 people and hails from Coimbra.

Obviously, he said he planned to open an office in the United States. “We are already in five markets in Europe, we’ve had a very successful and fast year and we were thinking of opening up in the States in 2026 but now I’m going next month and I think we’ll need to speed up our strategy.”

The company doesn’t have physical offices in the five markets in which it operates, but coordinates its business from Portugal. “We feel that as the business grows, we will have to open offices in some of these countries”.

“Portugal is a testbed and a very good one for quick, low-budget POCs (Proof of Concepts) and to test market attraction from Portugal to the rest of Europe,” concluded Ricardo Morgado.

Text and Photo: Chris Graeme