Shilling, an early-stage VC in Portugal, has now launched a new €30M ($35.6M) early-stage fund called Shilling Founders Fund, which is backed just over 35 successful tech founders, as well as large European VC Atomico. The fund will run on a profit-sharing model, sharing fund returns with all of its portfolio founders. While the fund tends to back Portuguese startups it also hold back 40% of its capital for international deals.
The fund says it has already invested in seven companies: Rows (spreadsheet for app creators), Vawlt (secure and resilient multi-cloud platform), Promptly (SaaS platform for health outcomes analytics), Modatta (decentralized marketplace for consented personal data), Biocol Labs (DTC post-chemical pharmacy), Decipad (low-code notebook) and Detech.ai (AI-powered application and infrastructure monitoring platform).
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. Additionally, we run on a profit-sharing model. Each portfolio founder will receive a share of our returns. 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 ExtraCrunch survey of Lisbon, Portugal, the city is gearing up to join other significant tech hubs.
Other leading VCs in the country include Indico Capital Partners, Faber, Armilar Venture Partners, Tocha, and Portugal Ventures.