CMU Portugal program has already given rise to two unicorn startups

The CMU Portugal Program, created in 2006 in collaboration between the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as part of the International Partnerships initiative, has already led to the creation of 12 successful startups that continue to make headlines on the national and international scene, including Feedzai, Unbabel, Veniam and Mambu. Together, these companies have managed to attract several tens of millions of euros in international funding and have created more than 1,000 highly qualified jobs. 

Feedzai was the first startup created under the CMU Portugal Program. Today it is considered a unicorn company and is the 4th Portuguese startup, and the first based in Portugal, to obtain this title, after having raised another 200 million dollars in the last investment round, thus reaching a valuation of 1 billion euros. This new investment, led by international investor KKR, also retains the support and confidence of Sapphire Ventures and Citi Ventures, which invested 50 million dollars in Feedzai in 2017.

Feedzai maintains an excellent collaboration with the CMU Portugal Program and its founders, Paulo Marques and Pedro Bizarro, were visiting professors at CMU under the Program. The startup, in addition to being involved in the Industrial Affiliate Program, is also the proposing institution of the CAMELOT project, which leads collaborative research between Portugal and CMU.

Feedzai is a market leader in the fight against financial crime, using artificial intelligence and machine learning to prevent and detect financial crime and make banking safer. Headquartered in Coimbra, it has a team of more than 500 people who have been working remotely due to the pandemic. The company also has offices in Lisbon, Porto, New York, Atlanta, Silicon Valley, London, Hong Kong and Sydney.

At the beginning of the year, Mambu, another CMU Portugal Program company, also became a unicorn. Mambu won 110 million euros in a new round of investment by TCV (Technology Crossover Ventures), a company that supports companies such as Revolut, Klarna and Netflix, becoming the first unicorn company in the CMU Portugal Program. With a valuation of 1.7 billion euros, it is now an international success story. The company took its first steps under the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program as a result of the work carried out by three Master's students in Human Computer Interaction at the Interactive Technologies Institute in Madeira. The three founders, Sofia Nunes (Portugal), Eugene Danilkis (Canada) and Frederik Pfisterer (Germany), created the startup in 2009, developing the "SaaS" (Software as a Service) banking platform, which is now the market leader. The technology company is based in Berlin, has expanded to more than 50 countries and develops solutions for digitizing banking services that speed up and simplify the way financial products are built and offered by financial institutions. 

In this latest round of investment, Mambu has received support from Tiger Global and Arena Holdings, as well as investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Runa Capital and Acton Capital Partners. Mambu intends to continue its expansion and invest in markets such as Brazil, Japan and the United States and plans to double its team to more than 1,000 employees by 2022.

About FCT's International Partnerships

The International Partnerships were launched in 2006 and are a strategic collaboration between Portuguese universities and R&D institutions with three US universities: Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Texas at Austin (UTA). This collaboration gave rise to the CMU-Portugal, MIT-Portugal and UTA-Portugal programmes, which promote the internationalization of Portuguese scientific and higher education institutions, boosting innovative projects and the mobility of highly qualified human resources.

FCT has been primarily responsible for the public funding of these partnerships, as well as for monitoring them and promoting new thematic knowledge networks. For the 2018-2023 period, the International Partnerships are now part of the goPORTUGAL initiative, which strengthens and expands the concept of international partnerships.

More information about the startups: Feedzai and Mambu