How CMU Portugal primes startups

When the Carnegie Mellon Portugal program launched in 2006, its charge was to lead Portugal to the forefront of research and higher education in information and communication technologies.

CMU Portugal forged relationships with Portuguese universities and a few Portuguese companies and maximized connections with Carnegie Mellon researchers in Pittsburgh. A thriving ecosystem formed that melded advanced research with world-class graduate education.

After five years, as the program’s first phase wound down, “we observed that the Portuguese faculty were eager to launch startups. Their attitude was, ‘If the CMU faculty in Pittsburgh can do this, why can’t we?’” says José M. F. Moura, the CMU founding director of the CMU Portugal Program.

“We supported that idea. And when we established Phase 2 of the program, we added an additional goal of fostering entrepreneurship and innovation,” explains Moura. The program encouraged Portuguese faculty and students to tap into Carnegie Mellon’s entrepreneurial culture and services offered in Pittsburgh.

The CMU Portugal program explored ways to support researchers. For example, with intellectual property (IP) as the driver, administrators from partnering Portuguese institutions were invited to CMU Portugal, where they shadowed representatives from CMU’s Center for Technology Transfer. Together they explored topics such as IP protection, marketing, and launching innovative startups. But beyond all this, it was the CMU entrepreneurial spirit and practice that paid off.

One of the first startups to come out of the program, Feedzai, is worth more than $1 billion today. Mambu, another unicorn startup, is the result of a research project on microfinancing developed by three master’s students studying human-computer interaction. Veniam and Unbabel are two other very successful startups with valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars. To date, 12 startups have been created under the scope of the program.

Being attentive to entrepreneurship and industry is a big success story of this program.

José M. F. Moura, CMU Founding Director, CMU Portugal Program

To keep the momentum going, Moura explains, “We wanted a program for early-phase startups. These are companies that got started because they had a technical idea, but they needed to learn how to write a business plan or how to pitch to a VC, and so forth. So, we launched, with the help of the Project Olympus at CMU, this program called inRes.”

CMU Portugal issued a call for startups to apply, and companies were selected. Representatives from these companies were trained for a month in Portugal and then they’d travel to CMU in Pittsburgh and Silicon Valley for an intensive program in which they attended workshops and pitched customers and VCs.

The inRes program hit a hiatus with advent of COVID, which led CMU Portugal to rethink its approach for fostering startups. Focus shifted to a series of Large-Scale Collaborative Projects led by national companies and carried out in partnership with Portuguese institutions, universities, and Carnegie Mellon.

“What was different is that we were working with established companies, and the research was suggested by problems that they needed to pursue to remain competitive in the global market,” explains Moura. These projects provided learning experiences for students and faculty and “the results exceeded everything that we could have imagined.”

As a result of the epidemic, the European Union launched programs to restart economies in European countries. “In Portugal, CMU Portugal was a catalyst for creating a few consortia of large companies, startups, and research centers and universities that put together successful proposals combining research and innovation for reconstruction funding,” says Moura.

“Being attentive to entrepreneurship and industry is a big success story of this program,” says Moura. He adds that CMU is now negotiating Phase 4 of the program, and the Portuguese Minister of Science and Technology will decide if CMU Portugal continues to serve the country’s needs. Undoubtedly, the program’s capacity for innovation and entrepreneurship will be a major factor in this decision.