Tonight, ten founders will stand up in a picturesque tennis club overlooking the Atlantic coast and pitch their companies to a room of over 100 investors, builders, and curious locals. No slides. No screens. Just conviction, and five minutes on the clock.
This is Startups by the Sea — the first edition of a live pitch competition hosted by Phira Ventures in Ericeira, Portugal.
Phira operates on both sides of the table. We build companies from the inside — incubating ventures from scratch — and we invest in founders who already have something underway but need capital, expertise, operational support, or all three. This dual perspective shapes everything we do.
But we wanted to do something more for the ecosystem around us. That meant not just deploying capital, but creating the kind of event we ourselves would want to attend: well curated, intimate, relaxed yet serious — where founders receive honest feedback, make real connections, and leave better off than they arrived, whether or not they win the investment prize.
So we built one.
An evening where ambitious founders present compelling companies to a room of people who came not just to watch, but to engage and, where the fit is right, to help.
Most people think of Lisbon or Porto when they think of Portuguese startups. Fair enough.
But Ericeira has something those cities cannot easily replicate: a unique, collaborative community of builders and remote talent, its proximity to the wild Atlantic ocean that sharpens and calms the mind, and just enough distance from the capital to foster a different rhythm of thinking.
Part of our team has lived and invested here for years. We have held our annual retreats here. We know this coast — and we believe it has the potential to become a vibrant hub for meaningful entrepreneurship.
The response to Startups by the Sea confirmed our instinct. Close to 90 founders applied to pitch. Tickets sold out quickly. There is now a growing waitlist. For a first edition, in a town the size of Ericeira, that tells us a lot. It suggests the appetite for something like this — something local, something serious — is there. There is a growing number of people here, who want to build businesses that have an impact on the local community and on the wider world.
This aligns perfectly with Phira’s mission to build ventures with a purpose.
Our ten finalists pitching tonight span a striking range.
Lola Stories is reimagining bedtime through AI-generated audio stories narrated in a parent's own voice. UpSpeech fills the gap between weekly speech therapy sessions with structured daily practice and real-time feedback. DJ Walk turns your music library into a clinically grounded fitness coach. Wave Cam connects surfers with photographers through a two-sided marketplace. Quilha has built an operating system for Portuguese short-term rental hosts navigating a maze of regulations that no competitor covers end-to-end. RAILspect uses onboard AI to detect railway track defects before they become disasters. Cinelingo teaches spoken language comprehension through film — the way people actually learn to understand a foreign tongue. Atlas Cove is creating the world's first structured health residency for founders and executives, right here in Portugal. Simplifyer turns item-level receipt data into behavioural intelligence that retailers and insurers have never had access to. And savearth has devised a water-saving device for hotel showers that installs in under a minute and cuts consumption by up to 60%.
What unites them is not a sector but a disposition: each is solving a genuine problem and can advocate with clarity for why their company should exist.
We were deliberate about who we partnered with. We wanted sponsors and partners who are either rooted in this community or genuinely aligned with what we are trying to build.
PostHog, the open-source product analytics platform — last sporting a $1.4 billion valuation and beloved by developers worldwide — joins us as a headline partner. We also partnered with leading local co-working/co-living companies Aoma, Sítio, Second Home, and Venture X. And our venue — BreakPoint Tennis Club — is itself a local institution.
We wanted every glass poured and every plate served to come from this corner of the world. Wine is from Quinta de Sant'Ana, a vineyard in the rolling hills just behind Ericeira. Beer comes from two local breweries: Pace, who pioneered non-alcoholic craft beer in Portugal, and Mean Sardine, who have been quietly building one of the country's best microbreweries a stone's throw from here. Kombucha is made by Aquela and ūmmi, both Portuguese producers with ties to the area. And the food comes from some of Ericeira's most exciting young food brands — Argentine Amigos BBQ, Cocotte, and Knuck Sandwich — the kind of places that locals know well and visitors remember.
It would have been easy to call a catering company. We chose not to. Part of what makes this event worth attending is the place itself, and we wanted every detail to reflect that.
Tonight will be the first edition. We very much intend it not to be the last. If even a fraction of the energy we have felt in the preparation translates into the room, it will be an evening worth remembering.
Ericeira is ready. The founders are ready. We shall see what happens next.
