Made in Portugal unicorns to hire 2,000

Unicorns which were either started by Portuguese entrepreneurs or have founders who are Portuguese are to take on up to 2,000 staff in 2022.

According to an exclusive story in Eco online news, last year saw the seven unicorns hire 3,675 staff, but in 2022 they will take on an additional 2,000 new employees as they expand their business activities in existing, and new markets.
The unicorn Remote (co-founder Marcelo Lebre pictured) alone could double its staff component from 700 staff to 1,400 highly qualified and specialised professionals.
Buoyed on by the switch to online work, HR Tech raised US$150 million in a Series B round, making it the fifth unicorn to be founded in Portugal.
In 2020 Remote has seen its revenues increase x65. It hired 170 people over that time period, bringing its headcount to 220. Now it has 700.
Other Portuguese unicorns include Feedzai, which uses AI to detect fraudulent payments; software companies Talkdesk and Outsystems; and online luxury fashion platform Farfetch. The country’s tech ecosystem boasts strong local engineering talent and high English proficiency — and more international investors are taking note.
OutSystems will be looking to hire as it launches its brand-new Project Neo which aims to achieve a 100x increase in developer productivity.
The low code tech company has built OutSystems Project Neo on a modern cloud foundation of Linux containers and Kubernetes to solve this developer productivity so that software developers can build applications running on Kubernetes that operate as they are tech elites, but without the risk, the cost, complexity and the time commitment.
OutSystems was founded in 2001 and has grown to have more than 525,000 community members, around 1,700 employees, over 400 partners with active customers in 87 countries and across 22 industries. More than 14 million people are currently using apps created on its platform, ranging from mobile apps and consumer websites to workgroup apps and extensions of other core systems like Microsoft, SAP, and Salesforce. Its product strategy is simple: “Serious productivity for serious apps”.
Feedzai enjoyed a 125% year-on-year ARR growth in Q3 with multiple new customers in North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia. Large multi-year enterprise deals closed in the US, EMEA, APAC, and LATAM with 100% year-to-date growth in new logos.
Feedzai recently announced the evolution of financial risk management, with the introduction of the world’s first RiskOps Platform in a single, comprehensive cloud-based platform to manage multiple forms of risk and compliance. Today, more than 20 percent of the world’s money flows through Feedzai while the company secures the bank accounts of 1 in every five people. In August 2021, Feedzai acquired Revelock and became the world’s largest Financial Intelligence Network (FIN), a vault of more than a trillion data points, sessions, and profiles of both good and bad actors.
Feedzai is the world’s first RiskOps platform, and the market leader in safeguarding global commerce with today’s most advanced cloud-based risk management platform, powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence. Feedzai is securing the transition to a cashless world while enabling digital trust in every transaction and payment type. The world’s largest banks, processors, and retailers trust Feedzai to protect trillions of dollars and manage risk while improving the customer experience for everyday users, without compromising privacy. Feedzai is a Series D company and has raised $282M to date with a current valuation of $1.5B. Its technology protects 800 million people in 190 countries.
Talkdesk, a cloud contact centre, will, according to its CEO and co-founder Tiago Paiva, take on more staff in 2022. In just 10 years the company had gone from 10 staff to over 2,000, and in 2021 alone contracted more than 500 new employees, and will take on more.
The unicorn has 1,800 clients in over 75 countries world-wide.
Sword Health, which is classified as a double-unicorn by investors (worth €2Bn and specialises in wearable technology with sensors that monitor patients’ movements during physical therapy workouts, is rapidly growing too. In one month in 2021 it collected US€163 million in investments with 150 employers offering Sword health solutions to their workers.
Founded in Portugal, Sword Health, based in Utah’s Salt Lake City, has about 300 employees, most of them in the US, but plans to double in size in the next year.
Online luxury retail fashion platform Farfetch which is Portugal founded but based in the UK also expanded in 2021 by purchasing the resale platform LUXCLUSIF, a business-to-business (B2B) service provider that enables luxury goods to be acquired, authenticated and sold to and from auctions, retailers, e-commerce platforms and stores worldwide.
The e-commerce company operates local-language websites and mobile apps for international markets in English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, German, Portuguese, Korean, Italian and Russian. Farfetch has offices in 14 cities and employs over 4,500 staff, 3,000 of which are in Portugal