Portugal has 6 in the top 1000
The capital has gained 21 places over the past year, while Porto has lost 11 and is now ranked 147th worldwide. Funchal has disappeared from the map. Portugal has moved up two places: it has overtaken Brazil and is now the 26th best country for the creation of start-ups.
Lisbon is the only Portuguese city to feature in the world’s top 100 cities for startup development in 2023. It has risen 21 places in the last year and now occupies 62nd place in a ranking that remains dominated by London, followed by Paris, Berlin, Stockholm and Amsterdam.
The findings come from HelloSafe, a platform for comparing financial products, which carried out the study based on a StartupBlink database, ranking Portugal in 26th place, an increase of two positions on last year’s top.
According to Blink’s map of the global startup ecosystem, Portugal currently boasts “around 332 startups, including four unicorns [such as OutSystems or TalkDesk] and a pantheon” [read Web Summit].
“Portugal has the potential to progress even further. The Portuguese startup scene is best represented in marketing and sales, e-commerce and retail, as well as software and data,” the same study points out.
What’s more, “until last year, Brazil held the top position among Portuguese-speaking countries, but in 2023, Portugal, along with Japan, is the only country in the top 30 to move up two positions, from 28th to 26th”, the same study points out, in a ranking where the UK remains in the lead, with the podium also occupied by Sweden and Germany.
Porto, Coimbra and Aveiro fall, Braga and Leiria rise, Funchal stands out from the crowd
As for the Portuguese cities in this ranking, there was no change in the top three, but while Lisbon moved up 21 places, Porto dropped 11 places to 147th, while Braga moved up eight places to 424th.
In the top 1000, Coimbra appears in 2023 in 557th position, which translates into a drop of 116 places, with the same thing happening to Aveiro, which falls from 667th to 739th place.
Leiria, which was at the bottom of the pack (965th), dropped to 639th place.
Funchal, which appeared in the 2022 ranking in 949th place, has this time been excluded from the list.
According to the author of the study (https://hellosafe.pt/blogue/startups-portugal), “the ranking is based on three criteria: quantity, quality and business environment”.