Portugal Made Room for Forty Deep Tech Teams in Porto and Filled Thirty-One, With Nearly Half the Cohort Still at Proof of Concept

The first edition of Tech Foundry Portugal, the state-backed accelerator built to push laboratory science in Portugal toward a market, began on Tuesday in Porto with 31 projects. The Ministério da Economia e da Coesão Territorial (Ministry of the Economy and Territorial Cohesion), which announced the cohort, put the number of applications at 98.

Read on its own, 31 from 98 sounds like a selective programme. Read against the government's own call, it is something else. When applications opened on 16 June, the ministry said the programme would support "up to 40 scientific and technological teams", and Startup Portugal, which runs it, designed the intake as two parallel tracks of roughly 20 places each. The cohort that started on Tuesday fills 31 of those 40. The programme also began three months long. In June it was announced as four, running from September to December.

Who Is In It

The sector spread is broad and tilts toward the life sciences. Six of the 31 projects are in health and six in biotechnology, five are in artificial intelligence, and five are in the climate and energy transition. The remainder are spread across advanced materials and nanotechnology, dual-use technologies with defence applications, robotics and autonomous systems including drones, and space and aeronautics.

The maturity numbers are the more revealing set. Nearly half the cohort is still at proof of concept. Just over a third, 39 percent, has tested its technology in conditions close to real-world application. The call was open to teams at technology readiness levels 4 and 5, which is to say validated in a laboratory or validated in a relevant environment, and the cohort has landed hard against the bottom of that band rather than spread evenly across it.

That is not a failure of selection so much as a description of the problem the programme was created to address. "This programme was designed to answer a critical failure in the ecosystem: the phase between technological validation and market entry," João Rui Ferreira, Secretary of State for the Economy, said when the call opened. Castro Almeida, the Minister of the Economy and Territorial Cohesion, framed it in similar terms: "Portugal today has a solid scientific base that is recognised internationally. The challenge is turning that knowledge into innovation with economic impact."

What the Teams Get

Over the three months the selected teams work through technological validation, business-model development and preparation for investment, in workshops, one-to-one mentoring with deep tech researchers, founders, investors and corporate executives, peer-learning sessions and a corporate site visit. The format is hybrid, with the in-person sessions in Porto and accommodation for them covered. It closes with a Demo Day in Porto in December in front of investors.

Participation is free. Startup Portugal runs the programme with Hello Tomorrow, the Paris-based deep tech organisation, and Porto Business School, with the Câmara Municipal do Porto (Porto City Council) as institutional partner. The Hello Tomorrow link is the part that is hardest for a national programme to build on its own: it opens a network the organisation puts at more than 5,000 startups across more than 100 countries and around 1,300 investors who specialise in deep tech. Teams also keep a tail of support after December, including three further 90-minute sessions, introductions to investors and attendance at the 2027 Hello Tomorrow summit.

The Money Underneath It

The accelerator is the second half of a structure whose first half is financial. At the end of 2025 the government opened the Linha Ecossistema Deeptech & Tech Foundry under the Instrumento Financeiro para a Inovação e Competitividade (Financial Instrument for Innovation and Competitiveness, IFIC), the Recovery and Resilience Plan vehicle for business capitalisation. That line does not hand out grants. It invests in science and technology-based startups through equity or quasi-equity instruments, in co-investment with private parties, which means the state's money moves only where private money moves with it.

The line ran in two application phases, the first from 22 October to 21 November 2025 and the second from 5 January to 4 February 2026, and the second was expressly conditional on the first not exhausting the allocation. Reporting at the time put the initial allocation at 15 million euros, the smallest of the IFIC's lines. The accelerator that started on Tuesday was announced in June as the complement to it: the money exists, and this is the pipeline meant to produce companies capable of absorbing it.

Which is why the 31 of 40 matters more than it looks. A co-investment line whose second phase had to be held open in case the first did not fill, sitting under an accelerator that took nine fewer teams than it built room for, describes the same constraint twice. The bottleneck the government identified is real, and on this first pass the supply of Portuguese science ready to cross it was thinner than the programme was sized for.

Where It Sits

Tech Foundry is the newest layer on a set of institutions Portugal has been assembling for several years, and its position in that set explains what it is for. The Instituto Pedro Nunes in Coimbra hosts the country's first NATO DIANA acceleration node, which anchors a small cohort of dual-use companies. The European Space Agency runs a business incubation centre in Oeiras that periodically calls for new space startups. Portugal Ventures puts equity into companies that already exist as companies.

Each of those picks up a team that has already crossed a threshold: a defence application, a space application, an incorporated business. Tech Foundry is aimed at the stage before all of them, where the work is still a research group with a validated result and no company around it. Nearly half of this cohort has not built a prototype that survives contact with a real environment, which is precisely the population none of the other instruments reaches, and it is also the population that is hardest to convert. A first edition that filled 31 of 40 places is a reasonable read on how many such teams Portugal produced in a single application window of just over a fortnight.

The initiative was first announced in mid-May at the SIM Conference in Porto. Applications closed on 3 July and results went out by the end of that month. Demo Day is in December.