UPTEC – Science and Technology Park of the University of Porto has just launched Matching Founders, a new initiative that addresses one of the main challenges of entrepreneurship: finding the right people to build a solid founding team ready to develop businesses.
Aimed at entrepreneurs in the early stages, Matching Founders promotes connections between founders and potential co-founders with ideas, talent and ambition to create projects together. The initiative combines a digital platform for discovering and matching profiles with regular face-to-face matching meetings.
The platform allows the creation of profiles of founders and potential co-founders, the publication of business ideas, the exploration of available projects and profiles, as well as the visualisation of compatibility levels between people and ideas. In addition, it includes a calendar of in-person events, designed to encourage direct contact, the presentation of ideas and the creation of relationships of trust between participants.
The initiative brings together two key audiences from the entrepreneurial ecosystem: on the one hand, entrepreneurs looking for co-founders and, on the other, people interested in joining founding teams of startups, creating a structured meeting point to transform ideas into projects.
The first Matching Founders matchmaking event will take place on 24 February at 5.30 pm at UPTEC Baixa, bringing together entrepreneurs, founders and potential co-founders in an informal setting designed for sharing ideas, brief presentations and the start of new collaborations. Registrations can be made on the platform’s website.
This activity is carried out under the Open Call 2025, an initiative of the Porto City Council, coordinated by Porto Digital with the support of Porto Innovation Hub and ScaleUp Porto. With this project, UPTEC reinforces its commitment to strengthening the entrepreneurial ecosystem, creating opportunities for innovative projects to be born with strong, complementary and aligned teams from the outset.
