Portugal's SME pitch prize gives you three minutes and €5,000. Entries close on 16 October
The second PME Pitch awards are open to startups incorporated in Portugal within the last ten years, and to teams whose project exists only on paper. The final is at Taguspark on 28 October.
Apply / Learn moreThree minutes is not long to explain a business to people who have never heard of it. That constraint is the whole point of the second edition of the PME Pitch awards, which take applications until 16 October.
The winner gets €5,000, handed over as a symbolic cheque at the closing ceremony of the Fórum PME Magazine. The final runs on 28 October at Taguspark in Oeiras, and each finalist walks on stage with those three minutes and nothing else. Slides, video and a prototype are all allowed. The clock is not negotiable.
Who can enter
The rules open two doors. One is for startups legally incorporated in Portugal less than ten years ago. The other, which tends to get missed, is for entrepreneurial teams with a project still in development or validation — people who have not registered a company at all.
Each company or team may submit one application. It asks for a short description of the startup, the founding team and the project, which makes it noticeably lighter than the paperwork attached to most public funding calls.
How finalists are picked
Applications go first to an evaluation committee appointed by the organisers, which decides who travels to Oeiras. The jury at the final is made up of investors and specialists in innovation and entrepreneurship, still to be announced.
There are four judging criteria, and the fourth is the interesting one. The jury weighs how innovative and original the idea is, the size of the market and how far the project can scale, the business model and its financial viability, and then the quality and creativity of the pitch itself. The presentation is scored on its own terms, so a strong idea told badly loses points it cannot win back.
If you are mapping what else is open right now, some windows are much tighter: €182.5m for productive innovation closes on 30 September, and anyone still at the idea stage should look at Startup Voucher, which works on a different scale entirely. Five thousand euros will not fund a company. Three minutes in front of a room of investors is usually worth more than the cheque.
Image: Threeohsix / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
