SRS and Union Venture Builders team up to support startups. "Entrepreneurship is reshaping"

"Law firm SRS Legal and consultancy Union Venture Builders - also characterised as an "investors club" by Crunchbase - have partnered to support entrepreneurs to develop innovative and sustainable ideas and businesses. That's really the key phrase: idea. Even if it's not really a startup, SRS lawyers and Union Venture Builders experts are available to give the 'push' these projects need in terms of training and preparation to scale across borders.

The programme that results from this joint venture is called 'Union Nest' and has the capacity to include 15 companies for ideation and incubation through the model used in the firm's in-house programme - Startup Lab by SRS - with panels of mentors who seek to pass on knowledge so that a good idea can be transformed into a viable business plan.

"We've been talking about this for a year. We saw that there were a lot of synergies here and possibility to take what each of us already had - in a way, an isolated effort, there are many in the ecosystem - and verticalise that effort into something that has a beginning and an end. At Union, projects are well crafted and well wrapped up for investors. So they come to investors with a higher level of risk mitigation. That is the right way," lawyer Paulo Bandeira told Jornal Económico (JE).

The SRS partner, responsible for venture capital (VC) and startups at SRS, said that applications opened this Thursday. "We will be able to do that selection step of the projects that come to the Startups Lab, channel them to the Builder and choose those that have the most potential to then be presented to investors. Builder is a funnel," he compared.

The idea is that this agreement may contribute to the construction of a solid national ecosystem, giving tools to innovators to be successful from the beginning. Not least because, in his opinion, there are too many startups acceleration and investment initiatives, but they do not communicate with each other and end up having the opposite effect to what they propose.

"Entrepreneurship is reshaping. In the last ten years there has been very rapid growth, but what we still see a lot of are isolated initiatives that don't always communicate well with each other. We are trying to correct that with this initiative. There are also other interesting ones running, even by Startup Portugal, to try to bring some consistency to the system, listening to all players through public consultation that is going on," Paulo Bandeira tells JE."