Portugal has once again proven its startup mettle on the European stage, with four homegrown companies earning a spot on the Sifted 100: France & Southern Europe 2025, a notable ranking of the region’s fastest-growing startups.
Compiled by Sifted, the Financial Times–backed media outlet for European tech, the leaderboard is based on two-year revenue compound annual growth rate (CAGR) and highlights the top 100 private tech startups scaling fast across Southern Europe.
The Portuguese cohort reflects the country’s growing presence in verticals ranging from wellness tech to logistics, HR, and sustainable agriculture.
Leading the pack is sheerME, a wellness super app offering seamless bookings and payments through a wallet system with cashback and top-up benefits. With a two-year CAGR of 330.95%, sheerME ranks among the fastest risers across the entire region.
Also representing Portugal is Bloq.it, which has scaled globally with its end-to-end smart locker network solutions. Its software ecosystem, Bloq.it OS, is now considered one of the market’s top technologies for managing locker infrastructure. The company posted a two-year CAGR of 240.04%.
Coverflex, the third Portuguese company on the list, posted a 128.28% two-year CAGR by rethinking how companies approach employee compensation. With an all-in-one solution for managing benefits, insurance, and flexible spending, Coverflex taps into a growing demand for more personalized and adaptable HR tools.
Finally, Equal Food, which delivers affordable, “imperfect” fruit and vegetable baskets from regional farmers to consumers in Lisbon and Porto, achieved a 90.22% two-year CAGR. With its focus on sustainability and food waste reduction, Equal Food combines environmental impact with commercial scale.
To qualify for the Sifted 100: France & Southern Europe, companies must be private, independent, less than 15 years old, and headquartered in one of the following countries: Andorra, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, San Marino, or Spain.
Crucially, they must demonstrate substantial revenue growth from proprietary technology over a period of at least three financial years.
This year’s average two-year CAGR across the 100 selected startups is 156%, up from 142% in 2024 – a strong signal that tech companies in the region are not just surviving but scaling rapidly despite broader macroeconomic challenges.
Startups are achieving more with less: average headcount has dipped slightly while revenues have grown, a trend partly attributed to the adoption of AI tools that help lean teams remain highly productive.
At the top of the 2025 list is Electra, a Paris-based electric vehicle infrastructure startup, boasting a 681.46% two-year CAGR. Close behind is Barcelona’s REVER, which provides “post-sale solutions” and grew 674.60% over two years.
France continues to dominate the leaderboard with 44% of all entries and seven of the top 10, but Spain and Italy are clearly gaining ground. Notably, 38% of the companies on the list are B2B SaaS startups, while fintech accounts for 23%.
The Sifted 100 also reveals deeper trends in European entrepreneurship, including a shift toward financial sustainability, with the number of profitable companies nearly doubling from last year, a broader distribution of innovation across the region, and a strong showing by startups still in the early stages of funding. Over three-quarters of the companies are pre-Series B, showing that serious growth is happening early in the startup lifecycle.
“From day one, we’ve aimed to disrupt an outdated industry and reimagine the way people discover, book, and pay for wellness. And we’re doing it with the best partners on the planet,” Miguel Alves Ribeiro, founder and CEO at sheerME, said.
He described the company’s inclusion in the Sifted 100 as not a finish line, but a springboard for what’s ahead – a perspective shared by many other founders on this year’s list, who see it not as an endpoint but as a signal to accelerate their growth and expand their impact.
Featured image: By engin akyurt on Unsplash
Portugal Startup News 