Hands On, a Portuguese marketplace for in-person workshops, has secured a €50,000 investment from Angels Way to support its growth plans, including expansion to Spain this year, ECO reports.
Positioning itself as the Airbnb of face-to-face learning experiences, the platform connects learners with skilled artisans and teachers, streamlining the entire process from discovery and booking to payments.
It currently offers around 300 workshops for individuals and teams, ranging from cooking and tufting tapestry to ceramics, urban agriculture, eco-construction, and fitness, across Lisbon, Porto, Sintra, Cascais, Setúbal, Braga, and other locations.
“Our mission is to digitize the management of teachers and workshop mentors so that they can focus on what they do best, which is to share knowledge, experience, and create real connections,” said Diogo Infante do Carmo, co-founder and CEO of Hands On, which was co-founded with Tom Archer.
He added that the company is seeing growing demand for tangible activities and aims to position itself as an offline alternative that promotes well-being and meaningful encounters through learning new skills.
The expansion into Spain will be supported strategically by Tom Batting, chairman of Hands On and founder of Obby, a London-based marketplace for creative courses, classes, and workshops sold to ClassBento, and by Rodrigo Sousa Coutinho, co-founder of OutSystems, a Portuguese-origin unicorn that provides an AI development platform enabling enterprises to deliver mission-critical applications and AI agents at scale.
Angels Way is a community of over 400 angel investors and one of the funds under the management of OW Ventures. Focused on early-stage technology startups, the fund invests up to €50,000 per company and aims to allocate €1 million across 20 Portuguese startups with technological impact.
With this transaction, Angels Way reaches its 10th investment, marking the halfway point of its plan to back that number of startups over a two-year period. In its first year of operation, the community analyzed more than 100 candidate projects, according to ECO.
Previous investments include Nixar, Granter, Medgical, Dojo AI, Purrmi, Courtmaster, Curiouz, WiseWorld, and ByTheLaw.
Featured image: Photo source: Diogo Infante do Carmo/LinkedIn
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