Ateeq ur Rahman is a London-based founding partner of Sovereign Stone Capital Partners, a private investment firm backing mid-market businesses across the UK and Southern Europe. After nearly 30 years in international banking, including a stint as Country Head and Managing Director for Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank in Qatar where he led the merger with Union National Bank, he turned operator and investor, building ventures spanning Portuguese real estate, venture capital, and specialty coffee. He commits personal capital to deals and prefers hands-on partnership to passive checks.
Tiago Paiva is the founder and CEO of Talkdesk, the AI-powered cloud contact center platform he built from a 10-day hackathon project in 2011 into a $10 billion enterprise unicorn. Born in Portugal and trained as an engineer at Instituto Superior Técnico, he packed his bags for San Francisco two weeks after winning a Twilio hackathon and never looked back. Under his leadership, Talkdesk has grown to over 2,000 employees in 16 countries, posting $420M in ARR, and pioneering agentic AI across the entire contact center stack.
Nuno Sebastiao is the Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Feedzai, the AI-native RiskOps platform protecting over $70 billion in annual payment volume across 190 countries. A former European Space Agency aerospace engineer turned fintech disruptor, he co-founded Feedzai in Portugal in 2011 alongside Paulo Marques and Pedro Bizarro. Under his leadership, Feedzai reached unicorn status in 2021, hit a $2 billion valuation in 2025, and was selected by the European Central Bank to power fraud detection for the digital euro. A multilingual polymath fluent in four languages, Nuno was ranked #1 in Portugal's 40 Under 40, named Entrepreneur of the Year by London Business School, and has shared stages with Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, and Richard Branson.
Dois Corvos is Lisbon's landmark independent craft brewery, founded in 2013 by Scott Steffens and Susana Cascais in the Marvila district. What started with a homebrew kit brought from Seattle has grown into one of Portugal's most recognised beer makers — producing roughly 550,000 litres a year, maintaining ~350 oak barrels, exporting to eight-plus countries, and operating two taprooms — all while remaining 100% family-owned with zero corporate backing.
Luna House is Cascais' most-loved coliving and coworking hub — a boutique B&B with nine private rooms in summer, a digital nomad village with community programming in winter. Founded in 2022 by Olena (Lena) Matveieva, it offers coworking for 25 people with 120mb/sec fibre, an event studio, team workation packages, and a resident dog named Luna who consistently out-reviews the human staff.