Augusta Labs, Portuguese AI startup, valued at €50M

Augusta Labs, a Lisbon-based startup that helps companies accelerate their AI transformation, has closed its first investment round with private equity firms and angel investors, valuing the company at €50 million. Backers in this round include Virgílio Bento — and the rest of Sword Health's founding team, through EX Capital —, Diogo Mónica (Anchorage), Paulo Rosado (OutSystems) and Nuno Sebastião (Feedzai), four well-known names in Portugal's tech ecosystem.

Founded two years ago by Rodrigo Fernandes and João Cerejeira, Augusta Labs' mission is to help companies carry out their AI transformation, with a client focus on private equity. "We found very strong product-market fit on the private equity side, to transform portfolio companies. It is where we concentrate most of our commercial effort," says Rodrigo Fernandes, the company's co-founder.

What Augusta Labs actually does

"We do end-to-end transformation of companies into AI-native ones. It's mainly a response to one question: imagining and making real the answer to 'if this company were built today, with all available technology, what would it look like?' — and then doing whatever it takes to make that happen, especially from a technical standpoint," Fernandes says of the company's value proposition.

In practice, we work side-by-side with the C-suite to design the future version of the company — reimagining processes and revenue lines — and from there we build custom AI solutions, measuring the value generated at each step.

For Augusta Labs' clients, mostly private equity firms, what matters most is the EBITDA and enterprise value generated by portfolio companies. "That's why we get valued the way we do, and it's what keeps us focused on what actually drives results. In essence, Augusta is becoming a money-making machine: it enters a company and unlocks real EBITDA in a very short time," the co-founder says.

Expanding into the United States and the United Kingdom

Two years old with more than 40 employees, Augusta Labs says it is growing more than six times a year. With this capital injection, the company wants to "massively accelerate" distribution and delivery: continuing to expand aggressively worldwide, with the United States and London as target markets, while also reinforcing its technical team in Portugal.

• Founded: 2024, by Rodrigo Fernandes and João Cerejeira.
• Valuation after the round: €50 million.
• Investors: Virgílio Bento/EX Capital (Sword Health founders), Diogo Mónica (Anchorage), Paulo Rosado (OutSystems), Nuno Sebastião (Feedzai).
• Claimed growth: more than six times a year.
• Current team: more than 40 employees.
• Target markets for expansion: United States and United Kingdom.

A new way of hiring talent

The expansion should come with a "very significant" reinforcement of the team. "We need the country's best young technical talent — and 'young' is deliberate. Those who grew up with these tools master them better and are more willing to experiment with ways of working that only became possible a few months ago," says Fernandes, who calls that talent "rare in Portugal, but exceptional."

The co-founder also argues that traditional hiring processes, based on résumés and academic credentials, are becoming obsolete at a time when what matters most is what each person can build with today's tools, and says the company will reveal, within two to three weeks, a new way of identifying who will be a top performer in this AI era.

On its client portfolio, Fernandes gives no numbers, but confirms that "most of the work is with large private equity firms, whose names we can't share yet" — with the exception of a few names already made public, such as British company Sage.

For an international private equity firm or a mid-sized company weighing where to start its own AI transformation, Augusta Labs' round shows there is already a homegrown alternative to the big international consultancies — built by Portuguese founders and backed by the same people who took other national startups to landmark valuations.