Heitor Benfeito

Heitor has more than 15 years’ experience as a VC executive, having been responsible for deal flow for Portugal Ventures for more than 6 years and for all the fund’s international activities in the USA, UK and Germany, mainly focused supporting early-stage companies in generating and closing strategic deals: commercially, funding and M&A.

Before Heitor was Investment manager at InovCapital, the first VC fund setup in Portugal and he held board positions in 12 companies, where he often acted as interim-CEO and interim-CFO and head of international operations.

He was also a secondee analyst at Go4Ventures (investment banking) in London and has been involved in more than 60 VC deals amounting almost $100M and 7 successful M&A exits of early stage companies in Portugal. Heitor was also co-lead on fundraising two ~$50M funds from institutional LPs.

He is currently the Director of Portugal Ventures’ operations in San Francisco and Boston in the USA and heads the team of Portfolio Development at Portugal Ventures, responsible for all funding, M&A and commercial strategic deals for Portugal Ventures and its portfolio. He also heads Portugal Ventures’ CEO Academy, an annual training program covering soft and hard skills for early stage entrepreneurs in areas of team management, finance, reporting, fundraising,

Heitor is a PhD candidate in Finance in the Economics Faculty of Porto University in Porto, with specialization in startup valuation under the supervision of Professor Jay Mitra (University of Essex) and Professor Hélder Vasconcelos (Porto University), he is a lecturer in Financial Management at European University in Porto and is an external expert for the European Commission on innovation, entrepreneurship and finance since 2017.

Heitor is a polyglot speaker of Portuguese (native), English (fluent), German (advanced), Mandarin (basic) and Russian (elementary) and has been a key-note speaker internationally in the areas of finance, entrepreneurship and VC and early stage operations.