Heitor Benfeito on the Mentor Bench at Techstars Startup Weekend Porto 2026
By Critical Ventures
Heitor Benfeito on the mentor bench at Techstars Startup Weekend Porto 2026
Techstars Startup Weekend Porto ran from September 25 to 27 at LACS Porto, organized by the 351 Portuguese Startup Association and supported by Techstars. Fifty-four hours, strangers on Friday, working prototypes by Sunday.
Heitor Benfeito, Managing Director of Critical Ventures, joined the mentor bench for the weekend. He sat alongside mentors like Ricardo Correia, Patrícia Mesquita, Sofia Correia de Sousa, and Marcos Almeida, working with teams as they moved from a raw pitch to something they could actually stand behind on Sunday.
Four ideas came out of this edition. ReRoute, a way for stranded travellers who've missed a flight connection to find the nearest decent hotel fast. Between Us, a safety-first app for women going out at night, showing which bars and streets the community trusts and quietly letting someone know when you've arrived, or when something feels off. ReConnect, matching retired people with family and younger generations for shared activities. CasaCare+, an operational fix for hospitals managing bed shortages by routing patients to at-home care instead.
That range was the point of the weekend. Nobody arrived with a finished business. They arrived with a hunch, got grouped with people they've never met, and spent two days finding out whether the hunch survives contact with real customers, real constraints, and a jury on Sunday afternoon.
Heitor's job over those two days was to keep asking the question founders least want to hear on a Saturday: who exactly is this for, and how do you know? It's the same question Critical Ventures asks the founders we back, just compressed into a weekend instead of a due diligence process.
We support this kind of mentorship because it's where the earliest version of the next founder we invest in gets built. Some of the people on those four teams will keep going after that weekend. Some won't, and that's fine too, that's what the weekend is for. Either way, they leave having built something with people they met, which is a strange and useful thing to have done.
If you're building something and want to talk to us before you've got a deck ready, get in touch.