The company is to hire 150 people in Lisbon by 2020 for key tech roles, such as Head of Engineering, Data Scientists and Developers. The office will be located in the Anjos neighbourhood in LACS Anjos, the refurbished building that was mostly known as Tribunal do Trabalho.


SWVL is an Egyptian scaleup based in Cairo and founded in 2017 that is disrupting the way commuters travel in the MENA region. The company offers an app-based mass transit system that enables riders heading in the same direction to share fixed-route bus trips for a flat fare with no surge pricing. The service claims to be up to 70 percent cheaper than competing on-demand ride-hailing.


SWVL operates in three countries, within six cities, and plans to expand to additional ones in Africa and South East Asia by the end of the year.


Nadia Pais, Global HR Director, said “I have been strongly supporting the choice of Lisbon for our Tech Hub. Lisbon offers an incredible pool of talents, local and international, and we will concentrate here the tech core of our business, hiring 150 key profiles that we would be able to find just in a few cities in Europe. Unlike some companies that choose Portugal to outsource back-office jobs, we see our Lisbon tech hub as a strategic office for us, and the plan is to focus on core product development from here.”


James Horrocks, Tech Consultant at SWVL, said “Portugal, Lisbon above all, has become a hotbed of tech talents and attracts them also from abroad. In only two years, SWVL has built a solid and competitive team, at an international level, and the Lisbon Tech Hub will strengthen it, integrating the tech expertise. We are looking for top tech talents that we would unlikely be able to find in the MENA region.” SWVL’s Tech Hub will be located in central Lisbon where also other top tech companies are located.