Uphold, a leading digital money platform, announced today the acquisition of Scytale, a digital agency based in Braga, Portugal. Uphold was an early believer in the technology talent to be found in the Portuguese hub around Porto, and the acquisition comes after deciding to further anchor its technology team in Portugal.
“This is a great development for our team. We’ve long felt that we’d like to have more say in how our consulting work is used. Now, we‘ll get to build, implement and continually enhance solutions for a truly global business. Uphold has more than 1 million customers in over 183 countries and we’ll be able to see our ideas become part of its growth story around the world.”
– Nuno Ferreira, Scytale’s former CEO and now VP of Engineering at Uphold
Scytale was established in 2011 in Braga, Portugal by Universidade do Minho graduates, Nuno Ferreira, Eduardo Conceição, João Veiga and Marco Martins. The co-founders built Scytale into a successful web development and design studio, specialized in producing digital applications and products for a wide range of global clients.
Rui Marinho and Tiago Ribeiro, fellow Minho alumni were busy building the global engineering hub for Uphold (Bitreserve) – a digital assets platform established in 2013 and which now has over one million users. Operating as Uphold’s Co-CTOs, Marinho and Ribeiro are responsible for a development team of more than 50 specialist engineers, designers, and product managers.
Ribeiro said of the integration, “We’re delighted to welcome Nuno, Marco, Eduardo, João, and their team. We’ve known many of them from university and, through collaborating with them on several projects, we’ve come to respect their work and rigorous processes. Uphold is all about making investments and payments seamless, easy and affordable for people worldwide. These aims align well with Scytale’s insistence that their solutions and visual designs should improve life, work and play for users.”
Marinho added, “This is a terrific endorsement of our expertise from Uphold’s management in San Francisco and London. Today, Uphold offers easy mobile access to and transfers between 23 fiat currencies, 12 digital assets and tokens, and four metals as well as a groundbreaking yield product. While this work is exciting and demanding – at the forefront of fintech – we do need to supplement our existing team. Although Scytale allows us to continue delivering to the standards we expect, we’ll continue to look far and wide for talented people who are up for the challenge of working for a growing, global company.”
