The Solution
Gapstars came recommended through Propellant’s own investor network: a warm introduction with an existing track record behind it. But the fit went far beyond this. Propellant didn’t just need more engineers, it needed a second talent pool it could stand up fast, without diverting leadership time into learning Portuguese employment law or building HR infrastructure from scratch. Gapstars offered exactly that: a Lisbon presence, recruitment, and the IT onboarding, HR, culture and compliance side of employing people in Portugal, bundled into a predictable monthly cost, so Propellant could stay focused on the roadmap.
“Here was an opportunity where somebody said: we will open you an office, we will help you hire the people, we will look after the compliance and the HR side,” Alex says. “If you consider that we were looking to expand and diversify, did I also want to take on the risk of understanding Portuguese employment law myself? Not really.”
Portugal wasn’t an incidental choice. Propellant considers itself a European company first, a principle that runs through the business, including the MiFID II regulation at the core of its product, which governs European markets. Staying within Europe for its second hub was a natural extension of that identity.
The partnership began in 2025. Through Gapstars, Propellant built out its Lisbon presence starting from an existing engineering base in Romania, adding local talent such as Antonio Fonseca, a senior engineer who leads the team on the ground. Alex has spent the last decade in engineering leadership, and describes his approach simply: his product isn’t the software, it’s the team. That philosophy extends fully to Lisbon.
“For us, it’s not a remote team. They are The Team. They’re not just a series of people over half the world away who I communicate with over a messenger. I see them the same way I see the people in the UK, Poland, Romania, or France.”
Implementation & Collaboration
Alex doesn’t take integration on faith. Earlier this year, he flew to Lisbon for Gapstars’ Remote to Real event: two days built around getting distributed teams and clients into the same room. He spent his days in workshops alongside the team, and his evenings at dinners and events with them, the kind of time together that never happens over a call. For a leader who says his product is his team, not the software, that time in the room mattered as much as anything on the roadmap.
That connection has built over time, not arrived ready-made. When Alex joined Propellant in early 2025, the Lisbon team didn’t exist yet. He and Gapstars built it from there, hiring Antonio and Razvan to lay its foundation. Coming back to Lisbon more recently, he found a team that had properly gelled, working well together and socialising together outside the office, something he credits specifically to Antonio’s role in bringing people together.
That trust shows up in the work Propellant hands over too. Antonio and the rest of the Lisbon team compute regulatory data separately for every client, under strict cost and performance constraints on Google Cloud, on a product where a single wrong output can cost a client’s confidence entirely. Antonio is blunt about what that demands:
“If we take a bit more time, clients won’t be happy. But if the data is wrong, we lose all confidence, and the company’s over.”
That same directness carries into how the partnership between Propellant and Gapstars actually runs. Alex points to a level of account support that goes beyond the standard vendor relationship: “I could always get someone on the phone within half an hour if I needed it. The level of support was there.”
It’s also stayed a genuine two-way conversation rather than settling into a fixed playbook, with both sides using the past year to learn what actually works.
Impact & Results
The scaled Lisbon team gave Propellant the capacity to restructure and start building specialisation into the engineering group, something that wasn’t possible with the headcount Alex inherited. The clearest proof came under pressure, not in quiet periods.
Since the partnership began, Propellant has navigated three hard regulatory deadlines, each requiring a fundamental change to how the company collects its data. Each time, Alex made the call to redirect the entire engineering organisation toward the deadline, Lisbon included:
- December: the first deadline. All development paused for three months across the team, with the Lisbon engineers still ramping up.
- March: the second deadline. 75% of development paused for two months, with Lisbon now carrying a growing share of the delivery.
- The most recent deadline: with the Lisbon team fully up to speed, half of the wider engineering organisation, spanning Lisbon and Propellant’s other hubs, was pulled for the majority of a six-week window.
Across all three, Propellant delivered with zero outages and no impact to clients.
“If you’d asked me this time last year whether I’d expect this outcome, I’d have said we’re likely to have a couple of issues along the way. That’s just the cost of doing business. It didn’t happen.”
For Alex, the regulatory deadlines are the clearest measure of what the partnership has delivered, because they tie directly to how the market sees Propellant.
“It’s really secured and strengthened our place in the market as a credible provider. We’ve moved on from being a scrappy startup to supporting tier-one clients at the level they expect.”
Looking Ahead
Propellant plans to grow its Lisbon team by a further 25–50% over the next year. As the team approaches critical mass, Alex expects future hiring to broaden beyond any single location, choosing talent on competency first, a shift he sees as a sign of the Lisbon team’s success rather than a step away from it. The foundation it’s built, he notes, has given Propellant the confidence to support tier-one clients through exactly the kind of high-stakes, zero-margin-for-error delivery its market demands.
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