From a pink-walled room in a shared student house to a mobile studio working at the intersection of fintech, regulated technology, and AI, IPBN member company Pink Room’s journey is rooted in a simple philosophy: build things that people actually want to use.
The IPBN sat down for a chat with Mário Gago to find out more about the project, the company, and the mindsets behind it. And like all good storytellers, Mário started at the beginning. When asked how he came to be involved in his company, the answer is refreshingly straightforward:
“I didn't set out to start a company. I set out to build things.”
That instinct goes back to university, where he and co-founder Bruno met while studying Informatics Engineering at the University of Coimbra. The two eventually shared a house with several others, and it was there, during late conversations about wanting to build something of their own rather than work for someone else, that the idea for Pink Room began.
The name came from the most practical of circumstances.
“When we started, the only free room in the house was one with pink walls. So that's where we worked, and that's the name.”
Rather than leaving that origin story behind, they deliberately kept the name. For Pink Room, it remains a reminder of where the company began and the mindset that shaped it: two people building something with the resources they had available.
A few years later, a €1,000 hackathon prize helped furnish their first proper office. After around four years at Nest Collective, Pink Room joined the Subvisual Universe in 2021 as its mobile studio and opened its own office in Coimbra.
That office would eventually become something more ambitious than originally planned: Pink Hub, a co-working space for freelancers, remote workers and other companies, with rentable desks and a programme of community events and groups including Coimbra.js and Coimbra.Blockchain.
For the team, the Hub has become an important part of their relationship with Coimbra's technology community.
“It's brought the local tech community through our door, which is one of the things I'm most glad we did.”
Pink Room's expertise is focused on mobile product development, but its approach goes considerably further than simply building an app.
There are roughly five million apps in existence, but most people spend the overwhelming majority of their time using only a handful. As Pink Room puts it:
“You're not just competing to be one app among millions, you're competing to become one of the five someone opens every day.”
That is a high bar — and one that shapes the company's entire approach.
“So the skill isn't building an app. Anyone can build an app. The skill is building a mobile product people keep using.”
Pink Room works across the entire product lifecycle, from strategy and product development through UI and UX, commercial considerations, and engineering. The aim is not simply to create something that performs well in a demonstration, but to build products that are reliable, scalable, and capable of standing up to real-world use over time.
The company has developed particular strength in fintech and regulated environments, with experience across banking, payments, lending, and crypto wallets.
These are products where the stakes are high: real users, real money, and real consequences.
“The thread through all of it is that the parts users never see, the performance, the reliability, the small details, are what decide whether someone keeps opening the app.”
For Pink Room, that is where the real work happens.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, AI is now central to the company's thinking about the future.
Pink Room is pursuing this in two distinct but connected directions.
The first is the transformation AI is bringing to the way software itself is built. The scale of that change is already significant: this year, more than 90% of the code produced by the company was generated by AI.
But rather than viewing that simply as a productivity tool, Pink Room sees AI as fundamentally changing the nature of software development.
“Our engineers write far less code by hand and spend more time on the things that decide whether a product is good: what to build, how it should behave, and holding the quality bar while the tools move fast.”
The company is reshaping its wider operations around that shift too, including running the company itself on an AI system that holds its internal knowledge and playbooks.
The second area is perhaps even more ambitious: on-device AI.
Rather than relying entirely on cloud-based intelligence, Pink Room is exploring AI that runs directly on the user's phone. The potential advantages are significant for the types of products the company builds: faster performance, offline functionality and greater privacy because data does not need to leave the device.
The company has already been working on applications, including on-device driver-fatigue detection.
“It's where we want to lead as mobile and AI come together.”
At the same time, client work remains the foundation against which these ideas are tested, with Pink Room continuing to build fintech, payment and crypto products for users handling real-world transactions.
“That's the ground truth: the bets only matter if they help us ship better products.”
One of the company's case studies is Aslan, a UK fintech operating in earned-wage access.
The concept addresses a familiar financial problem: rather than turning to an overdraft or payday loan when money runs short before payday, employees can access pay they have already earned.
Pink Room was involved from the beginning, building the product and helping take it to market. In 2025, Aslan raised a €4.7 million seed round.
But the story is significant for another reason.
What began as a mobile development brief evolved into Pink Room helping orchestrate a much broader build, bringing together several companies from its network into a cross-company team and carrying the product through to market. Over time, the team also helped Aslan develop its own in-house capability.
As Pink Room explains:
“That's the part the ‘mobile studio’ label doesn't quite capture. When it matters, we can own the outcome, not just our slice of it.”
For the IPBN community, perhaps the most important message from the conversation is about the speed at which technology is now changing.
AI has not simply introduced another new technology for businesses to consider. It has changed the pace at which technology itself evolves.
“Technology has always moved fast, but AI has changed the speed limit.”
For businesses, that creates enormous opportunities, but also a very real challenge in distinguishing meaningful developments from noise — and deciding what to actually do next.
The advice is therefore simple:
“This isn't a moment to sit out, and it isn't one to navigate alone.”
That is also where Pink Room sees its role: staying at the edge of the technology shift, experimenting with AI in its own operations and products, and helping businesses understand what these changes could mean for their own products and strategies.
And ultimately, that brings the conversation back to the value of the IPBN itself.
“The faster the world moves, the more the people around you matter: the introduction, the honest second opinion, the person a step ahead of you on the same problem.”
For Pink Room, that spirit of openness and collaboration is something worth contributing to.
“If we can be useful to anyone here, just ask. I'm glad to be part of a group that works that way.”
| The IPBN is supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Ireland under the ESP Grant programme |
