TOP AI & DEEP TECH STARTUP Pitch Competition at Web Summit
Invite-only pitch competition for early-stage AI and DeepTech startups
A Bay Area–caliber room in Lisbon during Web Summit. Every seat is hand-picked: standout pre-seed and seed AI founders, top-tier VCs, and frontier tech operators.
APPLICATIONS ARE CLOSED
Thank you to all 136 startups who applied! The pitching startups will be announced soon.
🏆 Prizes
OpenAI: Codex credits for the top 3. 🥇 $5,000 · 🥈 $2,500 · 🥉 $1,000
Access to the Atlassian for Startups package (subject to eligibility)
90% off one year of HubSpot, plus access to HubSpot’s fundraising kit (subject to eligibility)
PostHog: merch for the top 3
EasyStaff Payroll: 3% commission for 3 months, plus merch for the top 3
Eve: 20% off
JURY
Anand Chandrasekaran — Managing Partner @ Celesta Capital
$1.1B AUM deep tech VC · ex-Partner at General Catalyst · co-founder of Crescendo AI, ex-CPO of Airtel & Snapdeal
Ben Joffe — Senior Partner @ SOSV
Early investor in unicorn Opentrons via HAX · SOSV: $1.3B AUM, ~1,000 portfolio companies
Philip Braddock — Head of Startups @ Atlassian
10+ years at Atlassian · ex-Portfolio Management Lead, Atlassian Ventures
Roman Bunin — AI Adoption Lead @ Nebius
Nasdaq-listed full-stack AI cloud · ex-Head of Data at Nebius Group
Gonçalo Gaiolas — CPO @ DeepL
Ex-CPTO at SoSafe (doubled revenue) · 10+ years leading product at OutSystems
Tilman Ehrbeck: Co-founder & Managing Partner @ Flourish Ventures
$850M AUM fintech VC backing Chime, Neon & Unit · ex-McKinsey Partner, ex-CEO of CGAP
Igor Ryabenkiy — Managing Partner @ AltaIR Capital, Founder @ Altalab
$600M AUM · 400+ portfolio companies, 10+ unicorns incl. Miro & Deel
Stepan Gershuni — Investor @ cyber•Fund
AI-native VC from the Lido & P2P.org co-founders · serial web3 founder (ex-Bitfury) · AI Telegram channel with 63k+ subscribers
Space is limited and by application only.
HOSTED BY
Sobremesa Events, the agency curating executive events for B2B leadgen in any city in the world. We are the team behind top events at SF Tech Week and Web Summit — past guests have included senior leaders from Waymo, OpenAI, Zipline, and Khosla Ventures.
PARTNERS AND SPONSORS
Media partner
psy. agency is LLM visibility-first global PR & comms for founders, tech companies & VCs — from day one to IPO.
Sponsors
HubSpot for Startups helps early-stage companies grow with HubSpot's customer platform at a startup discount, plus resources like the HubSpot Fundraising Kit.
EasyStaff Payroll is a global contractor management and payroll platform that lets companies hire, manage, and pay freelancers and remote workers worldwide under a single B2B service agreement.
Atlassian for Startups gives eligible startups 12 months of free access to Atlassian Cloud products, including Jira, Confluence, Loom and Bitbucket, for up to 50 users.
AHOY powers sovereign Physical AI that acts in the real world, in real time, on cloud, edge, or on premises.
Fundraising partner
Eve is the AI teammate founders hire to raise. She analyzes your deck, finds the right investors, and books the meetings.
Community partner
PostHog is the all-in-one product platform with analytics, session replay, feature flags and more, built for engineers.
Ecosystem and venue partner
Unicorn Factory Lisboa is a powerhouse startup ecosystem transforming Lisbon into the innovation capital of Europe. It has supported over 1,100 fast-growing companies and supercharged over 350 startups and scaleups annually by plugging them into an elite global network of over 160 venture capital firms. Its explosive impact caught world attention, landing the #24 spot in the Financial Times' Europe's Leading Start-up Hubs 2026 ranking.