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.

APPLICATION FORM FOR STARTUPS: https://forms.gle/oULUuvfJBqHxwJkUA

JURY

Ben Joffe — Senior Partner @ SOSV

  • Global VC firm focused on early-stage deep tech

  • $1.5B+ AUM

Roman Bunin — AI Adoption Lead @ Nebius

  • Nasdaq-listed AI infrastructure company building full-stack AI cloud for model developers and enterprises

  • Leads AI adoption across Nebius; previously Head of Data at Nebius Group

Igor Ryabenkiy — Managing Partner @ AltaIR Capital, Founder @ Altalab

  • 100+ portfolio companies, 10+ unicorns backed, primarily at seed stage

  • Notable investments include Miro, Deel, OpenWeb, Turing

  • $600M AUM

Stepan Gershuni — Investor @ cyber•Fund

  • AI-native VC fund from the Lido and P2P.org co-founders

  • Serial web3 founder (ex-Bitfury); author of a AI Telegram channel with 63k+ subscribers

More jury members and speakers to be announced. 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.

Ecosystem and venue partnerUnicorn 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.