South Summit 2026 ran from 2 to 4 June in Madrid, at the La Nave venue. More than 20,000 participants, around 4,900 startups, over 2,000 investors. On the jury of the forum's main contest, the Startup Competition, this year sat Vasyl Zahorodniuk - founder and Chief Investment Officer of the holding UEX Capital Holdings and CEO of the New York studio Quanta Tech Systems.
South Summit runs the competition together with IE University. The 100 finalists were picked from more than 4,500 applications across 110 countries. The teams were strong: 57% show revenue above $150,000, 60% have already raised more than $1 million, half build their product around AI. The judges saw projects from every corner of the market - Argentina's fintech CryptoMate, the climate ventures PowerUP and Ocean Oasis, Finland's MedicubeX in diagnostics.
Zahorodniuk judged the way he is used to working with investments. A master of computer engineering from AGH University in Kraków, he dissects a business the way an engineer dissects a system. A deck doesn't sway him, nor a founder's fame, nor a hyped-up topic. The question for everyone is the same - where value is created and how it moves on.
"I strip everything extra out of the evaluation," he explained during the competition. "It doesn't matter who's behind the team. What matters is whether the mechanics work. Judge by sympathy and you let the other finalists down. So the yardstick is the same for all."
That's what keeps the call honest, and at a contest honesty is a currency of trust. When a founder knows they were judged on merit, not on who they know, the score carries more weight - a network of thousands of investors stands behind it. The forum compresses what usually drags on for months: a founder from Tallinn reaches funds in a day that they'd otherwise approach through intermediaries.
"The level of the teams is even, which makes judging fairer but harder," Zahorodniuk added. "What matters is that the investor and the entrepreneur end up in the same room, speaking the same language. And everyone knows they were judged on substance."
South Summit stopped being a shop window for startups long ago and works on the economy directly. And when the jury seats investors who judge by the mechanics, not by promises from the stage, the forum gains both precision and fairness.
