Sesame Summit 2026 – application open

“Building the Good Future”

What’s the scoop on VDS2023? Give us the lowdown on what the event aims to achieve and why it’s a must-attend for startup enthusiasts.

In just five years, the Valencia Digital Summit has established itself as an internationally recognized Tech event and a meeting point for entrepreneurs, startups, corporations and investors. The upcoming sixth edition will be held on the 26th and 27th of October at the iconic City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain. With the theme of ‘Building the Good Future’, VDS2023 promises to feature stages, workshops and presentations by prominent global leaders. Additionally, attendees will be able to explore an exhibition area showcasing the latest technological innovations, emerging trends, and disruptive solutions. This event is a must-attend for anyone passionate about technology and innovative entrepreneurship.

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Startup Valencia

We know there are tons of Tech events out there, but what makes VDS stand out from the pack? How will it blow attendees away with its content, networking opportunities, and overall experience?

VDS2023 aims to examine, through its program, the major social challenges that our society is facing. This sixth edition of the event also aims to foster engaging debates surrounding the latest tech advances, particularly those with significant social implications. This is the case of artificial intelligence and blockchain technology, which are already transforming various aspects of our lives. The convention will delve into crucial topics including regulation, investment, new applications, limitations, and security.

Mobility, sustainability, the future of work, the role of women in tech, and longevity are other aspects that will be explored through presentations and expert panels.

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Startup Valencia

Networking is where the magic happens! How will VDS2023 create those serendipitous connections among attendees? Are there dedicated mixers, speed-networking sessions, or online platforms to forge meaningful relationships?

Throughout the event, networking and the creation of synergies will be encouraged to promote business opportunities. The programme includes dedicated moments to facilitate these interactions, including the “Meet the Startups” session.

It is designed as a 5-minute speed-dating style networking event, bringing together startups, investors, and interested individuals. The session is organized into thematic blocks based on sectors, with each block featuring 10 carefully selected startups, providing them with the opportunity to engage in one-on-one meetings with attendees.

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Startup Valencia

Startups are the heart and soul of the tech world. Will VDS2023 feature any startup showcases or thrilling pitch competitions? How can ambitious startups get in on the action and grab the spotlight?

Valencia Digital Summit boasts its own international startup competition: VDS Competition. Tech companies have the opportunity to participate through four distinct categories, with submissions open until June 29th via the event’s website: VDS2023 Pitch Competition, Meet Corporates & Investors, Meet the Startups and Expo Village.

Startups from any industry are invited to apply to the competition, provided that they have at least one Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and their tech solution contributes to building a better future.  

By participating in the VDS2023 Pitch Competition, startups will have the unique opportunity to present their projects on the main stage of the event to an audience of over 10,000 attendees. The winning startups will receive a host of valuable prizes, including an exhibition space at the 2024 Valencia Digital Summit, and will benefit from networking and business promotion opportunities. The competition will also boost the visibility of the top 50 startups selected by the panel of judges.

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Startup Valencia

Tell us about the awesome host city! What can attendees expect in terms of the vibe and attractions in Valencia? Any local recommendations for accommodations and travel arrangements to make our stay top-notch?

Our city offers an unparalleled setting for this event. Valencia is a modern, cosmopolitan and welcoming city. With its consistently warm and sunny climate, it provides a great environment for exploring all that the city has to offer.

Valencia boasts a wide range of captivating tourist attractions. Among them is the iconic City of Arts and Sciences, a futuristic complex that houses an aquarium, a science museum, a planetarium and a magnificent auditorium. Additionally, the city embraces its historical roots with a beautiful old town, where one can easily get lost amidst its charming streets and buildings. Of course, Valencia’s stunning beaches are not to be missed, and its rich gastronomy adds an extra flavour to the experience.

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Startup Valencia

In addition to planning for a major expansion in 2024, what other initiatives are being driven by Startup Valencia?

Startup Valencia’s goal for 2024 is to further establish Valencia as a leading tech hub in southern Europe and scale our ecosystem internationally. We are excited to kick the year off with the launch of La Terminal, a new international tech hub located in the historic maritime station of La Marina de Valencia. Spanning over 5,000 square metres, the facility will accommodate over 500 highly skilled professionals, uniting key stakeholders from the entrepreneurial ecosystem and elevating the Valencia brand as a globally recognised tech hub.

The hub is projected to attract over 5,000 tech and innovation professionals each year, who will actively engage in a wide range of training, networking activities, and events.  Additionally, corporations and institutions will spearhead open innovation programmes within the hub, providing opportunities for collaboration and knowledge sharing among participants.

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Startup Valencia

Sign us up for VDS2023! How can startup enthusiasts get their tickets? Are there any early bird discounts or special deals to entice us to jump on board ASAP?

Until June 30th, anyone interested in attending the sixth edition of the Valencia Digital Summit this year can take advantage of discounted ticket prices available exclusively through the event’s official website.

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Fundraising 5 hours ago

London-based AI laboratory Ineffable Intelligence has emerged from stealth with a $1.1 billion seed round at a $5.1 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed on 27 April 2026. The financing is the largest seed round ever raised by a European company and one of the largest first-money-in rounds in the global history of artificial intelligence. The round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Participating investors included Nvidia, DST Global, Index Ventures, Google, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund, the British government’s recently established vehicle for backing strategic AI capacity on home soil. A bet on a different path to general intelligence Ineffable Intelligence was founded in 2025 by David Silver, the former Vice President of Reinforcement Learning at Google DeepMind and the principal architect of AlphaGo, AlphaZero and AlphaStar. He is joined by three further DeepMind alumni: Wojciech Czarnecki, Lasse Espeholt and Junhyuk Oh. All four have spent the past decade at the frontier of reinforcement learning research, the discipline behind some of the most consequential demonstrations of machine learning over the past ten years. The company describes its objective as building a “superlearner” — an AI system capable of acquiring knowledge directly from its own experience rather than from human-generated text or imagery. “Our mission is to make first contact with superintelligence,” Silver said in a statement accompanying the launch. “We are creating a superlearner that discovers all knowledge from its own experience, from elementary motor skills through to profound intellectual breakthroughs.” The framing is a deliberate departure from the dominant industry trajectory. Most leading AI laboratories, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind itself, have built large language models trained primarily on the corpus of the internet, then refined that training with human feedback. Ineffable’s wager is that the marginal returns on scaling text-based pretraining are diminishing and that the next leap in capability will come from agents that learn endlessly from the consequences of their own actions, in much the same way AlphaZero learnt the game of Go without studying any human matches. Why $1.1 billion at seed The size of the round is unusual even by the inflated standards of the 2026 AI capital cycle. Two factors appear to explain it. First, frontier reinforcement learning at the scale Ineffable describes is computationally extraordinarily expensive: the company will need to operate vast simulation environments and train very large models against them, an undertaking that consumes capital at a rate closer to physical R&D than to traditional software. Second, the round signals a strategic move by Europe’s investor and policy ecosystems to retain the most ambitious AI researchers on the continent. The presence of the UK Sovereign AI Fund alongside Sequoia, Lightspeed and Nvidia is the clearest expression of that intent. The British government has publicly framed the investment as a bet on breakthrough AI that “can discover new knowledge”, positioning the country as a willing co-investor in domestic frontier laboratories. For Ineffable, the implication is access not only to capital but to compute, regulatory engagement and the still-resilient academic talent base around UCL, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial. Founder pledge of historic scale Alongside the funding announcement, Silver disclosed that he is committing 100 per cent of any personal proceeds from his Ineffable equity to charity via the Founders Pledge network — described by the organisation as the largest pledge in its history. At the round’s $5.1 billion valuation, that commitment could ultimately exceed several billion dollars if the company succeeds. It is a meaningful gesture in a sector where the reputational stakes around concentrated AI wealth are escalating, and one likely to be referenced in subsequent founder-led commitments. Implications for the European AI landscape Ineffable’s emergence reshapes the European AI map in three concrete ways. It establishes London as the home of the continent’s largest-ever seed-stage company, complicating Paris’s recent narrative of frontier-AI primacy after Mistral’s earlier rounds. It validates a thesis — that reinforcement learning, not transformer scaling, is the next frontier — that has lately been losing capital share to language-model incumbents. And it confirms that the UK government is now willing to act as a balance-sheet co-investor in domestic AI laboratories, a posture much closer to the French model than to the predominantly grant-based regimes elsewhere in Europe. The execution risk is non-trivial. Reinforcement learning at frontier scale has historically required years of careful environment design before producing competitive systems, and Ineffable’s “first contact” framing sets a high bar against which it will be judged. But for now, with a billion dollars on the balance sheet, four of the discipline’s most accomplished researchers in the founding team and a sovereign co-investor at its back, Ineffable Intelligence is the most heavily resourced new entrant in the European AI cycle. Sesamers covers European fundraising rounds across deeptech, fintech and AI. Source: tech.eu.

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