After surviving two challenging years brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, the tech event has bounced back, with more than 70,000 attendees, 2,630 exhibiting startups and companies, 1,120 investors and 1,040 speakers travelling to Lisbon from November 1-4.
Hitting a record-breaking milestone, there will be more startups and partners on the Web Summit floor than ever before. The startup programme sold out four weeks before the event, with 2,300 startups joining from more than 100 countries.
Among this group will be more than 100 unicorns, coming to the event to network and to discuss the outlook for entrepreneurs during a time of economic turmoil. UK, Portugal, Germany, USA and the Netherlands are among the most represented countries for startups, with saas, AI and machine learning, ecommerce, fintech and marketing continuing to be the most popular industries.
Speakers hail from the biggest names in tech including Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon, as well as hundreds of the fastest growing startups in the world.
Author and linguist Noam Chomsky, Signal president Meredith Whittaker, Y Combinator president Geoff Ralston, Airbnb co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk and Yuga Labs CEO Nicole Muniz are among the 1,040 speakers who – with the climate crisis and a recession looming – will be forecasting what the next few years will look like for society, the economy and tech companies around the world and who will be discussing the next steps forward in this new era.
Google, Figma, Stripe, PitchBook, AWS and Binance are among the partners exhibiting on the Web Summit floor. The exhibition space for partnerships sold out seven weeks before the event, with 330 partners attending – up nearly 40 percent on pre-pandemic numbers.
“By early 2021, it looked like Web Summit might not survive the year. As a team, we rallied together and somehow made it through 2021. It’s been an extraordinary recovery over the last 18 months, from near death in early 2021 to our best year ever in 2022,” says Paddy Cosgrave, founder and CEO at Web Summit.
To cater for the 2,630 companies taking to the exhibition floor, Web Summit 2022 will spread over an area at the Altice Arena and FIL pavilions that is the size of 371 tennis courts – 25 percent larger than the space used in 2021.
