Web Summit 2026: dates, speakers and what to expect in Lisbon

Web Summit 2026 runs from November 9 to 12 at the MEO Arena in Lisbon, according to the event's official site, and a general ticket costs €1,595 (about $1,782) including Portuguese sales tax as of October 31. The organizer's speaker directory listed 890 entries that day, and a SaasBuzz count of that list shows a programme led by founders and chief executives, with US-based speakers outnumbering China-based ones eight to one even as Chinese AI and robotics companies fill the top of the page.

For people who build, buy and invest in software, the draw is the density: last year's edition drew 71,386 attendees and 1,857 investors, Web Summit said in November 2025.

What to expect

Web Summit is a general technology conference rather than a vendor's own event, so it is a place to meet buyers, founders and investors more than to hear product roadmaps. The organizer's ticket page says general attendees get speaker content "across 32 industries," the exhibition floor, curated meetups and access to Night Summit.

The 2025 edition set the scale. Web Summit said it drew 71,386 attendees from 157 countries and 2,725 exhibiting startups from 108 countries, with AI and machine learning the top industry among them. It counted 1,857 investors from 86 countries, up from 1,066 the year before, which SaasBuzz calculates as a 74% increase and roughly one investor for every 38 attendees.

Who is speaking, by the numbers

SaasBuzz collected all 45 pages of Web Summit's 2026 speaker directory on October 31 and counted 890 entries. Four of them are robots (AgiBot's A3 and PrimeBOT Q1, Galbot's G1 and UBTECH Robotics' Viki Yang). The page's own description promises "800 speakers."

Source: SaasBuzz count of websummit.com/speakers, all 45 pages, October 31, 2026. Countries as the directory lists them. Titles overlap, so the last three rows do not add up.

The order of the page tells a different story from the totals. Of the first 20 entries the directory shows, 17 are listed in China, including speakers from Manus AI, MiniMax, ModelBest, Unitree, Xiaomi, Pony.ai and the Cyberspace Administration of China. Web Summit founder Paddy Cosgrave made that billing his pitch on X on October 30.

The speakers software readers will want

From the official directory, as of October 31, with titles as Web Summit lists them:

• Founders and chief executives: Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare; Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder and CEO of Atlassian; Anton Osika, co-founder and CEO of Lovable; Richard Socher, co-founder and CEO of Recursive and You.com; Timothy Young, CEO of Jasper.

• Product and technology leaders: Michele Catasta, president of Replit; Andreas Blattmann, co-founder of Black Forest Labs; Kamil Sindi, CTO of Runway; Gonçalo Gaiolas, chief product officer of DeepL; Andy Hock, CSO of Cerebras.

• From China: Tao Zhang, co-founder and CPO of Manus AI; Alan Shen, MD Global at MiniMax; Dahai Li, co-founder and CEO of ModelBest.

• Investors: Philippe Botteri and Matt Robinson, partners at Accel; Nina Achadjian, partner at Index Ventures; Nowi Kallen, managing director of Salesforce Ventures; Tom Mandoza, partner at EQT Ventures.

Session times were not part of the directory, and Web Summit can add or drop names before the doors open.

The startup programme

Web Summit's startup page says its 2026 startup programme is sold out, and it is already taking applications for 2027. The live competition, PITCH, brought to you by KPMG, has published the startups selected for 2026; they present to a panel of investors and partners. Portugal-based Granter, which Web Summit describes as an AI funding assistant, won the 2025 edition.

The organizer also points to what happens after the event: a Web Summit and Crunchbase report it published in November 2025 said nearly 200 startups from its 2024 programme raised money after the event, $715.5 million in all.

Tickets and prices

Prices on the attendee ticket page on October 31, with dollar figures at the European Central Bank's October 30 reference rate of $1.1172:

Source: websummit.com ticket page, October 31, 2026; 2025 prices from the Internet Archive's copy of the same page on November 6, 2025. Prices include Portugal's 23% sales tax; before tax they are €1,297, €1,585 and €20,285.

The general ticket costs the same as it did four days before last year's event, about $1,782 or roughly €399 a day across four days. VIP is €500 cheaper, a 20% cut, and adds lounges, evening receptions and priority registration. The VIP ticket was marked "limited stock" on October 31, and a price-rise countdown on the page had run out on October 30.

What we will be watching

The first question is whether the China billing turns into business for software buyers in Europe. Cosgrave is selling the line-up on Chinese leadership in AI and robotics, but on the list itself China-based speakers are 42 of 890, fewer than Portugal's 79. The sessions from MiniMax, ModelBest and Manus AI are the ones to follow for any pricing, model or European expansion news.

The second is money. With 60 speakers titled partner on the list, most of them at venture firms and a record investor count last year, investors are a large part of the room for founders raising money. Web Summit published last year's investor count during the event week, and whether the 2026 figure beats 1,857 is the number to look for.

SaasBuzz has also previewed AWS re:Invent 2026.