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Best Startup Pitch Competitions in 2022

Tess Lawrence Tess Lawrence
December 6, 2021

4YFN Awards 2023

Application Start: Now
Deadline: October 18
Prize: Several prizes

The 4YFN Awards is a global startup competition aimed at finding the best digital startups around the globe. It is the highest official recognition offered exclusively to startups during MWC Barcelona 2023.

The LG NOVA Global Challenge 2022

Application start: September 1
Deadline: October 27
Prize: Several prizes

LG is looking for new technologies, concepts, and business ideas that will push the envelope of a technologically advanced lifestyle for the good of people, communities, and the planet. Selected companies will have the opportunity to join a six to nine-month challenge program to build their business with LG.

South Summit Brazil 2023

Application start: Now
Deadline: January 15
Prize: Several

South Summit is looking to make your startup the next unicorn.  You will get to pitch on stage, network, have a demo booth, free tickets, and much more! They welcome projects from any industry, any development stage, and any country. Plus it’s free!

South Summit Madrid 2023

Application start: Now
Deadline: January 31
Prize: Several

If you are an entrepreneur with great ideas and even greater dreams, don’t waste another second, and let South Summit Madrid help you become the next unicorn. They welcome projects from any industry, any development stage, and any country… and it’s entirely free!

Web Summit 2022 ALPHA Startup Program 2022

Application start: Now
Deadline: TBA
Prize: Several prizes

Web Summit puts your startup front and center. Learn from the leading figures in tech, pitch your big idea to thousands of attendees, and connect with the people who can take you to the next level. These opportunities are only available to startups participating in our startup program – ALPHA – at Web Summit.

Hatch Pitch 2022

Application start: Now
Deadline: TBA
Prize: Several prizes

Gain worldwide media exposure, potential clients, and access to investors. Your pitch will be live-streamed to their viewers around the globe & selected teams will get personalized pitch coaching and feedback from industry specialists.

Past Competitions

ALPHA Startup Global Competition Program At RISE 2022

Applications: Closed

High-potential early-stage startups from across the world gathered at RISE in March 2022 to get their emerging companies in front of thousands of attendees, including global business leaders, experienced investors, and some of the most influential people in tech.

The LVMH Innovation Award 2022

Applications: Closed
Deadline: March 4
Prize: Media coverage and onsite visibility (VivaTech)

Since 2017, the LVMH Innovation Award puts the spotlight on the best global startups and has been a powerful provider of solutions to enhance the customer experience. This challenge establishes itself as a unique acceleration program for the startup ecosystem, by building successful collaborations between LVMH Maisons and any startup willing to explore new business models and technologies.

Podim’s Startup Competition

Applications: Closed
Deadline: March 15

Be exposed to 100+ highly motivated investors, get the chance to have plenty of 1-on-1 meetings, discuss your ideas and plans with various industry leaders, C-level executives, mentors and get invaluable feedback. Podim’s startup competition is a great opportunity for your startup to grow.

Next Founders 2022

Applications: Closed
Deadline: March 17

Next Founders accelerates the growth of Canada’s most promising entrepreneurs by providing mentorship, access to capital, and unparalleled entrepreneurial education taught by world-class faculty.

TechChill Milano Startup Pitch Battle

Applications: Closed
Deadline: August 12

This is a chance for all seed and early-stage startups from different fields to take part and compete for the recognition of international investors along with the main prize of 10,000 € with no strings attached! TechChill Milano’s pitch battle will give a spotlight to the most promising early-stage startups from across Italy, and the Southern and Western European regions.

SHV Energy Startup Challenge

Application start: Closed
Deadline: August 19

SHV Energy wants to reduce its direct CO2 emissions in Scopes 1 and 2 by working and collaborating with global innovative solutions in various steps in their value chain. If you are a startup with a ready-to-test or scale solution that can work with SHV Energy to reduce its CO2 emissions, this call is just for you!

Big50-2022 Startup Competition

Application start: Closed
Deadline: August 31 for the preliminary questionnaire

It costs nothing to join the competition, but you will need to ace a series of challenges —including appealing to VCs, pitching irresistible stories, converting coverage to leads, and more — to become one of the 50 top startups to watch in 2022.

Startup Slams – Biofit

Application start: Closed
Deadline: September 9

The Start-up Slams are a great opportunity for young companies (and particularly start-ups seeking to raise a seed or a Series A financing round) to showcase their project in front of potential partners and investors in the Life Sciences field. The selected candidates will be offered to present their projects and receive advice and feedback from a panel of experts.

Pitch Session

Application start: Closed
Deadline: September 13

Want to pitch your early-stage startup in front of VCs, investors, and potential clients? The Marketplace Conference is an annual event focused on all things marketplaces and unites marketplace entrepreneurs, investors, and industry experts. It provides a platform for exchanging know-how and best practices and attracts marketplaces entrepreneurs and investors of all stages.

GSV Summit Cup Pitch

Applications: Closed
Deadline: September 30th

GSV Cup Pitch is open to pre-seed and seed companies in the education technology and skilling sector. Applicants are evaluated by an esteemed panel of judges through a confidential review process designed around the “Five P’s” framework.

SaaStock Startup Program

Application start: Closed

Participating startups amplify their visibility through receiving exhibition space on the SaaStock show floor. This is complemented by a tailored day of practical workshops, matchmaking with investors, and further support from their official Startup Program partners. Places are limited so they’re looking for those SaaS startups with the highest potential.

Slush 100

Application start: Closed
Deadline: September 22

This competition turns the spotlight on the ones that are in the very center of Slush – the early-stage startups. Each of the 100 companies participating in the competition receives invaluable feedback, invitations to exclusive events, and of course, stage time. Slush 100 is open to companies founded during or after 2019 that have raised <500 € in equity funding.

X-Pitch

Application start: Closed
Deadline: October 1

PUZZLE X Barcelona X-Pitch is an investor-startup interactive pitch session. This 2-hour session is specially curated to give startups the opportunity to pitch their technology in front of an international panel of investors from Silicon Valley to Europe and Asia.

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Fundraising 4 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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