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Waking up to Wolves Summit

Ben Costantini Ben Costantini
October 13, 2021
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Credit: Wolves Summit

Before we dive in, quick shoutout to all startup founders reading this article – we have a special code for you to register for FREE to join Wolves Summit

Regarding this year’s “Connections That Matter” theme – how are you planning to make these connections during Wolves Summit 2021 valuable/unique for attendees?

Returning for its 6th year, Wolves Summit will bring together prominent industry influencers executives, influential media, and more than 500 startups to explore the latest technology trends and innovations from Poland and surrounding European countries.

Focusing on the theme “Connections That Matter”, the summit which takes place October 19-21st is set to become our largest event to date, attracting over 5,000 participants in-person and online. We are here to build a truly flourishing startup ecosystem on both an EU and international level, being an innovation bridge between both the Central and Eastern European regions and the tech powerhouses of the world.

With this year’s edition embracing a fully hybrid model, more founders, investors, and innovators will be able to access the unparalleled match-making opportunities and industry-leading speakers we have lined up. As previous attendees will attest to, Wolves Summit has been instrumental in facilitating the success of some of the region’s most successful startups and now draws the cream of the VC community, keen to invest in this next generation of tech titans.

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Credit: Wolves Summit

This event is clearly a must-attend event for investors interested in expanding their portfolios into the CEE region; which investors are you the most excited about hosting this year?

Startups should know that they can engage with investors of all types at the summit. The event brings the most influential investors from top international funds together with leading angels, accelerators, Corporate Venture Capital, and EU financing options.

Some noticeable names that have been with us over the years are Accel, Seedcamp, SOSV, Sunfish VC, Flashpoint, Kaya VC, Peak Capital, Hoxton Ventures, Expon Capital, AI Startup Incubator, EIB Group (the European Union’s bank and European Investment Fund), among others.

Corporate venture capital (CVC) investment can be a real game-changer for startups, but it has traditionally been difficult to secure. This year we are joined by senior representatives from UNIQA Ventures, Elevator Ventures, Wayra X, Brand Capital (The Time Group), and many more.

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Credit: Wolves Summit

Although most Tech events tend to incorporate some level of startup pitches, it’s rare that we see any event hosting two startup pitching competitions! What’s the difference between these pitching competitions?

The Great Pitch Contest is Wolves Summit’s official startup competition. Each edition attracts over 1,000 startup applications out of which only 40-50 tech game-changers get to pitch in the Semi-finals in front of investors, corporations, and other attendees. The top 10 startups will be selected to pitch in the Finals on Thursday, October 21st.

This year’s winners will receive the opportunity to pitch directly in front of AI Startup Incubator’s investment board committee, a guaranteed interview with a Techstars Global Startup Pipeline Manager, a scholarship for the next cohort of the InnovX-BCR program starting in November, as well exclusive access to a tech stack from leading providers such as Amazon, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, and others.

At Wolves Summit we strive to support the growth of the CEE innovation ecosystem, and we know we can best achieve this by partnering with forward-thinking organisations and individuals sharing our mission. We are happy to be able to provide the platform and tangible support to UiPath to select the next automation champions in the CEE and Turkey.

UiPath Automation Award is an annual competition designed to identify new technologies and products that can have a global impact and revolutionize the larger ecosystem of automation solutions. The awards ceremony will be held live on stage and broadcasted to the home audience on October 20th. The finalists in the two award categories are Start-Up Category: Demoboost (Poland), Serket (Hungary/The Netherlands), Easysales (Romania); Scale-up Category: Apify (Czech Republic), Powerful Medical (Slovakia), Dronehub (Poland)

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Credit: Wolves Summit

There’s a new CEE Innovation Track taking place at Wolves Summit this year; what sets this apart from the other tracks being planned for the event?

CEE Innovation Track is a dedicated programme allowing external ecosystem players to craft and showcase their own content in front of business leaders and decision-makers. Wolves Summit will provide the partners with the right platform to bond over common challenges, and create business opportunities that help maintain and grow the region’s tech sector.

This track is just one of our initiatives to connect the tech and innovation ecosystems Wroclaw in the West to Moscow in the East, and Tallinn in the North to Tirana in the South. We are getting ready to launch a new concept in 2022 – a one-week festival of live tech events taking place throughout Central Eastern Europe and beyond. It is set to become the largest, decentralised festival in Europe uniting tech and talent in a world-class hub of innovation.

This year’s Innovation Track partners include MIT Enterprise Forum, Sx.tech, Made in Wroclaw, InnovX, and PODIM, and will offer attendees an intriguing slate of co-located events throughout the day in addition to conference programming.

We are expecting all the current Innovation Track partners to be part of the 2022 event and welcome other innovators to join. If you are an event organizer, an organization supporting startups and innovation, or a large corporation willing to make a difference, express your interest here.

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Ben Costantini

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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. 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