The second edition of The Vertex Summit by GoHub Ventures took place on October 19 and 20 at Bellver Blue Tech Zone in Benicàssim, Spain. Organized with support from Microsoft, GoHub Ventures’ annual invitation-only gathering brought together founders, strategic investors, and leading voices from Europe’s technology, healthcare, and investment ecosystems. Attendance is limited to 60 people, a curated format designed to foster lasting relationships and high-quality networking. Across six sessions, speakers discussed progress in health and life sciences, the evolution of artificial intelligence, and Europe’s capacity to build global companies.
The Intelligence You Own: Why the Winning AI Companies Rent, Route, and Build
Jaime de Mora, CTO, Startups & Digital Natives at Microsoft EMEA, opened the summit with a question: what makes a company extraordinary when intelligence is available to everyone? He showed how the time European companies need to reach a billion-dollar valuation keeps getting shorter, citing Legora, Lovable, Factorial, INBRAIN Neuroelectronics, and Orbio, and described a future in which AI agents act as both customers and a route to market. His advice to founders was to own a specific customer outcome, start with a narrow workflow that can grow into a wide business, and ask whether a better model would strengthen their product or remove the reason to buy it.
Programmable Biology: Reading and Rewriting the Human Body
Moderated by Marisol Quintero (Columbus Venture Partners), the panel with Alberto Conti (Alceus Bio), Jason Mills (Talvo), and Andrii Buvailo (WTMB Group) examined how far AI has moved drug discovery forward. Speakers agreed that target identification and molecule design have become much faster, which shifts the bottleneck to clinical development, where timelines and patient recruitment remain hard to compress. The discussion also covered the scarcity of high-quality biological data, early work on synthetic control arms, China’s growing role in early clinical studies, and the value of bringing AI and lab teams together from the start.
From Copilot to Autopilot: When AI Stops Assisting and Starts Doing
Pablo Perea, Partner at GoHub Ventures, moderated this session on what happens when AI moves from supporting people to completing the work itself. Marcos Valera (ElevenLabs), Vicent Soler (Kenmei), and Alberto Martín (Depa) shared how agents are validated alongside engineers before taking over processes in telecom networks, how a lean payments team runs compliance and customer support with tightly scoped bots, and how voice AI is reaching mainstream adoption. They also discussed the impact on hiring, with attitude and AI fluency gaining weight alongside experience, and the role brand and trust will play as more purchasing decisions happen between agents.
Born in Europe, Built for the World: Can Europe Build Global Category Leaders?
Carolina Aguilar (INBRAIN Neuroelectronics), Marcel Queralt (Factorial), and Ignacio Moreno (Capchase) agreed that Europe has the talent to build global leaders, and that conviction and ambition are what make the difference. In the session moderated by Javier Martínez, Partner at GoHub Ventures, the panelists discussed starting as an international company from day one, turning Europe’s market fragmentation into a distribution advantage, and hiring for drive and willingness to learn. Their asks to policymakers included a single European capital market, a better balance between regulation and support, and faster progress on initiatives such as EU Inc.
The AI-Native Clinic: Building Preventive Care from Day One
Jared Aron (Coherent Healthcare), Lucas Mittelmeier (Heal Capital), and Jorge Pérez (Tandem Health) joined moderator Leonard Rinser (Venture Institute) for a panel that started from a gap many in the room recognized: wearables generate large amounts of health data that rarely reaches a doctor. Speakers discussed the rapid adoption of ambient scribes and the shift toward clinical guidance, medical device certification as a competitive advantage, and why trust, evidence of real outcomes, and humans in the loop remain central to how AI enters clinical practice and clinic operations.
Limits Are Meant to Be Broken
Ultra-endurance athlete Juancar Gimeno closed the summit with a keynote on resilience, drawing on his solo expeditions across Patagonia, the Arctic, and Hawaii. He spoke about choosing discipline over motivation, breaking big goals into daily targets, embracing uncertainty, and adapting when plans fail, and connected each lesson to the reality of building a company.
GoHub Ventures’ Commitment to Digital Health
The Vertex Summit reflects GoHub Ventures’ focus on digital health, particularly early detection, prevention, and the application of AI to clinical practice. Portfolio companies such as Quibim, OpenHealth, Aeon, Oska Health, and Prevision Medicine work in this space.
“Preventive health is one of the great challenges of our generation, and artificial intelligence is changing the speed at which we can tackle it,” said Inés Calabuig, Managing Partner at GoHub Ventures. She explained that the fund’s annual gathering aims to connect the people building these solutions with those who can drive their growth.
Over 24 hours, The Vertex Summit offered a space for technology companies, researchers, and investors to share their work and explore collaboration in a sector where AI is speeding up the development of new tools to understand and care for health.
