Connecting people and making a concrete contribution to the ecosystem, this is the main mission of South Summit, the tech event that has been held in Madrid since 2012, that of 2025 (4-6 June) will be the 14th edition and that over the years has also been held in South Korea, Brazil, Argentina and other Latin American countries.
“Today the focus is on growth,” María Benjumea, founder and president of South Summit, tells Startupbusiness. “It is what everyone needs: start-ups, scaleups, investors, market, corporate, industry. Our goal is to create business opportunities for those who attend our events. We do this with events that reach a maximum of 20, 25 thousand participants precisely to ensure a good level of interaction, and we do this by not only curating content but also dedicating space and value to vertical sectors. South Summit is both an enabler and a tool for the ecosystem, if at the beginning when we were born the mission was to create the right culture around entrepreneurship that makes innovation, today it is to promote growth by accelerating the process of integration and synergy between all the players in the ecosystem and between ecosystems”.
Benjumea is herself an entrepreneur. After participating in the Taller del Arte project at the age of 25 and the Círculo de Progreso in 1981, in 1995 she founded Infoempleo, which has become an important labour portal. In 2011 she launched the Lidera Programme in collaboration with the Community of Madrid, aimed at the emancipation and upliftment of women with the slogan ‘If you want, you can!’, and in 2012 she founded South Summit.
“South Summit is made and designed for entrepreneurs,” he adds, “with the involvement of institutions, academia, corporations in order to create the best possible environment for those who innovate, we aim to have a positioning with connections at every level to give strength to the concept of supporting the growth process that means finding people to hire, developing internationalisation, meeting investors, this is what the market today demands and this is what South Summit does.
The last edition of the South Summit in Madrid, of which Startupbusiness is media partner, the 13th, registered more than 18,000 participants from 133 countries, while the 2025 edition in Brazil has just closed, with 23,500 participants from 55 countries gathering in Porto Alegremore than 800 speakers including Brian Requarth, general partner and founder of Latitud; Konrad Dantas, founder and CEO of Kondzilla; Federico Vega, founder and CEO of Frete; Juliana Binatti, founder and CPO of Pismo; Orkut Buyukkokten, founder of Orkut; Ed Soo, CTO of Lenovo, three thousand startups including those that participated in the final phase of the Startup Competition, with 50 finalists from 11 countries, selected from more than 2.100 applications, 900 investment funds, with a total portfolio exceeding USD 200 billion, and 750 accredited media.
“When we started out, in 2012, we were facing a major challenge, Spain was in the midst of a major crisis and we needed a strong impetus for change, we needed to accelerate and we brought our contribution, we talked to large companies that were beginning to realise that they had to focus on innovation in a decisive way and they found in us a source that allowed them to understand more quickly how business innovation was flourishing and how it would change things, as it did.
Today, the challenge is not only to support growth, but also to give strength to a European ecosystem: ‘Europe is our great opportunity, what the reports signed by Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta say is fundamental, focusing on start-ups and innovation is the key and we are here to support and accelerate their growth, we cannot waste any more time, we must focus on accelerating development, our keywords are innovation and collaboration. We need to position Europe as a global player in innovation, we have all the characteristics and potential, we need to strengthen collaboration between ecosystems, we need to share experience, knowledge, resources, to be united. This is achieved by leveraging the skills of our entrepreneurs, starting with the serial entrepreneurs, and the various players in the ecosystem that can only together generate innovation and business. It is true that there is great diversity within the European house, but our basic values are common, and it is precisely from these diversities that a unique capacity for innovation is born, but it must be able to grow dynamically and with conviction; we need to make the growth process easier for start-ups and scale-ups in Europe. Proposals such as the 28th regime are important, and it is important that the European institutions directly finance start-ups and scaleups, but we need to accelerate this process of consolidating markets and rules, and the South Summit’s soil is precisely that of acting as a platform in this sense, thus giving a concrete response to the requests of the Draghi report’.
While it is true that there is a need for institutions to make decisions about regulatory frameworks and making it easier to do business and make investments, it is also true that it is even more important for the growth process to originate from ecosystems: “South Summit is a community that works together, that stays in touch, that exchanges ideas, experiences, resources, and this is the force that drives other changes: institutions cannot fail to react if they see that this push is becoming more and more decisive, politics cannot fail to act if they see that entrepreneurs, investors, ecosystem players want the context to improve also from a structural point of view. When the law to facilitate and support start-ups was made in Spain, it was voted for by all political parties to emphasise how the awareness towards the creation of favourable conditions for innovation was stronger than any ideological positioning, now we need to replicate this drive at European level and we all need to do it together, working together.
Benjumea makes no secret of the fact that leading the development of South Summit is still a great thrill for her even after 14 years, and above all, she does not hide her desire to become a bearer of an ever closer union between the ecosystems: “This is why We want a large presence of the Italian ecosystem in Madrid, it is not a regional issue, it is a cultural issue that makes Spain and Italy very similar and even stronger together and in the European context, for example in Italy as in Spain there is a significant growth of international investors who choose to focus on start-ups in their respective ecosystems, and South Summit is the place where you can meet a high number of international investors, and then there is the role of the academic world, which for us at South Summit is genetic as IE University is one of the organisers, which contributes to building both the cultural aspect and the growth of awareness of the importance of innovation.
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