Last updated June 10, 2026.

📌 "What to Expect" is the media’s go-to guide for Web Summit Rio 2026, organised by Web Summit, the world's largest technology event series, which gathers and connects thousands of global founders, investors, policymakers and media to the Middle East with Web Summit Qatar, North America with Web Summit Vancouver, South America with Web Summit Rio and its flagship event each November in Lisbon. 

This guide includes top themes, speakers, standout startups and relevant links to the official Web Summit Rio (ENG/PT) website, updated regularly by the media team. 

Jump to:

• Key informations & top stats

• Top speakers & Robots on the floor

• Key themes

• Startups to look out for

• Web Summit reports

• Beyond centre stage: meetups and Night Summit

Curious to learn more after reading? You can reach the team to book a coverage call, request interviews with Web Summit spokespeople and learn more about the event at media@websummit.com.

Web Summit is where the future goes to be born. From Lisbon to Qatar, Vancouver and Rio de Janeiro, Web Summit has grown into the world's largest technology event series. Over one million attendees have joined across four continents, dubbed "Glastonbury for geeks" by The Guardian and "the tech world's glitterati" by Sky News.

This June, Web Summit Rio returns for its fourth edition bringing global tech leaders to Brazil. More than 30,000 founders, investors, policymakers, creatives and media will descend on Rio de Janeiro for Web Summit Rio at a moment when the global tech and trade order continues to be rewritten in real time. 

These tech leaders will be connecting, discussing and debating the most pressing developments in technology and their impact on business and society as a whole. 

Can the Global South build its own AI? Can the Amazon rainforest become an economic argument, not just an environmental one? Which unicorns will be resilient? What happens when tariffs redraw supply chains overnight? And who controls the story: media, marketing, or culture?

The event welcomes

40,287 attendees from over 100 countries

1,572 exhibiting startups

688 investors
720 members of the global media

Final attendance figures will be announced on day one of the event by email and on the Web Summit Rio blog. Head to the Web Summit website to discover top speakers, media and startups at Web Summit Rio 2026.

The full Web Summit Rio speaker lineup is on the official speakers page and regularly updated, where you'll find top names from Nvdia, OpenAI, Google, AWS, and more.  Below are a few names handpicked by the Web Summit Speaker team that you should have on your radar.👇 

Luana Lopes Lara, Co-founder and CO of Kalshi

Luana Lopes Lara, a 29-year-old Brazilian founder, took the title of world's youngest self-made female billionaire from Taylor Swift after her prediction market startup Kalshi raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation in December 2025, backed by Paradigm, Sequoia, a16z, and Y Combinator. The exchange trades over $100B a year, and offers contracts on politics, sports, economics, crypto, among many others. 

Luana’s backstory is anything but typical Silicon Valley: Lopes Lara grew up training at Brazil's Bolshoi Ballet Academy, enduring 13-hour days before pivoting to computer science at MIT and interning at Bridgewater and Citadel. She co-founded Kalshi in 2018 and built it into a US-regulated fintech giant from scratch, becoming living proof that Latin American talent can define the next wave of global financial infrastructure.

Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security, and Democracy European Commission

EVP Henna Virkkunen runs the EU's digital and frontier technology portfolio, covering AI, data, cybersecurity, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA). She is the Commission's most senior voice on what it means to build technology on democratic terms and the architect of Europe's tech sovereignty agenda.  

In January 2026, the EU and Brazil signed the world's largest mutual data adequacy agreement,  unlocking free data flows across 670 million people and cementing a strategic partnership that goes well beyond trade. Virkkunen comes to Rio to make the case that what Brussels and Brasília built together is a blueprint for how the world's democratic economies should wire themselves for the AI era.

Gerry Colyer, co-founder and CEO, Clara

Gerry Giacomán Colyer is the co-founder and CEO of Clara, Latin America's leading corporate spend management platform. Clara gives businesses across the region corporate cards, real-time expense tracking, and automated financial workflows, tools that were either nonexistent or outdated for most Latin American companies until Clara showed up. The company now serves around 20,000 businesses across Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, ranks among the top three corporate card issuers in both Mexico and Colombia, and recently secured $70 million in structured debt.

Giacomán Colyer grew up in Monterrey in a family of entrepreneurs, studied at Yale and Stanford, and previously co-founded a scooter startup before launching Clara in 2020. The company hit unicorn status in eight months. 

Aline Pellegrino, Director of Legacy and Institutional Relations, FIFA Women's World Cup Brazil 2027

Aline Pellegrino is the former captain of the Brazilian women's national football team and an Olympic medallist, now serving as Executive Director of Legacy and Stakeholder Affairs for the FIFA Women's World Cup Brazil 2027. Her role centres on building the networks and opening the institutional doors that will determine what opportunities exist for women in football governance, and across sport more broadly, long after the tournament ends.

With Brazil hosting the first Women's World Cup ever held in South America, Pellegrino is the person inside the federation working so that a home tournament can translate into structural change for women in the sport.

Rebeca Andrade, Olympic Gold Medalist

Rebeca Andrade is the most decorated Brazilian and Latin American Olympian artistic gymnast of all time, with six Olympic medals, including two golds, and nine World Championship medals. At Paris 2024, she won gold in the floor exercise, silver in the all-around and vault, and bronze in the team event, beating Simone Biles by just 0.033 points on floor. The moment where Biles and Jordan Chiles bowed to her on the first all-Black podium in Olympic gymnastics history went viral worldwide. In April 2025, she won the Laureus Comeback of the Year award after overcoming three ACL tears that nearly ended her career.

Andrade grew up in Guarulhos, Brazil, raised by a single mother of eight. Web Summit Rio will be the first stage of its kind where she shares her story with a global audience and in a room full of founders, investors, and builders, she also knows what it takes to come back from the brink and perform when it matters most.

Glenn Greenwald, Founder, System Update

Glenn Greenwald is the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist behind the Snowden disclosures and, more recently, the founder of System Update, the nightly news show he ran on Rumble for three years. As of February 2026, he is returning to written journalism on Substack, with a vast majority of his recent work heavily critiquing US and Israeli military strategy and covering the geopolitical fallout in the Middle East, Iran's strategic positioning, and the debate over regional ceasefires.

Greenwald has spent the past decade based in Rio, making him a rare figure who covers US foreign policy from the Global South rather than from Washington or New York.

Fábio Porchat, actor and co-founder of Porta dos Fundos

Fábio Porchat is an actor, comedian, and co-founder of Porta dos Fundos, Brazil's most successful digital comedy brand. The channel has over 18 million YouTube subscribers, more than 8 billion views, an International Emmy for Best Comedy, and has expanded into Mexico, series, film, and branded content. Porchat and his co-founders left TV Globo in 2012 to build something on their own terms. In 2017, Viacom (now Paramount) acquired a majority stake. In March 2025, Porchat, Gregório Duvivier, and João Vicente de Castro bought it back, returning the company to full creator independence, one of the very few cases globally where creators have reclaimed ownership of their own IP from a major studio.

In a media landscape where creators everywhere are fighting to own their work, Porchat is the most credible voice in Brazil on what creative independence actually costs and whether taking it back is worth the risk.

Patricia Muratori, Managing Director, LatAm, YouTube

Patricia Muratori runs YouTube across Latin America, the region's leading video platform for the creator economy. Named by Bloomberg Línea to its 50 Women of Impact in Latin America, the Brazilian executive sits atop one of YouTube's largest and fastest-growing markets, where a channel becomes a company and a creator becomes an entrepreneur.

With roughly a decade at Google, Patricia rose from leading YouTube's telecom and retail sales teams in Brazil to running the platform across all of Latin America. She holds a postgraduate degree in Human Rights from PUC-RS and completed Harvard Business School's PLD program, and sits on advisory councils for UNICEF.

Peter Fernandez, CEO of Mombak

Peter Fernandez is the executive chairman of Mombak, a carbon removal company turning degraded Amazon land back into native rainforest. Named to TIME's 100 Most Influential Climate Leaders in 2025, Fernandez left his role as CEO of 99, Brazil's ride-hailing rival to Uber and the country's first tech unicorn, to co-found Mombak with Gabriel Silva, the former CFO of Nubank. The company launched a $100 million reforestation strategy to capture millions of tons of carbon by restoring degraded land with native tree species.

It has since planted 5 million native trees across 45,000 acres and secured carbon credit contracts with Google, Microsoft, Meta, and McLaren, turning the rainforest into a balance sheet line item for the world's biggest companies. Mombak raised $30 million in its Series A from Union Square Ventures, Kaszek, Bain Capital, and Lowercarbon Capital.

Fernandez is trying to prove that high-integrity carbon removal in the Amazon can be a scalable, investable business, not just a corporate CSR exercise.

Michele Catasta, President and head of AI, Replit

Michele Catasta is the President and Head of AI at Replit, the platform that's turning anyone with an idea into a software developer. Replit lets people build and deploy apps by describing what they want in plain language, no coding required. In 2024, they launched Replit Agent, an AI tool powered by Anthropic's Claude that writes, tests, and ships code. Since its launch, Replit's revenue has grown more than 10x, driven almost entirely by demand for the tool. 

Before Replit, Catasta led applied research at Google X and Google Labs, contributing to the coding capabilities of Google's language models. At Web Summit Rio, he's the person to ask what happens when building an app becomes as easy as writing a paragraph.

Fábio Coelho, President of Google Brazil and VP at Google

Fábio Coelho has led Google's operations in Brazil since 2011, overseeing one of the company's largest markets outside the US. He previously served as president of IAB Brasil and has sat on Brazil's Council for Economic and Social Development since 2016. At a moment when Google is pouring investment into AI infrastructure across the Global South, including DeepMind research partnerships in the Amazon, Coelho is the person connecting Google's global AI ambitions to Latin America's largest digital economy.

Christian Rôças (Crocas), Head of Community, Influencers and Talent at OpenAI for Latin America

A journalist by training with over 25 years at the intersection of technology, media, culture, and behaviour, Rôças is OpenAI's point person for how ChatGPT and its products reach creators, communities, and cultural conversations across the region. As OpenAI expands aggressively beyond the US, Rôças represents the company's bet that Latin America isn't just a user base, but a market that will shape how AI tools are adopted and adapted. 

He knows the territory: before joining OpenAI, Rôças was CEO of Porta dos Fundos, Brazil's most successful digital comedy brand. He has also mnanaged creative partnerships across Facebook and Instagram  and co-founded Gruda, a content agency that managed digital strategies for artists like Marisa Monte and Gilberto Gil. 

Marcio Aguiar, Executive Director of Enterprise Sales for Latin America at Nvdia

With over 25 years in IT, Aguiar leads Nvidia's enterprise push across the region at a moment when the company's GPUs have become the most sought-after hardware in the world. As Latin America builds out AI infrastructure at speed, with over $60 billion in data centre investment flowing into the region, Nvidia's chips are the foundation layer. Aguiar is the person deciding how that hardware gets deployed across LatAm's fastest-growing AI markets.

Hai Wu, Chairperson, China Internet Investment Fund (CIIF)

Hai Wu chairs the China Internet Investment Fund, a 100 billion yuan vehicle established in January 2017 by the Cyberspace Administration of China and the Ministry of Finance, with anchor capital from ICBC, China Mobile, China Unicom, and CITIC Guoan Group. The portfolio includes 4 unicorns, 16+ IPOs, and over 140 investments, with names like ByteDance, SenseTime, Kuaishou, and Kingsoft Cloud in the portfolio.

Wu sits at the intersection of Chinese state capital and the country's most consequential technology companies. In a year when capital flows, chip access, and AI development have become explicitly geopolitical, he is one of the people who can speak with authority on how Beijing actually allocates strategic capital into frontier tech.

G1 Robot, Special opening night guest from Unitree

One of the first guests to step on stage on opening night won't be a person. The G1 is a 132-centimetre humanoid robot with up to 43 joints, superhuman flexibility, and a CV most founders would envy: it performed a fully autonomous kung fu routine on Chinese national television in February 2026, walked 130,000 steps across -47°C snowfields to test cold-weather autonomy, and just had its brain open-sourced. After Unitree released its Vision-Language-Action model earlier this year, the G1 can now take natural-language instructions and act on them on its own.

The G1 is built by Unitree, the Hangzhou-based company founded in 2016 by Wang Xingxing that has done more than any other player to bring humanoid and quadruped robots within reach of regular buyers. The G1 sells for around US$16,000 (roughly R$85,000), about a tenth of what comparable Western machines cost. Unitree posted 335% revenue growth in 2025 and filed for a US$610 million (roughly R$3.2 billion) IPO on the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

On the floor in Rio, the G1 will be joined by the Go2W, Unitree's wheeled-leg robot dog. Between the two of them, opening night in Rio gets a live demonstration of where consumer robotics actually is in 2026, and it's a lot further along than most of the room will expect.

Explore the official Web Summit Rio page to discover the full updated schedule, confirmed speakers, and all 14 content tracks— including the new Sport Summit, arriving in a World Cup year, and the new Machine Summit, tackling the hard things about hardtech, from robotics to auto to spacetech.

Latin America built an ambitious fintech ecosystem. Now what? Latin America's fintech boom was built on real problems: unbanked populations, broken payments, non-existent corporate banking. Brazil's Pix instant payment system now processes more transactions than credit and debit cards combined. With regulation tightening, and AI rewriting the rules of financial services, the question is whether the region’s fintechs can evolve from disruptors to durable institutions.

• Look out for the talks at Web Summit Rio’s Fintech Summit. 

What does the Global South's AI future look like? Latin America accounts for just 1.1% of global AI investment despite 6.6% of world GDP. Brazil responded with a $4 billion national AI plan and a sovereign cloud to keep sensitive data at home. Meanwhile, Microsoft has pledged $50 billion for AI infrastructure across the Global South by 2030 and more than $60 billion in data centre investment is now flowing into the region. 

• Look out for the talks at Web Summit Rio’s AI Summit. 

The World Cup is coming and sport is no longer just a game:  The 2026 World Cup lands in North America, Brazil's biggest athletes are becoming global brands, and the economics of sport have never been bigger or more complex. From athlete-owned media companies to AI-powered coaching, Web Summit Rio’s new Sport Summit explores what happens when sport becomes tech.

• Look out for the talks at Web Summit Rio’s new Sport Summit.
  
  

Can the Amazon become an economic argument? Since President Lula returned to office, Amazon deforestation has fallen by more than 55% to an 11-year low. Then COP30 in Belém put $1.3 trillion annually by 2035 on the table for climate action, but stopped short of a clear roadmap to phase out fossil fuels. At Web Summit, New Energy Summit looks at both sides: how tech and capital can accelerate climate solutions, but also the environmental cost of the tech industry itself, from data centres to the resource demands of AI.

• Look out for the talks at Web Summit Rio’s New Energy Summit.

In a new media world who gets paid, who gets trusted, and who tells the story? The media business model is changing. AI is scraping newsrooms for training data, platforms are de-prioritising news, and trust in media keeps falling. At Web Summit,  New Media Summit digs into who controls the narrative, who funds it, and whether journalism can survive as a business without losing what makes it journalism.

• Look out for the talks at Web Summit Rio’s New Media Summit.

Cultural power in the digital age: Brazil exports music, fashion, content, and visual culture at scale. From Havaianas to Porta dos Fundos to the global reach of Brazilian creators on YouTube and TikTok, the creative economy is a serious business. The Creative Summit explores who profits from cultural influence, how creators protect their work, and what happens when digital platforms become the primary stage for cultural expression.

• Look out for the talks at Web Summit Rio’s Creative Summit.

Web Summit Rio community partners

Web Summit’s Community Partner Programme is a key part of its commitment to diversity, inclusion, and representation. By partnering with grassroots organisations, community builders, and nonprofits, the programme helps bring new perspectives to Web Summit and supports communities that have traditionally been underrepresented in tech. The 2026 Web Summit Rio Community Partners are:

• Litro de Luz: Previously attended Web Summit Rio as a startup. They provide sustainable, affordable eco-lighting to underprivileged communities without electricity.
  
  

• Instituto Guetto: A Brazilian non-profit organisation focused on social justice and racial equity. Their mission is to promote the inclusion, leadership, and professional development of Black and marginalised individuals, particularly those from peripheral urban areas.
  
  

• 2gether-international: A unique NGO and startup accelerator based in the United States that supports entrepreneurs with disabilities. Founded on the belief that disabled individuals are natural innovators and problem-solvers due to navigating an inaccessible world, the organisation provides mentorship, resources, and accelerator programs specifically designed to help disabled founders launch and scale high-growth startups.
  
  

• Djassi Africa: Long-time partner with the mission of advancing and backing African and Afro-diasporan innovators building tech-enabled startups to solve the world’s greatest challenges.
  
  

• Pista: The Pista programme promotes and supports the development of businesses with a socio-environmental impact in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
  
  

• IDE Social Hub: Is a social tech company that develops solutions for inclusion, diversity, equity, and employability for companies, institutions, and innovation ecosystems.

Web Summit women in tech programme

Web Summit Rio's women in tech programme brings together women founders, entrepreneurs, executives, investors, and leaders from across the technology ecosystem. The programme includes highly discounted tickets and a curated event experience designed to help attendees build meaningful connections and discover new opportunities.

• Women in tech meetup area: Attendees have access to a dedicated networking space for women in tech, providing opportunities to connect with fellow attendees, exchange ideas, and build valuable relationships.

• Curated meetups: Throughout the event, Web Summit wll host tailored meetups across meetup areas, the Community Space, and the Women in tech meetup area. These sessions are designed to bring together women in tech from different industries, roles, and backgrounds for focused discussions and networking opportunities. 

• Tailored online content: Attendees can access exclusive insights, resources, and event updates through the Women in tech LinkedIn group, helping them discover relevant opportunities and get more from their Web Summit Rio experience.

Web Summit publishes a number of annual data-driven reports that track trends across the global tech ecosystem. These include:

Web Summit x Crunchbase reports

Web Summit teams up with Crunchbase on an annual funding report analysing how investment flows across the startup ecosystem in the months following a Web Summit event. The second edition, released in November 2025, found that nearly 200 startups from Web Summit Lisbon's 2024 Startup Programme raised a combined $715.5 million in post-event funding, with AI taking the top spot by sector. 

• You can read all about it here. 

State of Gender in tech report

Every year, in November Web Summit releases its State of Gender in Tech Report, based on a survey of participants in its Women in Tech attendee programme. The latest report reveals that women are increasingly confident about stepping into leadership roles and view AI and automation as potential drivers of equity. Yet, bias, sexism, and "boys' club" cultures remain entrenched. You can access the full report here.

Web Summit continues its mission to help building meaningful connections through meetups, powered by its proprietary software, Summit Engine. Aiming to create a more intimate and community-driven experience, the objective is to invite attendees to at least one personalised meetup. More information here.

The discussions also continue after the stage content ends and the main venue closes its doors. Night Summit offers opportunities for post-event networking and exploration of the host cities.. These gatherings, organised by industry, continent, and nationality, bespoke networking opportunities in key areas of Rio de Janeiro.