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You can spot a good startup-competition judge by one thing. They measure everyone by the same yardstick. No discount for a famous investor standing behind a team, no bonus for a trendy topic, no soft spot for fellow countrymen. At the 15th anniversary edition of South Summit in Madrid, that role fell to Vasyl Zahorodniuk – founder and Chief Investment Officer of the holding UEX Capital Holdings and CEO of the New York studio Quanta Tech Systems. On the jury of the Startup Competition, he was responsible for exactly this – a fair call.
South Summit 2026 ran from 2 to 4 June at the La Nave venue in Madrid. Organizers counted more than 20,000 participants, around 4,900 startups, over 2,000 investors and roughly 600 speakers. But behind those numbers sits the reason the forum exists – selection. And the fairness of that selection rests on the judges. How evenly they assess the teams decides which founders reach capital and which walk away empty-handed.
One yardstick for all
Zahorodniuk judged the way he is used to working with investments. A master of computer engineering from AGH University in Kraków, he dissects a business the way an engineer dissects a complex system. A slick deck doesn’t sway him, nor does a founder’s fame, nor a hyped-up sector. He looks at one thing – where value is created in the company and how it moves on. He applied that test to everyone, measuring an Argentine fintech and a Norwegian climate project with the same ruler.
“I try to strip everything extra out of the evaluation,” Zahorodniuk explained during the competition. “It doesn’t matter who’s behind the team or how many followers they have. What matters is whether the mechanics work. Where’s the input, where’s the output, where does money actually move, and where is that movement only promised? If I start judging by sympathy, I let the other finalists down. So the question is the same for everyone.”
That approach is no accident. Under his leadership, UEX Capital Holdings backs cybersecurity, green energy and frontier technologies – fields where engineering rigor decides, not the wrapping. And as CEO of Quanta Tech Systems, he builds products himself. That’s where the instinct comes from, and it’s what keeps the call honest. Zahorodniuk sees where a pitch has a working system and where it has good intentions, and he doesn’t mix the two up depending on who’s in front of him.
What the jury was weighing
There was plenty to judge. South Summit runs the Startup Competition together with IE University, and this year the contest posted record international representation. The 100 finalists were picked from more than 4,500 applications across 110 countries, and they themselves represented 26 nations. The teams were strong. Revenue above $150,000 is what 57% of finalists show, more than $1 million has already been raised by 60%, and half build their product around artificial intelligence.
The judges saw projects from every corner of the market. Argentina’s CryptoMate at the crossroads of crypto and payments, Estonia’s PowerUP and Norway’s Ocean Oasis in climate, Finland’s MedicubeX in digital diagnostics, Spain’s Kincode AI in corporate hiring. Each had its own sector, its own language, its own stage. Bringing them to a common denominator and judging them fairly is a job in itself, and here Zahorodniuk’s engineering eye came in handy. He compared not the themes but the wiring of the business.
A voice against the backdrop of the forum
Zahorodniuk judged an edition whose central theme was “AI Convergence” – the merging of artificial intelligence with every other industry. South Summit president and founder María Benjumea cited a figure hard to wave off. In three years, AI’s share of global venture funding rose from 30% to 61%. She also urged Europe to behave as a single market rather than “27 separate borders.” When half the field rides on AI, an even, unbiased assessment matters even more. Otherwise capital goes to whoever’s louder, not whoever’s stronger.
Wrapping up his work on the jury, Zahorodniuk singled out the quality of the selection.
“I want to thank the organizers for the bar they’ve held for fifteen years running,” he said. “The teams here are genuinely strong – with a product, with revenue, with a clear grasp of their own economics. When the level is this even, judging is both fairer and harder – you end up arguing with yourself over the details. The value of events like this is that the investor and the entrepreneur end up in the same room, speaking the same language. And everyone knows they were judged on merit, not on who they know. Being a judge here is a responsibility, but also a privilege.”
Why it matters for the ecosystem
Fair judging isn’t a formality, it’s a currency of trust. When a founder knows they were assessed on substance and not on connections, they come back to the forum and bring others. When the score comes from an investor who builds products himself and judges everyone by the same yardstick, that score carries more weight. Teams that pass the South Summit jury walk away not with a number in a protocol but with the trust of a network of thousands of investors. And the forum compresses what usually drags on for months. A founder from Tallinn reaches funds in a single day that they’d otherwise approach through a chain of intermediaries.
The horizontal effect works too. When people from 26 countries converge in the jury and the audience, a common language emerges and partnerships form that rarely happen within a single country. But all of it rests on one simple condition – judge by the truth. Let a jury start handing out scores by sympathy and trust falls apart, and with it the point of the whole contest. For Zahorodniuk, who holds both UEX’s capital and Quanta Tech’s engineering school, this isn’t an abstraction but a working principle.
South Summit 2026 made one simple thing clear again. Events like this stopped being shop windows for startups long ago and now work directly on the economy. And when the jury seats investors who judge by the mechanics of how value is created, not by promises from the stage, and apply one standard to all, the instrument gains both precision and fairness. Judging by the finalists and the pace of dealmaking, Europe’s ecosystem has both the money and the ambition for its next leap. Which means the teams that were judged on merit have plenty of room to grow.
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