Web Summit Lisbon's edition returns from 9 to 12 November, and the organisers' featured speakers page has a detail still rare at tech conferences: two of the "speakers" are robots.
AgiBot's A3 humanoid and Galbot's G1, described as an "embodied large-model robot", appear on the page alongside the people who built them. AgiBot is sending its President for Europe and the Americas, William Shi. Galbot is sending its chief strategy officer, Yuli Zhao. Unitree, whose co-founder Li Chen is also on the list, is best known for the four-legged and humanoid robots that went viral online. Last year, AI and machine learning was the top industry among the startups exhibiting, according to the organisers. This year, AI is arriving with a body.
A programme that tilts east
Look at the companies on that featured list and a second story jumps out. Most of the names are from China's AI and robotics sector:
- Xiaomi, represented by CMO Fei Xu
- Tencent, by Ling Ge, Chief Investment and Strategy Officer for EMEA
- MiniMax, the model developer, by Alan Shen, MD Global
- ModelBest, by co-founder and CEO Dahai Li
- Pony.ai, the autonomous-driving company, by co-founder and CFO Leo Haojun Wang
- Xpeng Aridge, by founder and president Deli Zhao
- Rokid, the smart-glasses maker, by CSO Irene Long
Chinese officialdom, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under General Secretary and President Xi Jinping, is there too. Xiaoxia Qi, Director General of the Bureau of International Cooperation at the Cyberspace Administration of China, is listed, the regulator responsible for China's internet and AI rules.
For European founders and investors, that is worth noticing. A European tech summit is giving prime billing to the companies Europe's industrial strategy most often casts as competitors. Expect the hallway conversations to come back again and again to whether Europe has its own answer. We were already asking that question at Web Summit 2023, when interviewees told us where Europe's great large language model was.
The American AI builders
Silicon Valley isn't absent. Richard Socher, co-founder and CEO of You.com and Recursive and one of the best-known researchers in natural-language AI, is on the list. So is Michele Catasta, President of Replit, whose coding agent has become a fixture of the "vibe coding" debate about whether software can now be written by describing it. Manus AI, the agent company, is sending co-founder and CPO Tao Zhang. The agents-versus-jobs argument will be loud on the main stage.
The money question
The bigger question is capital. Web Summit reported 1,857 investors from 86 countries at the 2025 edition, up 74% from 1,066 the year before and the most it has ever hosted, bucking what the organisers called wider industry trends. The 2025 event drew 71,386 attendees from 157 countries and 2,725 startups from 108 countries, according to the organisers.
Whether investors return in those numbers is the first thing we will be measuring on the ground. The deeper question is what they come to fund. If the speaker list is any guide, the answer is "physical AI": robots, autonomous vehicles and devices, rather than another chat interface.
What Via News will be covering
We have reported from Web Summit since 2016, and our video interviews from the floor are a record of how the conversation has moved.
At Web Summit 2023, UCLA professor Ramesh Srinivasan told us about AI's short-term economic impact. In the same edition, Vasco Pedro, co-founder and CEO of Lisbon-founded Unbabel, talked through the future of AI-driven translation. He is one of the clearest examples of a Portuguese AI company built for a global market.
Five years earlier, at Web Summit 2018, Philipp von Hagen of Porsche SE spoke to us about the future of sustainable mobility, and Element AI founder Jean-François Gagné about putting AI to work in business.
This year we will focus on three questions:
- Is physical AI investable yet, or still a demo?
- How does Europe answer a programme this heavy with Chinese AI?
- What does AI change for markets and money? That has been our beat for a decade.
Follow our coverage on via.news and YouTube from 9 November.
This article was drafted with AI assistance, and reported, edited and fact-checked by Miguel Salvado.
