Latest / AI.pt / Web Summit Opens in Lisbon With a Record Number
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- Maya: Hey everyone! Here's what's on the radar today on AI.pt. Web Summit opens in Lisbon with record Portuguese startups, Defined.ai lets companies sell their data, and Oversonic brings a factory robot to town. I'm Maya. James: And I'm James. Let's get into it. Maya: So Web Summit opened Monday in Lisbon, and Startup Portugal says Portugal sent seventy-eight companies, led by AI and health tech. Paddy Cosgrave called it the most Portuguese startups the event has ever seen, with close to seventy thousand attendees expected. James: That's the real headline, Maya, and the other half is China. Dancing robots opened the show, Cosgrave counts over thirty Chinese AI and robotics leaders, and he said the future superstars are coming from China, not California. Maya: Exactly right, and he dropped one detail builders should note: Revolut, which he called Europe's largest private tech company, moved its two thousand engineers off OpenAI and Anthropic onto a Chinese open-source model. James: And on the numbers, an EY study puts Web Summit's contribution at two hundred fifty million euros a year. It runs through the twelfth at MEO Arena, with the main programme and investor meetings starting Tuesday. Maya: Next, Defined.ai, the Portuguese startup led by Daniela Braga, launched an expanded data marketplace at Web Summit. It's an online place where AI developers buy training data and companies sell their own, now holding nearly two thousand datasets. James: And here's the mechanism, Maya: there's a new partner model for organisations sitting on data. Braga helps them monetise it, and she says more than two hundred eighty companies came forward in two weeks. Maya: Right, and the demand shifted toward physical AI: buyers now want body-worn camera footage of people repairing cars or performing medical procedures. Folding clothes with head cameras no longer interests the market, in her words. James: Worth naming the hard part too. Defined.ai restructured this year and cut about thirty percent of staff, mainly in Europe. Braga called the slowdown a cycle, and the marketplace now drives seventy percent of revenue. Maya: Last, Oversonic brought its RoBee R20 factory robot to Web Summit Lisboa for the first time. The Italian startup built it for repetitive, risky work: picking, moving objects, loading machines and quality control. James: And the engineering is the story, Maya. It pairs Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors with Oversonic's own BeeOS. Processing onboard lets it perceive surroundings and control movement in real time, and it's certified for industrial environments, running continuously at Intel's stand. Maya: That's your AI.pt daily brief. Check ai.pt for the full stories.