An Engineer’s Eye on Startups: Vasyl Zahorodniuk Joins the South Summit 2026 Judging Panel

When South Summit sits down to rank a hundred of the world’s best startups, the makeup of the jury says as much about the market as the projects themselves. This year, the judging panel of the Startup Competition included Vasyl Zahorodniuk — founder and Chief Investment Officer of the investment holding UEX Capital Holdings and CEO of the New York technology studio Quanta Tech Systems. At the fifteenth, anniversary edition of the forum in Madrid, he was among those deciding which teams would earn the chance to be seen by two thousand investors.

South Summit 2026 ran from 2 to 4 June at the La Nave venue and drew, according to organizers, more than 20,000 participants, roughly 4,900 startups, over 2,000 investors and around 600 speakers. But behind the headline numbers sits the forum’s core mechanism — selection. And it is here that the role of a judge becomes decisive: their assessment shapes which technologies and business models the market deems worth backing. Zahorodniuk was one of those the organizers entrusted with that call.

A judge who looks at how money moves

Zahorodniuk’s approach to evaluating projects differs noticeably from the standard venture playbook. A master of computer engineering from AGH University in Kraków, he dissects a business the way an engineer dissects a complex system: what interests him is not the pitch deck or the size of the claimed market, but where, exactly, value is created and how it moves inside the company. That lens makes him a demanding but useful judge — he quickly separates projects with real economics from those held up by a polished slide.

“I look at a startup not as a story but as a system,” Zahorodniuk explained during the competition. “Where is its input, where is its output, where does money actually move, and where is that movement only promised? A good team answers those questions in two minutes. If there’s no answer, there’s no business — no matter how impressive the technology.”

That focus is no accident. Under his leadership, UEX Capital Holdings backs startups in cybersecurity, green energy and frontier technologies — sectors where engineering rigor matters more than marketing gloss. And his experience as CEO of Quanta Tech Systems gives him a rare advantage for an investor: he builds products himself, so he can tell working mechanics from good intentions in a pitch.

What the jury was weighing

There was plenty to judge. The Startup Competition, which South Summit runs jointly with IE University, posted record international representation this year: 100 finalists were selected from more than 4,500 applications across 110 countries, and the finalists themselves represented 26 nations. The caliber of the teams was high even by the forum’s standards: 57% of finalists generate revenue above $150,000, 60% have already raised more than $1 million, and half use artificial intelligence as the core of their product.

The judges saw projects from a wide range of sectors — Argentina’s CryptoMate at the intersection of crypto and payments, Estonia’s PowerUP and Norway’s Ocean Oasis in the climate segment, Finland’s MedicubeX in digital diagnostics, Spain’s Kincode AI in corporate hiring. For a judge with an engineering background, it was an intense run: every pitch had to be unpacked at the level of the product, not the presentation.

A voice against the backdrop of the forum

Zahorodniuk’s stint as judge fell on an edition whose central theme was “AI Convergence” — the merging of artificial intelligence with every other industry. According to South Summit president and founder María Benjumea, AI’s share of global venture funding has risen from 30% to 61% in three years; she also urged Europe to think as a single market rather than “27 separate borders.” In that context, judges’ verdicts carry even more weight: they determine which AI projects reach capital first.

Wrapping up his work on the jury, Zahorodniuk singled out the quality of both the organization and 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. The value of events like this is that the investor and the entrepreneur end up in the same room, speaking the same language. The discussions were substantive, with none of the usual hype, and you could see it in the quality of conversations at the booths. Being a judge here is a responsibility, but also a privilege: you’re among the first to see technologies that will be on everyone’s lips a year from now.”

Why it matters for the ecosystem

The role of a judge at a forum of this scale reaches beyond a single competition. The assessment of a seasoned investor who builds products himself is a signal to the market: teams that pass through the South Summit jury earn not just a score but the trust of a network of thousands of investors. Platforms like this compress what normally takes months — a founder from Tallinn can, in a single day, reach funds they would otherwise approach through a chain of intermediaries.

The horizontal effect matters just as much. When entrepreneurs and investors from 26 countries converge in the jury and the audience, a common language takes shape and partnerships form that rarely emerge within national borders. For Zahorodniuk, who pairs UEX’s capital with Quanta Tech’s engineering discipline, such forums are a natural habitat: a place where money, technology and people willing to take risks all meet.

South Summit 2026 made it clear once again that events like this have stopped being mere shop windows for startups and become a working instrument of economic development. And the presence on the judging panel of investors of Vasyl Zahorodniuk’s caliber — those who assess projects not by their promises but by the mechanics of how value is created — adds precision to that instrument. Judging by the finalists and the pace of dealmaking, Europe’s ecosystem has both the capital and the ambition for its next leap — which means there is still plenty of room to grow ahead, for investors and founders alike.