UpNext World Tour
GITEX Africa 2026 confirmed that African tech has moved past infrastructure storytelling into deployment at scale. Sovereign digital strategies and cross-border fintech are now live products, not roadmaps.
Flashpoint POV
Estonian founder Kerli Luks spent years as a doctor watching women navigate hormonal health on incomplete data. Her company Muun Health is building the first continuous hormone monitoring device.
What's UpNext
The F1 Circuit of the Startup Ecosystem. Tracking founders, momentum, and signals as they emerge.
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Pharmaceutical companies have spent decades circling African markets, unable to act without reliable data. David Chen built Kapsule to fix that, pooling health records from hospitals, pharmacies, and insurers across Africa into a single compliant platform.
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Carolina Valadas used mobile money daily in West Africa before she joined Sharp Vision.. Founded by Cyril and Christophe Casanova, the Paris-based RegTech now manages €5 billion in annual flows across six jurisdictions, tripling tax revenues for the governments it serves.
Flashpoint POV
After 25 years in mobile and banking technology, Finnish founder Kristian Luoma identified the real obstacle to leadership, the coordination tax consuming 40% to 70% of every manager’s week. In Parallel is built to remove it.
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Shwan Lamei's co-founder proved at MIT that coordinated residential devices behave like a grid-scale battery. Emulate is the production-grade platform giving utilities real control over EVs, heat pumps, and batteries already in their customers' homes.
Join our global community of founders, investors, and innovators discovering the stories, startups, and movements shaping the future.
The F1 Circuit of the Startup Ecosystem. Tracking founders, momentum, and signals as they emerge.
Capital in this year’s CIX cohort is shifting from SaaS to hard infrastructure. Defense tech, climate systems, and regulated health ventures now define the highest-conviction bets, pointing to longer-cycle, capital-intensive builds.
Medical device hardware is moving from research validation to commercialization readiness. Ontario's life science pipeline now produces founders who can articulate regulatory pathways and buyer economics before raising capital.
David Mill spent three years inside contractor businesses before he tried to design for them. What he found were high performers running on empty, skilled enough to build cities and too busy to build the life they were working toward. Scelta is the operating system that closes that gap.
While the aquaculture and pet food industries face a growing protein supply crisis, Jarna Hyvönen built Volare around a conviction that the raw material to fix it was already sitting in food factories being discarded.
The F1 Circuit of the Startup Ecosystem. Tracking founders, momentum, and signals as they emerge.
Industrial operators running mining equipment, ferries, and logistics fleets need batteries designed for their reality, not adapted from EV technology. Anders Teigland founded TioTech in Bergen to fill that gap with TitanB, an anode material that charges in six minutes and delivers 90% uptime.
Europe's student-run startup conference shifted from AI hype to deep tech commercialization. The Alpine region positioned itself as a structural advantage for industrial innovation, with founders moving from research prototypes to scalable companies.
When Chris Coomes was handed 100 startup applications with no way to rank them, he realized the early-stage funding ecosystem had not evolved in twenty years. He built X1 Pipeline, an AI-native platform whose investability score evaluates any startup, anywhere, on the same terms.
Ómar Thor Ómarsson spent years as a CMO and agency director watching great B2B companies stay invisible online. He built Optise, the world's first self-driving B2B website platform, to fix that.
Andrea Demichelis grew up on the Italian Riviera dreaming of a career in finance, then discovered that donations alone cover just 4% of the cost of providing clean water access. He built Elliot for Water, a productivity dashboard that funds clean water projects in developing countries.
A Turkish-American mother of two saw the gap between New Jersey and Turkey: parents searching for children's activities with no dedicated platform to find them. She built Bulbi, a marketplace for kids aged 0-12, and reached the Web Summit Qatar semi-finals.