Critical Ventures Brought Its Ecosystem Together in Lisbon for a Day That Delivered

On 22 June, Critical Ventures held its annual Ecosystem Summit in Lisbon — hosted at the Beato Innovation District. Around 100 investors, founders, advisors, and corporate partners spent the day together — not at a conference, but at something more deliberate.

The idea came from a simple observation: the conversations that move things forward in our ecosystem don't happen on stage. They happen over coffee, in the margins of meetings, between people who actually trust each other. This Summit was built around that. One venue. One day. A programme that made space for real exchange, not just presentations.

The day opened with remarks from Heitor Benfeito, Managing Director, and João Carreira, Managing Partner, who framed the day and shared Critical Ventures' manifesto — a set of convictions about where critical systems are headed, which sectors matter most, and what it means to back the companies building them. From there, Gil Azevedo who runs Unicorn Factory Lisboa and knows better than most what it took to turn Lisbon into one of Europe's most compelling places to build a company, delivered the opening keynote.

From there, the programme moved into territory that reflects what Critical Ventures actually cares about. Rich Minford from Turion Space sat down with Eric Kohlmann, Managing Director of Critical Ventures, for a conversation on space infrastructure — one of the more underappreciated dependencies of modern critical systems. Francisco Almada Lobo from Critical Manufacturing walked through the story of ASMPT. And Margarida Garcia from Poolside joined Heitor Benfeito to dig into how AI is actually changing the economics of building safety-critical software — not the version you hear at industry panels, but the one operators are living with right now.

The Critical Ventures portfolio companies then took to the stage — each operating in a sector where getting the software wrong isn't a customer service problem, it's a safety or security one. The showcases put the firm's thesis in concrete terms: deep-tech software in sectors where the cost of failure is high, regulatory and security demands are unforgiving, and the market for whoever gets it right is significant.

Hackurity is reshaping how organisations think about offensive security: rather than periodic penetration tests, their autonomous engine hunts for vulnerabilities continuously — finding and remediating them before attackers do, and giving smaller teams the coverage that was previously only available to the largest enterprises. RunSafe Security works one layer deeper, hardening the embedded systems that power industrial infrastructure, defence platforms, and connected hardware in a way that renders entire classes of attacks structurally impossible — a problem that has gone largely unsolved for decades. Rhizome Labs is building AI that runs at the edge rather than in the cloud: adaptive models that learn and improve directly on devices like drones, sensors, and industrial hardware, in environments where cloud connectivity cannot be assumed. twinzo gives factory and warehouse operators a real-time 3D digital twin of their operations — live data mapped onto a navigable model of the physical space, accessible on any device — translating operational complexity into something people can actually act on. Kirontech tackles fraud, waste, and abuse in healthcare insurance using AI and graph-based machine learning: a quiet but enormous problem in a sector where existing detection tools have consistently lagged behind the scale of the issue.

The afternoon closed with a panel on where deep-tech capital is actually going right now — not the official narrative, but a frank read from people with capital at risk. Moderated by Eric Kohlmann, it brought together Advisory Board members for an unfiltered conversation on funding gaps, founder positioning, and what the next cycle looks like from the inside.

"We've spent years building relationships across this ecosystem — with founders, co-investors, corporate partners, advisors. Last Monday we put all of those people in the same room. The conversations that came out of it were exactly what we hoped for and helped to mutually advance business growth and opportunities." — Eric Kohlmann, Managing Director, Critical Ventures