During the opening ceremony, María Benjumea, President of South Summit, stressed at the opening ceremony that "This year, we have witnessed a transformation—a demonstration of resilience in Rio Grande do Sul and Porto Alegre. Ten months ago, in our beloved Cais, the water reached two meters high, and today, it welcomes us more spectacularly than ever. The theme of South Summit Brazil 2025, Beyond Resilience, represents how we recover and grow stronger after adversity. An incredible transformation and the best example that together—and always with innovation and entrepreneurship as our greatest allies—we can overcome any challenge. South Summit is the driving force behind innovation, showing the world that we are in Brazil’s most innovative state. Here, startups, investors, and corporations come together to create opportunities and strengthen a powerful global ecosystem."

José Renato Hopf, president of South Summit Brazil, also participated in the welcome ceremony, saying that this new edition "is a great opportunity to establish connections and do business."  For his part, Juan José Güemes, Vice President of Economic Affairs at IE University and President of the IE Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, who stressed that "South Summit Brazil is the perfect example of the entrepreneurial commitment between Spain and Brazil, the reflection of what both countries can achieve and show the world."

Eduardo Leite, governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, also underscored the collaboration between the region and South Summit in the face of "the times of intense transformations we are experiencing." "South Summit will provide us with opportunities, challenges and will place us at the center of all these debates to be at the forefront," Leite said, adding that "Rio Grande do Sul has a plan, it has a future and that is to make this state stronger, more resilient and increasingly innovative."

Also present during the official inauguration of #SouthSummitBrazil25 were Mar Fernández-Palacios, Spanish ambassador to Brazil; Sebastião Melo, president of Porto Alegre, and Jorge Audy, president of the Honor Committee of South Summit Brazil.

South Summit Brazil 2025, beyond resilience

Under the slogan 'Beyond Resilience', this new edition of South Summit Brazil pursues the search for ideas to anticipate, innovate and build stronger and more collaborative ecosystems and processes, from a perspective that combines technology, sustainability and positive impact. Mateo Salvatto, CEO of Asteroids Technologies, spoke about precisely this, showing the audience the steps to follow to build a more inclusive and equitable society thanks to technology and innovation.

The first day of South Summit Brazil 2025 continued with the intervention of top-level speakers such as Brian Requarth, general partner and co-founder of Latitud, or Juliana Binatti, founder and CPO of Pismo, among many others. Requarth spoke in his speech about how startup founders face setbacks, uncertainties and conditions of an increasingly complicated market, while Binatti gave the keys to turning an entrepreneurial project into a unicorn. On the other hand

Some 600 internationally renowned speakers complete the line-up of interventions at South Summit Brazil 2025, including 160 investors from all over the world, 9 unicorn founders and names such as Federico Vega, founder and CEO of Frete; Orkut Büyükkökten, founder of Orkut, or Ed so, CTO of Lenovo.

South Summit Brazil 2025 will continue until next Friday the 11th with the deliberation of the winning project of the Startup Competition, selected from among 50 finalists chosen from more than 2,100 applications. These include the Barcelona-based startup DIDIT, which offers secure digital identity and fraud prevention to both companies and individuals, and Madrid-based ClassInTheBox, developer of the Boxie educational software  to transform video and text into interactive learning adventures.