Startup Award Cyprus 2026

Twelve startups, four trophies, no prize money — and a room of investors who actually write cheques. The Ventures' Startup Award Cyprus returns for its 2026 edition, and the whole thing comes down to one in-person afternoon on Thursday 15 October 2026. Read this part first if you were planning to apply: you are too late. Applications opened on 1 August and closed on 1 October 2026. The twelve finalists are announced on 11 October, and the Final Pitch and Awards ceremony is on 15 October. This listing exists for the people who want to be in the room, not on the stage. One honest caveat about the times above. The Ventures has not published a start time or a venue for the 2026 final. The 10:00–19:00 window in this listing is a placeholder for the date, not a schedule — if you are attending, confirm the hour and the address with the organisers. For reference, the 2025 edition's final ran on 23 September at The Warehouse, so Limassol is the obvious guess, but it is a guess. The format. Applications are reviewed online — free to enter, a website link and a pitch deck is all it took. The top 12 are then invited to pitch live to a judging panel, which picks four winners across:

• Best Product
• Best Traction
• Best Team
• Best AI Solution (special nomination)

Participation in the final is in person only, and mandatory for finalists — being able to travel to Cyprus was part of the eligibility bar, alongside being early-stage (pre-seed through Round A), from any industry, with an MVP or prototype and "global impact potential". There is no cash prize. That is deliberate. What winners get is distribution: investor introductions, mentorship, media exposure and access to what The Ventures describes as a network of 460+ VC funds, investors and business angels collectively managing over $57 billion. Finalists pitch to a hand-picked set of investors face to face. Whether that beats a €7,000 cheque depends entirely on what stage you are at. The judging panel is the strongest argument for showing up:

• Petros Farah — Investment Director, Samsung Ventures
• Demetrios Zoppos — Co-founder & Partner, 33East
• Andreas Panayi — Co-founder & CEO, Kinisis Ventures
• Stavrinos Kyriakou — Startups and Scale ISVs Recruit Strategy Lead, Microsoft
• Anton Timashev — Co-founder, ZERO10 & Tetrad.vc; CEO & Co-founder, Wayvee Analytics
• Margarita Kyprianou — Innovation Program Manager, Cyprus Seeds
• Grigory Bortnik — Co-founder, Narwhal Accelerator; Venture Partner, The Games Fund

Partners. Platinum partner 4dev.com, gold partner Royal Pine, with AWS/Cloudvisor, Miro and TechIsland among the supporting names. Why it is on this list. It is not a hackathon — there is no build phase and nothing gets coded on the day. It is here for the same reason Unicorn Pitches is: October and November have turned into Cyprus' pitching season, and this is the one where the panel is mostly investors rather than mostly mentors. If you are a founder who did not apply, go anyway and watch which twelve made the cut — that list is the most honest snapshot of the island's early-stage pipeline you will get this year.

Event website