Two Weeks, Two Pitches, One Nobel Prize: Inside Tech.Summer.2026

This summer, more than 50 students aged 15 to 17 from Italy and Cyprus arrived in Barcelona for Tech.Summer.2026, part of Harbour.Space's fully funded boarding scholarship program, Technology Leaders of the Future. All of them came in with strong STEM backgrounds. None of them came in with a startup.

Ten days later, they walked out with one, pitch deck, team roles, and a real investor pitch behind them.

Split into teams of four, each student took on a specific role: CEO, CTO, Designer, or Marketing/Sales lead. Every team was paired with a Harbour.Space student mentor, who stayed with them for the full two weeks, translating masterclasses and lab sessions into an actual product and an actual pitch.

The structure repeated daily, but the intensity never let up:

• Mornings opened with a masterclass for the whole cohort, led by a serial founder or a working investor.

• Afternoons split into role-specific labs, where practitioners in each track — CEO, CTO, Design, Marketing/Sales — worked directly with the students on the skills their role demanded.

• Evenings were build time, with mentors guiding each team as they turned the day's lessons into progress on their pitch deck.

Two Fridays. Two investor pitches. In front of people who fund companies for a living.

Partway through the program, the cohort had the chance to hear from Sir Konstantin Novoselov, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for his work on graphene. For a group of young founders in the middle of building their first companies, it was a rare, direct look at what scientific breakthrough at the highest level actually looks like.

Tech.Summer.2026 brought together founders, investors, and industry practitioners across every track.

Masterclasses were led by Kamran Elahian, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of ten tech companies with three unicorn IPOs, and Igor Ryabenkiy, founder at AltaIR Capital, whose portfolio includes Miro, Deel, and PandaDoc.

CEO track: Laura Morris (founder, FoxHouse), Antonello Barbaro (CEO and General Manager, H-FARM Education), Luiz Fittipaldi (former global strategy lead, Preply and Bolt), Sergey Nugaev (founder, Journey Now), Jorge Villabona (startup builder in venture studios), and Eric Nobileau (Group CFO, Harbour.Space).

CTO track: Carlos Mota (Google Developer Expert for Android, AVANCEESoftware), Yuliyan Savchev (software engineer, Tomoro), and Anton Baranov (CEO, Luminaide).

Design track: Anna Suvorova (graphic designer, Develit AB), Alice Bianco (social media manager, Harbour.Space), and Joshua Davis (generative art pioneer, with work in the Whitney Museum collection).

Marketing/Sales track: Andy Crestodina (co-founder and CMO, Orbit Media), Stephanie Schwab (CEO and founder, Crackerjack Marketing), Giorgio Fasulo (CMO, Harbour.Space), Rui Nunes (serial founder), and Víctor Bescós (founder, HAL-E).

Every team built toward the same finish line: a pitch in front of real investors, twice. The first Friday tested how far a week of masterclasses, labs, and mentorship could take a team with no prior startup experience. The second gave them the chance to come back sharper — with a refined deck, a clearer story, and a better answer to the questions investors actually ask.

Two weeks of building toward something real. We're proud of what these teams brought to the table on the final Friday — and grateful to every founder, investor, and practitioner who gave their time to make it happen.