• Attendance success: The congress recorded outstanding attendance with 250 participants throughout the day.
• First PEIC Public Award: Star Robotics won the award for its innovative robot supporting port surveillance and security.
• Strategic networking: The event facilitated direct connections between the three fundamental pillars of the innovation ecosystem: startups, corporations, and venture capital, generating collaboration opportunities.
Valencia, October 24, 2025.
Opentop has successfully held the third edition of PEIC (Port Entrepreneurship International Congress), an event that has established itself as a key meeting point for innovators, investors, and companies and institutions from the international port community, within the framework of VDS (Valencia Digital Summit) held at the City of Arts and Sciences.
The day began with the official welcome from Mar Chao, President of the Port Authority of Valencia, and Antonio Torregrosa, General Director of Fundación Valenciaport, who highlighted Valencia port’s commitment to port innovation.
This was followed by a round table on PIN, the innovative port network co-founded by Opentop, where the global PIN Challenge was presented. This session featured representatives from port innovation hubs such as The PIER (Halifax), homePort (Hamburg), Port of Tyne (United Kingdom), and Blue Economy Incubator from the Port of San Diego; in a session moderated by Salvador Furió, Innovation Director of Fundación Valenciaport. Additionally, new members were officially welcomed: thinkport VIENNA, the network’s first river port, and the port of Esbjerg (Denmark).
Throughout the day, the congress was structured around “Innovation Lighthouses” or thematic round tables that addressed relevant sector challenges: Blue Economy (featuring Biobright, Ocean Ecostructures, Sea Grown), supply chain efficiency (with Elonroad, Passify, and Aeler), safety and resilience (with Gaist, Cyraco, and Quantum Harbour), and energy transition. Each block combined innovative startup presentations with industry expert analysis. On stage were 20 startups—75% from outside Spain—that had been carefully selected following an international call launched in June.
A distinctive element of the event was the “Investment Squad,” a reverse pitching session where venture capital funds such as onenorth Ventures, Signal Ventures, Maersk Growth, and Freight Ventures presented their initiatives and investment theses to attendees, inverting the traditional format to facilitate more effective meetings.
The congress also dedicated special focus to energy transition in ports, with a keynote by Grant Brown from Hitachi Europe, and a specific round table on sustainability, decarbonization, and energy that brought together companies such as PowerUp Energy Technologies, Arrecife Energy Systems, and Walker Subsea Engineering.
Live demonstration sessions allowed eight startups to showcase their products and services interactively, including solutions for maritime identification (Hamsa ID), autonomous marine robotics (Marinerob), container management and optimization (Connectainer), port analytics (Ensemble Analytics), predictive techniques (Inguru Predict – HUPI), compliance management software (Stowlog), sustainable refrigeration (Cooling Photonics), and the award-winning Star Robotics, with a surveillance and security assistance robot.
The event concluded with a session on public-private collaboration featuring the European Space Agency (ESA), demonstrating synergies between different technological sectors; followed by closing remarks from the interesting day, delivered by Juan Manuel Díez, Head of Innovation at the Port Authority of Valencia.
This was followed by the presentation ceremony for the first “PEIC AWARD,” a prize chosen by attendees who could vote through a mobile platform.
Jorge Marcos, Lead Project Manager at Opentop, expressed his pride in the event’s development: “This third edition has meant international recognition for the open innovation we do at Valenciaport. We have brought great speakers and many attendees to Valencia, creating a unique networking space that brings together startups, corporations, and Venture Capital—three key elements that have come together in person at PEIC. The satisfaction expressed by all attendees about how fruitful the international congress has been greatly encourages us as organizers, because it reinforces our role in bringing entrepreneurship closer to the port community, and motivates us to start preparing the next edition.”
Events like PEIC 2025 demonstrate that Valencia is positioned as a hub for European port innovation, attracting talent, capital, and transformative ideas that will shape the future of the global maritime-port industry.
The PEIC 2025 congress is organized by Opentop, the open innovation initiative of Fundación Valenciaport with the support of the Port Authority of Valencia and the Valencian Government through the Department of Innovation, Commerce and Tourism, through EMENTI/2025/29
