The Hive Summit 2026: AI or DIE | Samaipata Founders' Retreat

Every year, we bring the Samaipata founder community together for the Hive Summit, our annual retreat for portfolio founders, Operating Partners, and close friends of Samaipata. Three days to surface the real challenges, the big bets, the questions keeping founders up at night. This year's theme reflected the defining shift of our times. AI or Die.

In the past eighteen months, AI has fundamentally rewritten how startups operate. What used to take a team of fifty can now be done by ten. The leverage every founder carries today is unlike anything we have seen before, and it cuts both ways.

This year we had an exceptional group of voices. Oskar Hjertonsson, co-founder of Cornershop acquired by Uber, Vinay Rao, former Head of Safeguards at Anthropic and Tomás Pueyo, author of Uncharted Territories, joined our portfolio founders to share their experience and perspective. Together they sparked discussions on what it truly takes to build category-defining companies, how the most durable ones are often born from contrarian bets, what leading a real AI transformation looks like beyond the tools and into the culture and the people, and how founders tell the story of what they are building with the clarity and conviction it deserves.

The room brought together an exceptional mix of people. This year's close friends of Samaipata included Ana Ivanovic (former world No. 1 and French Open champion), Luis Ruigómez (Director Iberia at Palantir), Guli Moreno (co-founder of Capchase), Frederik Bjork (founder & CEO of Grafbase), Kintxo Cortés (Product Partnerships and Expansion at Gigs), Hugo Arévalo (Co-Founder of the Power Business School & prolific BA), Sebas Fernandez-Medrano (founder of Bihar Batteries) and Christian Stiebner (ex-KfW Capital),

Once again, our Operating Partners Jessica Romano (ex Remote), Lee Clancy (ex Senior VP of Product & Growth at Prosus), Stephan Lagraulet (Director of Engineering at N26) and Paulo Rodriguez (Head of International at Vanta), were there, bringing the expertise and support they dedicate to our founders all year round.

At the heart of it all, our portfolio founders Carlos Gómez (VIVLA), Mickael Roger and Pablo Gil Brusola (Prophero), Carlos Serrano and Toni Berga (Embat), Alvaro Bernabe and Sergio Alemany (Imperia), Javier Escribano and Patrik Bergareche (Punto), Juanjo Mestre and Jacobo Umbert (Dcycle), Jose Luis Vilar (Caravelo), Declan Kelly (Eolas Medical), Kai Brandt (Genesy), Patrick Asdaghi (Carbonmaps), Guillem Oliva (Konvo) and Daniel Callaghan (Veremark).

‍

‍

"The AI era is going to separate founders. It will. Some will get paralysed by the speed, some will get lost in the noise. The ones who win will be the ones who lead with focus, with backbone, and with humanity. After these days, I have zero doubt that this room is on the right side of that line."

José del Barrio, Samaipata Managing Founder

‍

‍

‍

‍

“This event was very gracious. A lot of resources, a lot of joy, a lot of high-quality intervention and content. And I don't know a lot of VC funds in Europe doing that kind of stuff.” Patrick Asdaghi, Co-founder of Foodchéri (Exited to Sodexo) & Carbonmaps · Backed by Samaipata

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

“This event was very gracious. A lot of resources, a lot of joy, a lot of high-quality intervention and content. And I don't know a lot of VC funds in Europe doing that kind of stuff.” Oskar Hjertonsson · Co-founder of Cornershop · Acquired by Uber for $3B

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

"The next decade of building belongs to the founders who aren't afraid to go up against the big tech giants like Anthropic, like OpenAI, like Amazon or Microsoft, who are able to find and iterate on that next niche of AI impact that's really going to serve the world.” Luis Ruigómez · Director of Palantir Technologies Iberia

‍

‍

‍

‍

“The next decade of founders that will do well are the ones that will evolve with AI-generated coding, AI-generated design, and AI-generated applications. We assume code to be static. It may not be static. We assume design to be static. It may not be static. So the founders need to create products that evolve as AI evolves” Vinay Rao · AI expert ·  Google, Anthropic, Stanford

‍

‍

‍

‍

"We were very pro Codex. People were actually telling us: hey, give a try to Claude. And that night, Sergio and I changed Codex to Claude; and we did that because people were actually helping us.” Alvaro Bernabé · Co-founder of Imperia · Backed by Samaipata

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

“I had the pleasure of hosting our panel, Winning Big Against the Playbook. Each of the founders revealed that they were being contrarian or doing things differently without even realising it. And that actually became their edge.” Jessica Romano · Revenue Strategy Expert | ex-Remote · Samaipata Operating Partner

‍

‍

‍

‍

“It's my third time. The level of honesty. We usually speak about growth, ambition, money, valuation. But I think these days it's about us, about founders, about taking care of ourselves and helping each other and having honest conversations around challenges and uncertainty.” Toni Berga · Co-founder of Embat · Backed by Samaipata:

‍

‍

‍

“AI or DIE to me means that as entrepreneurs, AI is our new religion. We need to learn about it, apply it every day, and really understand how it becomes a new transcendental thing for our company. There's this new gospel and we all need to learn.” Carlos Gómez · Co-founder of VIVLA ·  Backed by Samaipata