On June 9, 2026, Baulders and Dirox took part in Web Summit Rio for the very first time.

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Set in the Barra da Tijuca district, Riocentro spreads across more than 90,000 m² devoted to innovation. For this new edition, the organisers went big: three vast exhibition halls, showcases from startups pioneering their fields, and a run of talks led by tech specialists drawn from the biggest names in the industry. This year, Web Summit Rio pulled in the crowds, more than 40,000 attendees, along with 688 investors and 1,572 startups, all converging on the "Cidade Maravilhosa" to redraw, in their own way, the contours of global tech.

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From the first hours, the tone is set: studious, but warm and welcoming. Tucked between the aisles sit inventive booths, staging fascinating demonstrations delivered by faces from every corner of the globe. Unsurprisingly, every headline subject in today's tech world is on display. From artificial intelligence to software development, by way of venture capital and digital marketing, the themes moving from one booth to the next speak directly to what Dirox and Baulders are working on. Every conversation becomes a chance to explore the best of what's out there, and to place our own solutions on a landscape that keeps shifting.

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Day one of Web Summit Rio is for observing and making first contact. From day two, the experience changes. This time, no more watching: we have our own booth, and two entities to represent as well as we possibly can, Baulders and Dirox. That shift in posture changes everything. All day long, new and curious faces come through our space, one after another, to find out more, to prospect, to share their story. Chilean entrepreneurs arrive with ambitious, well-built projects. Brazilians come in numbers, curious and passionate about what's being built across Latin America. Foreigners settled in Brazil talk about a life choice as much as a career one. Add founders hunting for partners and investors ready to back the right startups, and that's exactly what makes an event like this irreplaceable.

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Running a booth is an education in itself. Presenting Baulders to strangers, dozens of times a day, is the fastest feedback loop there is. You watch faces. You learn which sentence lands and which one loses the room, and you rewrite your own words in real time.

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Once again, the atmosphere at Riocentro, professional, yes, but alive, is what makes the event so singular. The people here love what they do, and they know why they put in the hours. These jobs may look technical, and they're routinely filed under "geeky," yet they are deeply social. The exchanges are consistently absorbing, one flowing into the next, and there is always an unexpected conversation that teaches you something you never saw coming. Between two chats at the booth, we slipped away to open a new window and widen our horizons at a talk given by two Red Bull athletes on stage, including surfer Lucas Fink.

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Rio, for its part, leaves nothing to chance when it comes to atmosphere. Carnival parades, samba lessons, beach tennis courts to unwind between pitches: the city pulled out all the stops, culminating in the opening of the World Cup on Thursday, June 11, the final day of the event. Right to the end, the booths stayed inventive and the mood stayed warm. And Rio, true to form, delivered a closing worthy of the name: the World Cup opening gave the city an extra surge of energy, as if the party simply refused to stop.

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Three days of conversations with founders, investors and engineers building in Latin America give you a firsthand read on what is really moving in the market, not on what the press releases say is moving. What companies are asking AI to do today, and what they have stopped asking of it. The building blocks teams still develop in-house, and the ones they have given up on. How fast a region can go from emerging market to serious competitor.

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That read doesn't end up in a trip report. It feeds straight into the work: into the roadmaps we build with Dirox clients, into the way we prioritise what Baulders ships next, and into the conversations we'll be having with you about what's worth investing in over the next twelve months. The connections made in Rio, partners, specialists, potential collaborators across three continents, are part of that too. That's the whole point of showing up.

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Web Summit Rio 2026 is packed away in the suitcases now. Ideas, contacts, conversations that will carry on well beyond Riocentro. For Baulders and Dirox, this edition will stand as a rewarding and constructive experience, and a fine demonstration that Latin America is more than ever at the heart of the global tech conversation.

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See you next time, Rio. 🇧🇷

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Our Next stop: Lisbon. Dirox and Baulders will be at Web Summit Lisbon, November 9–12, 2026. If you're planning to be there, let us know, we'll catch up over a coffee.

Come find us →

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