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Notes from the field: two days of matchmaking, meetings, and side events at GITEX Europe
- 10 hours ago
- 5 min read
Last week, from June 30th to July 2nd, we were back at GITEX Europe for the third time as ecosystem partners. Each edition teaches us something slightly different about how the investment world is reorganizing itself, the dynamics, trends as well as long term evolution. This year, the lesson was about speed, and about who still has the patience to slow down.
ALBAN Global Network’s role is that of an ecosystem partner and enhancer, a translator and bridgebuilder: we connect founders to investors, angels to VCs for follow-on rounds, GPs to LPs, and family offices to the partners and opportunities that actually fit their mandate. It is a strange, useful vantage point. You see the market not as a single event, but as dozens of small negotiations happening in parallel, each one testing whether trust can be built faster and limits pushed further.
The Meeting Mania
This year's edition was compressed into two days, which meant something conferences rarely force on people: discipline. You had to know exactly who you wanted to meet, and when. There was no drifting, though spontaneous conversations and introductions happened all around.
For us, a clear thread ran through both days: deep tech. From AI infrastructure to hard science ventures, a notable share of the founders we met were building in spaces that require patient capital, long development cycles, and investors who genuinely understand the technology. That alignment: between what founders are building and what the right investors are actually looking for is still rare, and building the right connections and ties is most of the work.
We opened the first day with a deep-tech investor roundtable at the investor lounge organized by Anssi Uimonen founder at Nordic Science Investments, followed by a string of back-to-back ten-minute meetings with startups, enough time to evaluate, exchange contacts, and set a concrete follow-up, but not a minute more. The second day shifted focus toward fund managers raising capital, LPs, and investors working the other side of the table. GITEX's concierge service deserves credit here; the matchmaking and follow-through on scheduled meetings was noticeably sharp and real time.
"You stop trying to have the perfect conversation and start trying to have the useful one," is roughly how one investor summed up the rhythm of the two days, a sentiment we heard, in different words, from more people we crossed paths and exchanged with.
Leveraging the Wider Network
Beyond the one-on-ones, we leaned on existing partnerships, with GIZ and Berlin Partners, through the Ecosystem Connectors program, built to connect Berlin's ecosystem with Eastern Europe, to support founders directly and to open conversations with several Balkan delegations about future collaboration, with a special focus from our side on Albanian founders.
We also co-organized a "double speed pitch" session: sixty seconds per founder, not nearly enough to close an investor, but not the point. The goal was memorability (one founder pitched in a bright red hat), and a low-pressure setting where the best connections often happen almost by accident. What stood out most was watching founders introduce each other to their own networks, trade feedback, and workshop each other's ideas on the spot.
That kind of peer-to-peer generosity is harder to manufacture than any panel discussion.
Check out full album from our "Double Speed Pitch" event on july 1rst at the IHK in Berlin:
ALBAN Global Network runs on a similar principle at a larger scale: a group of more than 40 international independent associates review every pitch submitted to us, and we aim to make at least one meaningful introduction for every founder who applies. The follow-up conversations are going strong in the days after.
Where the Money Actually Comes From
It's easy to talk about "the investment ecosystem" as an abstraction. In practice, it's a supply chain, smaller funds sitting alongside first-time managers and international vehicles that close a dozen deals a month, each with different appetites, mandates, and timelines. Matching them well is less about spotting a hot deal and more about understanding, in detail, who is actually solving for what.
One LP put it plainly: "We like to invest in people who know what they're doing, and are in it for the long run not for the return alone, but because they want to keep building the ecosystem systematically." That distinction that investors who see themselves as infrastructure rather than spectators came up again and again in the fund conversations we had over the two days.
Another investor, reflecting on due diligence in a market this segmented, offered a version of a familiar principle: "The deal isn't really about the terms. It's about whether you know exactly who you're getting into business with." Trust and understanding, in other words, is the actual currency being exchanged, capital just follows it.
Trust in it's broaded sense of meaning, and in this context comes closer to engineered certainty. The whole function of an introduction is to remove the need to trust, because by the time the deal is on the table, you already know them and the ties to the whole ecosystem are solid.
The Side-Event Phenomenon
Usually, the more revealing conversations happened after the badges came off. Founders and investors alike will tell you, half joking, that the real deal flow lives in the dinners and the late drinks, when nobody is checking the clock.
This year, we hosted our own: the double speed pitch event, organized on July 1st in collaboration with the Ecosystem Builders program and other partners.
“Curated events where open in person dialogue are the ways forward to build the investor founder ecosystem and we enjoyed working with Alban Global at Gitex Europe to bring out excellence as well as putting a spotlight on new ideas, investments and collaborations.” - Stanley Marchon.
We also made a point of attending a few other gatherings and side events, and the SuperConnectors event stood out in particular, where among the local organizers and platform founders of SuperConnectors, we met a handful of sharp Belgian founders we hadn't crossed paths with before.
What Comes Next
GITEX Europe is one stop in a longer circuit that includes Davos, SuperReturn, and Money20/20, and the WhatsApp groups and informal communities that grow from each event are, in some ways, more durable than the conference itself. We're carrying several of those threads into a busy stretch around Berlin before taking a proper pause this summer.
We'll be back for the next edition. In the meantime, founders raising capital are welcome to share their details with us, and if you're an investor, GP, LP, or partner who wants these conversations to keep going between conferences.
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ALBAN Global Network is a Brussels-based nonprofit connecting founders, angels, VCs, LPs, and family offices across borders.
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