Dublin’s Web Summit has accelerated into SXSW territory this year, scaling to over 22,000 attendees. Unlike other tech conferences, which put the startups centre stage, Web Summit has gone for scale, with side stages where 200 companies pitched over the three days of the conference.
Portuguese company Codacy won the BETA Award for its platform, which automatically reviews software code, saving time and frustration for software companies.
Competitors to it include Code Climate and Scritiniser. Codacy claims they are better because they “provide flexibility to adjust the code analysis experience” and support a lot of programming languages. The company is based in London, but its tech team operates in Lisbon. This is worth noting because Lisbon is emerging as a genuinely new tech ecosystem in Europe, with Berlin-levels of cheapness but with Southern European weather.
Last week, Codacy recently announced a “freemium” model, plus a significant upgrade that introduces extensive code monitoring, quality insights and a number of customisable features.
Backed by Faber Ventures, Seedcamp and Espirito Santo Ventures, Codacy serves over 3,000 developers worldwide and its customers range from individual freelancers to Fortune 500 companies.
Meanwhile, BaseStone, from the UK, won the ALPHA Award for its company, which aims to streamline communication and speed up the design-review process.
Judges of this year’s competition included John O’Farrell of Andreessen Horowitz and Alfred Lin of Sequoia. This year the competition saw over 1,500 entries.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco | October 13-15, 2026
Both winners will receive 10,000 euros in cash for the business and a meeting at Coca-Cola in Atlanta, which sponsored the pitch competition. I’m not exactly sure how useful that will be, but hey ….
Mike Butcher (M.B.E.), formerly Editor-at-large of TechCrunch, has written for UK national newspapers and magazines and been named one of the most influential people in European technology by Wired UK. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum, Web Summit, and DLD. He has interviewed Tony Blair, Dmitry Medvedev, Kevin Spacey, Lily Cole, Pavel Durov, Jimmy Wales, and many other tech leaders and celebrities. Mike is a regular broadcaster, appearing on BBC News, Sky News, CNBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera and Bloomberg. He has also advised UK Prime Ministers and the Mayor of London on tech startup policy, as well as being a judge on The Apprentice UK. GQ magazine named him one of the 100 Most Connected Men in the UK. He is the co-founder of TheEuropas.com (Top 100 listing of European startups); and the non-profits Techfugees.com, TechVets.co, and Startup Coalition. He was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2016 for services to the UK technology industry and journalism.