NextStar’s Deborah Magid Featured Speaker at InnovateHer Investor Summit 2026, Cagliari
REGISTER NOW!
Great companies are not built on capital alone. They are built on access: to networks, to expertise, to talent, and to opportunity. And on that front, the playing field is still far from level. This October, that challenge takes center stage in Sardinia, and NextStar Venture Partners Managing Director Deborah Magid will be there to help meet it.
Event Details
What: InnovateHer Investor Summit 2026
Hosted by: University of Cagliari
Where: University of Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy
When: October 2 and 3, 2026
The summit convenes women founders, investors, allocators, and leaders from across the innovation ecosystem, bringing together an exciting group of women entrepreneurs from across Europe who will pitch their companies to investors and a panel of judges for prizes and recognition. Deborah joins the program as a featured speaker and as one of the judges evaluating the founders who take the stage.
Why This Conversation Matters Now
The reason an event like InnovateHer exists is not hard to find. It is written plainly in the funding data, and the numbers remain stark.
According to PitchBook’s 2025 US All In: Female Founders in the VC Ecosystem report, all-female founding teams raised a combined $3.2 billion in 2025, while all-male founding teams raised $191.1 billion over the same period. Even more telling, all-female teams raised 22 percent less capital than the year before, even as all-male teams raised 21 percent more. The gap is not closing on its own. In some respects, it is widening.
This is not a matter of a shortage of exceptional women founders. It is a matter of access. Women entrepreneurs continue to face greater barriers to funding and fewer opportunities to build the networks that so often lead to investment in the first place. Capital tends to flow through relationships, and when women are underrepresented in the rooms where those relationships form, the disadvantage compounds at every stage. InnovateHer is designed to interrupt that cycle by putting women founders directly in front of the investors and allocators who can back them.
Building a Bridge Between Silicon Valley and Europe
There is a second thread to this summit that aligns closely with how NextStar thinks about the innovation landscape, and it is one Deborah cares deeply about: strengthening the connections between Silicon Valley and Europe.
Innovation does not stop at national borders, and neither should the relationships that help it flourish. The InnovateHer summit is built in part to connect capital, technology, talent, and new ideas across the Atlantic, opening opportunities on both sides. For European founders, that means access to the networks and investment culture of Silicon Valley. For investors, it means visibility into a deep and often underappreciated pipeline of European companies. NextStar’s own thesis, backing AI for critical industries, is inherently global, and the kind of cross-border relationship-building that InnovateHer champions is exactly how the most important companies find the resources they need to scale.
Who Should Attend
This summit is designed for women founders building across the innovation ecosystem, along with the investors, allocators, and industry leaders committed to backing them. If you are building or supporting AI and technology companies and you care about closing the access gap that the funding data makes so visible, you will be in the right room.
Register and Connect
Registration for the InnovateHer Investor Summit 2026 is open now for the event at the University of Cagliari on October 2 and 3, 2026.
If you are attending and would like to connect with Deborah in Cagliari, reach out to her directly on LinkedIn, or via deborah@nsvp.vc to connect during the event.
