Meet the jury
Deciding who builds Europe’s AI future takes more than good judgement. It requires deep technical know-how. That’s why the Next Frontier AI jury is made up of leading AI researchers, successful founders, and builders who have operated at the frontier.
They come from across Europe and beyond. Different disciplines, different career paths, different industries. What they share: the ability to tell the difference between a genuine breakthrough thesis and a well-dressed incremental idea.
How the jury works
What the jury does
The jury selects which teams enter the Challenge, evaluate progress at the end of each of the three stages, and determine who stays in the race.
At the initial Pitch Days, they assess the shortlisted proposals and decide who gets funded. At each subsequent stage, they review the submissions along technical milestones, operational progress, scaling potential and other dimensions. They listen to the pitches at the end of each Stage and challenge the teams during the in-person meetings.
How decisions are made
Decisions are made collaboratively, focused on breakthrough potential rather than cataloguing weaknesses. The jury looks at the full picture: the boldness of the thesis, the team's ability to execute, and whether the approach has a credible path to frontier-grade impact.
The guiding question behind every decision: "If this team executes well and then receives serious scale-up capital, can they build a lab that shifts the global frontier?"
If the honest answer is that a team would build something useful but ultimately regional or derivative, they don't advance.
Confirmed Jury members
Pim De Witte, Co-founder and CEO, General Intuition
Pim de Witte is the co-founder and CEO of General Intuition, an frontier AI research lab focused on spatial-temporal reasoning. He is also the co-founder and former CEO of Medal, the world's largest platform for capturing and sharing gaming moments, and Highlight, an AI assistant that captures insights for users across every app. Pim's love of video games and his expertise in reverse engineering both started early and have shaped his trajectory. At 14 years old, he started and ran the largest private server on Runescape. This initial success allowed him to support humanitarian aid work with Médecins Sans Frontières, including the co-creation of a crowdsourced mapping tool, MapSwipe, at the height of the Ebola crisis.
Søren Hauberg, Professor, Technical University of Denmark
Søren Hauberg is a machine learning professor at the Technical University of Denmark. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Copenhagen in 2011. Prior to pursuing a PhD he worked as a "digital lumberjack" in the startup Dralle A/S. He is a dual ERC grantee, and further serves as Denmark's first Ambassador for the ERC. In 2018, he joined the Young Scientists community under the World Economic Forum, and was in the process named one of "10 of the most exciting young scientists working in the world today." In 2025, he was the leading initiator of the EurIPS conference and has since served in the ELLIS Events Area to develop European AI conferences.
Stay tuned
More jury members will be announced over the coming weeks!