Demo Night Lx June 2026: SpotGov's João Alves Wins People's Choice in Lisbon

There is a particular kind of energy in a Lisbon evening when founders, investors and operators crowd into a small room with great coffee and a clear purpose. On Wednesday 24 June 2026, Canopy Community hosted Demo Night Lx at The Royal Rawness on Avenida Infante Dom Henrique and walked away with a new People's Choice winner: João Alves of SpotGov.

The setting: Lisbon's startup community at The Royal Rawness

Demo Night Lx is the Lisbon edition of Canopy Community's monthly demo night series. The format is deliberately simple — three founders, three pitches, an audience of peers and early-stage investors, and live voting through Mentimeter.

This month we partnered with Ground Capital for the fireside chat, opening a frank conversation about what early-stage investors in Iberia really want to see at pre-seed and seed. Founders left with a clearer picture of the questions that get asked behind the term sheet — and the warning signs that close the door before a second meeting.

The audience itself summed up the night better than we could. When asked what they would tell a friend about Demo Night, the words on the wall were fast, sharp, fresh, welcoming, very supportive and energetic vibe, and a simple definitely — love it! The NPS score for the night came in at 9.5 out of 10.

Three founders, three different futures

Demo Night Lx brought together three founders working on very different problems, each at a different point on the funding journey.

João Cabral opened the night with VoiceTune, a Trinity College Dublin spin-out building real-time emotional AI voices for digital characters. VoiceTune is solving a specific pain in game production — voice-over workflows that break every time a script changes or a character ships in a new language. João walked us through the product flow and shared that VoiceTune is raising €200K to extend runway and convert pilots with game studios into paying customers. Audience scores: 3.6 / 2.5 / 3.0.

João Alves followed with SpotGov, an AI suite for government contracting. In 14 months, SpotGov has become one of the fastest-growing startups in Portugal — 100+ clients, more than €1.5B won annually by those clients, and retention above 90%. His pitch reframed public procurement as a €2 trillion European market still running on manual processes, and SpotGov as the AI-native platform that turns tender chaos into a strategic advantage. The audience response was unmistakable. Audience scores: 3.8 / 3.6 / 3.9 — the highest marks of the night.

Jeremy Healsmith closed the demos with Replied, the AI email agent born from an investor with 60,000 unread messages. Replied — business email, sorted — is built for the inboxes most of us are quietly losing the battle with. Backed by Innovate UK, Jenson Ventures, Unicorn Factory Lisboa, Canopy and Microsoft Partner status, Jeremy and co-founder Robyn Greaves have raised £600k in pre-seed and UK government funding. Audience scores: 4.0 / 3.0 / 3.4.

And the People's Choice goes to…

The People's Choice vote is where audience members tell us which pitch they would back if they had to choose just one. This month's result was clear: SpotGov first, Replied second, VoiceTune third.

Congratulations to João Alves — the new Canopy Community People's Choice winner.

João won not because public procurement is glamorous, but because he made a complex, regulated, often boring market feel obviously valuable in eight minutes. He showed traction (100+ clients), economic scale (€1.5B+ won annually for clients), and a vision big enough to compete for — building the whole public procurement team inside a single AI-native platform. For first-time founders watching, the lesson is worth pinning to the wall: clarity beats theatre. For early-stage investors, SpotGov is one to watch as it scales beyond Portugal.

Why first-time founders and early-stage investors keep coming back

Demo Night Lx is built for two audiences.

For first-time founders, it is one of the lowest-risk ways to test a pitch in front of real investors, get fast, honest audience feedback, and meet the kind of peers who will introduce you to your first cheque.

For early-stage investors, it is curated, founder-dense deal flow you cannot easily find on a deck list — three high-conviction founders, a fireside chat with a respected fund, and a room where the next round often starts as a conversation over coffee.

Bring your idea — see you at the next one

If you have an idea you would like to bring to Demo Night — as a founder, panelist, or simply as part of the audience — we would love to hear from you.

Get in touch and sign up for the next edition at lu.ma/canopy. Build. Pitch. Connect. Grow.