When the Miami AI Summit opens on Oct. 23, one of its featured speakers will be a local resident who recently agreed to sell the company he co-founded to Nvidia for nearly $13 billion. That’s the kind of success story that proves the city no longer needs to convince anyone it’s a tech hub, said Burhan Sebin, who leads the event.
This year’s top voice is Hugging Face’s Clément Delangue, who will share the story behind the deal. He’s one of more than 30 speakers, from companies including Nvidia, Microsoft, Cognition, Base44 and Archie, at the daylong, curated gathering that’s expected to bring together 600 to 700 founders, investors and enterprise leaders at the Loews Coral Gables Hotel. Attendees apply to attend and are selected based on their profiles.
This year’s summit comes as South Florida’s tech story hits a new gear. Citadel’s Ken Griffin just pledged $2 billion to build a Carnegie Mellon campus in Wynwood. VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is opening a West Palm Beach base for its $1.2 billion American Dynamism fund. And Miami-area startups raised at least $3.14 billion in venture capital through September, on pace for the region’s best year since 2022, according to PitchBook data. That funding result was helped by two $250 million raises in 2026 for Miami’s AI medtech star OpenEvidence, which is now valued at $15 billion.
“All the ingredients are already here,” Sebin [pictured above], eMerge Americas’ chief AI officer, told Refresh Miami.
eMerge Americas is best known for its flagship tech conference, which started in 2014 and now draws some 20,000 attendees to Miami from more than 60 countries each year. In June 2025, it acquired Miami AI Hub, the community Sebin founded, and named him its first-ever chief AI officer. The move also launched the Miami AI School, which trains founders, small business owners and corporate teams to use and build AI tools, and expanded eMerge’s year-round AI programming, including the summit.
Hackathon kickoff
The event caps a week of AI programming that opens with a 12-hour hackathon on October 17. Teams will compete in enterprise AI, finance and healthcare tracks, and more than 400 builders are expected, according to Sebin. Sponsors include Miami-Dade County, Archie, Millennium and Cognition, which are offering cash prizes and platform credits.
Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, which backs both the hackathon and eMerge’s Miami AI School, plans to work with winning teams on life-science problems afterwards. “They need this AI talent, so they’re ready to hire these people,” Sebin said.
Miami AI Summit aims to give executives, founders and investors practical guidance on putting AI to work. The daylong program includes fireside chats, panels and breakout sessions on open-source AI, enterprise deployment, healthcare, national security and workforce training, plus networking time for startups and investors.
Sebin wants attendees to leave the event with three things. The first is clarity. “There are new AI tools popping up every day, new AI models popping up every day,” he said. “It’s very hard to track all of these and cut the noise.”
The second is practical action. The summit will run hands-on workshops led by Anthropic, Cognition, Base44, Millennium and the University of Miami, among others. A dedicated vibe-coding room will teach non-developers how to build apps, agents and websites. “The idea is the next day they can use this knowledge,” Sebin said.
The third is connections. The summit puts AI founders in a room with the enterprise clients they need for pilots and the investors to fund them. “I’m sure there will be some co-founders that will tell this story when they raise their Series C: ‘We met at Miami AI Summit,’” he said.
A community that doubled
Miami AI Hub, the community Sebin started, has grown from about 4,000 members to nearly 8,000 in a year, roughly 90% of them local. Three years ago, it was the only AI community in town. “Right now I can list about 20 AI communities just off the top of my head,” he said.
He said what sets Miami apart from major tech hubs is that people here are early adopters. They quickly pick up new technologies such as crypto and AI, and they’re good at selling the Miami vibe to the world. They are also generous with introductions. “If people cannot help you, they know someone that can help and they will introduce you,” he said.
Sebin knows that firsthand. He moved from Istanbul to New York, then to Miami about six years ago, during the pandemic. He found the local tech scene at a weekend hackathon run by eMerge and the City of Miami, where his team took third place with an e-learning platform. Today he leads one of the city’s largest AI communities. He met his wife here and hopes to raise his kids in the 305.
“Miami is home,” he said. “We owe this city a lot.”
Scenes from 2025’s Miami AI Summit. Photos provided by eMerge Americas
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Adriana Brasileiro is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and communications strategist based in Miami. She has reported and edited for Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and the Miami Herald, covering business, technology, climate and Latin America. A former communications leader at Meta, she is especially interested in South Florida’s startup ecosystem, artificial intelligence and the people using innovation to solve real-world problems. Send pitches to [email protected].
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