Gaussian Scout, Pixentinel Take Top Prizes at San Sebastián’s Zinemaldia Startup Challenge

SAN SEBASTIÁN, Spain — Finland’s Gaussian Scout (formerly listed Virtual Location Scouting) and Spain’s Pixentinel claimed the top prizes at the 2026 Zinemaldia Startup Challenge, the San Sebastián Festival’s flagship technology competition.

Gaussian Scout, a browser-based virtual location scouting platform being developed by Finnish cinematographer Antti Ahokoivu, won Best European Project with its €10,000 and also picked up the €3,000 Special Mention for Entrepreneurship. Spanish streaming-operations startup Pixentinel took the €30,000 Best Spanish Project award. Rather than simply flagging when a live stream has broken, Pixentinel aims to determine where a failure originated supplu evidence to the diagnosis and, where possible, automatically trigger a response. The proposition is aimed at broadcasters and streaming operators feel the hit of short interruptions during live programming can become lost viewers and revenue.

Ahokoivu admitted the double win came as a surprise after travelling from Finland with a project that is still pre-commercial somewhat a side project to his Cinematorgraphy work. More important than the prize itself, he said, was seeing people engage with the idea. “People come to talk and are interested about it,” he told Variety. “You get more confident that there is something interesting.”

The technology grew directly out of Ahokoivu’s work as a cinematographer and his experience trying to get different departments to understand a location in the same way before a shoot. “Having some tools that you can visualise things with, that you talk about the same things, what we’re going to do, helps so much,” he said. The prize money will now help Gaussian Scout move into tests on real productions and further develop the cloud-based system that will eventually allow users to upload and work with their own digital twins.

The 2026 Zinemaldia Startup Challenge offered €30,000 for the Best Spanish Project, €10,000 for the Best European Project and a €3,000 Special Mention for Entrepreneurship. The competition is the centerpiece of the Festival’s Zinemaldia & Technology initiative and is organized by the San Sebastián Festival in collaboration with Tecnalia, ALÍA and Vicomtech.

The Spanish competition also forms part of Spanish Screenings: Financing & Tech, supported by Spain’s Ministry of Culture through ICAA, the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Civil Service, ICEX, the Málaga Festival and the San Sebastián Festival. Prior to the win announcement the ten finalists, five Spanish and five from elsewhere in Europe, pitched their projects with each given a strict 10 minutes to present and field questions.

We profile the companies below:

European Finalists

GaussianScout (Virtual Location Scouting Finland)

Cinematographer Antti Ahokoivu is developing this browser-based tool intended to make remote location scouting more spatially informative than conventional photographs. Ahokoivu’s starting insight was simple: flat images rarely communicate the true proportions and geometry of a filming location for the disparate teams. GaussianScout, formerly listed as Virtual Location Scouting, brings Gaussian splats, XGRIDS scans, photogrammetry and related 3D capture methods into a shared environment where filmmakers can explore spaces, frame potential shots, even measure spaces accurately. Script-import tools are also planned. The project is still pre-commercial, with a subscription launch is targeted for autumn 2027.

Graphrs (Germany)

Berlin-based Graphrs wants to become the “operating system for video production,” orchestrating everything from scheduling and staffing to shoots and AI-assisted content creation in a single platform. Co-founder and CEO Thomas Brömme pitched the product as infrastructure for companies producing video repeatedly across multiple markets, currently backed by a network of around 20 camera teams. Brömme cited names including TikTok, UNIQLO and the WHO as examples of its client base.

SuperScout (United Kingdom)

SuperScout, founded by Gabriel Isserlis, turns filmmakers’ accumulated location research into private, searchable, map-based databases. Isserlis gave the example of working alongside a Disney location scout and seeing how painful it was to retrieve alternatives when a booked location suddenly became unavailable and showing how this scout was able to find an alternative location scouted 6 years prior quickly and getting the production day back on track. The platform stores previous scouts, imagery and location data so teams can find options instead of starting again. At Zinemaldia, SuperScout said it was being used across 14 countries, including by the BBC, and that 11 customers had also invested in the company. English Heritage is a confirmed institutional customer.

TheGreenShot (Belgium)

Belgium’s TheGreenShot automates sustainability measurement and carbon reporting for film, television and other entertainment productions. Co-founder Max Hermans described the opportunity as replacing today’s scattered spreadsheets with software able to ingest accounting, supplier, expense and on-set data and turn it into customised reporting at scale. The pitch argued that its advantage over horizontal carbon platforms such as Greenly or Watershed is deep entertainment-industry specificity. Its public customer roster includes HBO, Chanel and Banijay, while Hermans announced Fremantle as a new customer during the Zinemaldia pitch.

THELMA (Finland)

Finnish startup THELMA is building an identity-protection service for actors, influencers and other public figures whose image, voice or likeness may be impersonated or reused without permission online. Founder Aleksi Hyvärinen described a workflow of finding suspected misuse, preserving evidence, helping initiate action and then reporting outcomes back to the customer. The business is already testing a subscription model, with pitch pricing of roughly €350 per month for individuals and €499 for agencies.

Spanish Finalists

Volum (Spain)

Barcelona-based Volum Technologies is commercialising years of i2CAT research into real-time volumetric communication. Its HoloMIT technology captures, compresses, streams and renders people as live 3D representations, allowing remote participants to appear “there” rather than as flat video, as long as you don a headset of course. The company spun out of i2CAT in 2025 following more than €3.7 million of research investment and is now developing an ecosystem spanning an SDK and products such as HoloBooth and HoloTotem. Volum’s broader ambition is to make holographic presence as accessible as videoconferencing, using relatively standard cameras rather than specialised studio-scale capture infrastructure.

Pixentinel (Spain)

Pixentinel is developing an operational-intelligence layer for live streaming that, it was proposed, goes beyond detecting outages to diagnosing their likely cause and automatically triggering responses. Its system analyses video signals in context, attaches evidence and confidence scores to detected problems and can activate webhooks when intervention is required. The pitch is aimed at broadcasters, streaming platforms and telecom operators whose existing monitoring stacks generate fragmented alerts that engineers must manually correlate and react to. Pixentinel’s core proposition is therefore reducing the time between a streaming failure starting and an operations team understanding and deploying a fix for it.

intoreality.tv (Spain)

Barcelona-based Into Reality offers a white-label immersive streaming platform that lets traditional 2D feeds coexist with VR180 and VR360 video. Viewers can switch cameras, audio streams and perspectives across phones, computers, tablets and VR headsets, effectively becoming their own live-event director. The platform can be embedded into a customer’s website or deployed as a standalone audiovisual service, with AVOD, subscription and pay-per-view monetisation models. Into Reality has also licensed i2CAT’s Sync-X technology, expanding its ability to deliver synchronised multicamera and multiscreen experiences for entertainment, culture, sport and live events.

HaMo Real-Time Animation System (Spain)

HaMo Animation is building patented hardware and software for animating digital characters live, combining the responsiveness of traditional puppetry with real-time virtual production. HaMo showed the technology works with 2D, 3D, realistic and stylised characters and has already been used for promotional content around “Tad and the Magic Lamp” enabling the IP to be used live in front of Spanish distributors. The stated ambition is to productise and sell the hardware, with consumer applications potentially following in the future. José Luis Farías demonstrated the system live arguing that speed and production cost distinguish it from AI-generated animation workflows starting to appear.

Dymensium (Spain)

Valencia-based Dymensium is developing a volumetric-capture pipeline built around Gaussian Splatting, particularly 4DGS for moving subjects. Founder Jacinto Nicolás framed the pitch around the rapid evolution from NeRFs to Gaussian techniques and a workflow spanning capture, Gaussian generation, cleaning and integration. Its studio uses 120 synchronised cameras and targets film, VFX, games and immersive media, where directors can reposition the virtual camera after capture. Dymensium also pointed to Gaussian Splatting’s emerging use in major film production namely in James Gunn’s “Superman” as evidence that the underlying technology is moving into commercial workflows.