The Pioneers'18 conference happening this week in Vienna, Austria, is focused on early-stage startups and investing. The startup conference season is now officially opened in Europe with some of the continent's largest entrepreneurship events happening this month of May, like The Next Web (TNW) in Amsterdam, Vivatech in Paris, France, Infoshare in Poland or Latitude 59 and Arctic 15, in Estonia and Finland respectively, for startups in the Nordics region. However, Pioneers'18, formerly the Pioneers Festival which is happening this week in Vienna, Austria, is quite unique with its maniacal focus on early-stage startups and investing and emerging and future technology themes (space, artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, science…). "Over the years, Austria has emerged as an early-stage startup hub," told me ahead of the event Oliver Csendes, the CEO of Pioneers. "And this year, we've handpicked 550 early-stage startups, from all over the world, to attend the event and pitch hundreds of investors, corporations, public sector representatives and media."