Renaissance Summit

The Renaissance Summit is an invitation-only gathering held at Rittergut Remeringhausen, a country estate near Hannover, with a smaller winter delegation staged in Davos during the WEF Annual Meeting. It is organised by Paloneo, a community established in 2021 by students from Cambridge, Oxford and St. Gallen and now run through a London company by founder Ludolf von Schöning. The summit ran as the Paloneo Summit until 2025, when the fourth edition took the current name, and it now bills itself as Europe's systems change platform, framed around the challenges of the Draghi report.

Who attends

The organiser's own description: Europe's leading business families, venture capitalists, frontier innovators and culture shapers. Third-party coverage of recent editions describes a curated room of rising leaders, mostly under forty, and the scale is deliberately small: about fifty participants in 2025, around ninety planned for the flagship and thirty for the Davos delegation.

Named contributors range from Magnus Grimeland of Antler and Nicolas Brusson of BlaBlaCar to Rennie Hoare of Hoare Bank and the musician Aloe Blacc, which tells you the mix: capital, technology and culture in one room.

For this directory the relevant strand is the family one. Next-gen family business leaders are a stated audience, and there is a Family Business Leadership circle run with Horizons, a next-gen family office community. But this is not a family office industry event, and nothing on the agenda touches office operations.

How access works

Participation is by invitation; outsiders can request to join, and every pass type requires approval, including a family pass for two and a scholarship pass for artists. No prices are published anywhere. Accommodation is billed separately after acceptance, with options running from a hotel room down to a field bed on the estate.

One disclosure: behind the summit sits Paloneo's wider model of community, venture building and a member-led capital formation platform, and the organising company lists venture capital among its registered activities. The convening body has an investment arm, which is worth knowing in the same way as the fund-affiliated networks elsewhere in this directory.

What attendees get

Not a keynote conference. The core format is impact circles, small peer groups on themes like sovereign AI, the energy transition, defence and capital markets, wrapped in dinners, live music and the estate setting; the Davos edition adds mainstage panels. With fewer than a hundred people, the draw is the room rather than the agenda.

The honest caveat is youth, of the event as much as the audience: the format and branding are still settling. For a next-generation family member who wants a European peer scene across capital, technology and culture, it is a distinctive room. For anything operational, look at the associations and peer networks here instead.