Future Caribbean judges and the Founding 1000

Future Caribbean’s Buildathon is only half a sprint story. The other half is governance: who evaluates deployable agentic systems, under what rubric, and with what integrity controls. The organisation publishes that layer as The Founding 1000, a growing network of judges, advisors, builders, and volunteers contributing expertise, networks, and time (futurecaribbean.com/judges).

Pair with Future Caribbean Buildathon and partners stack.

What the Founding 1000 is

The judges page frames global expertise around one mission: turn ambitious ideas into deployable solutions. A public counter on the page (still growing) has listed on the order of three dozen named people across roles, with judges in the teens, advisors in the teens, plus members and volunteers (futurecaribbean.com/judges). Silicon Caribe’s late-July reporting described wider community scale: 800-plus members and 88-plus advisors around application close (siliconcaribe.com). Those are different scopes. The Founding 1000 page is a curated roster; Silicon Caribe measured broader momentum.

The page says the Founding 1000 is unfinished. New judges, advisors, and volunteers will be introduced as the Buildathon progresses (futurecaribbean.com/judges). GlobeNewswire’s July Assembly release likewise said recruitment continued while judging ran on a rolling basis, with nearly 700 builders, founders, investors, advisors, judges, and partners already in orbit (globenewswire.com).

How judging works

Future Caribbean publishes process before personality. Submissions are evaluated against a shared rubric. Final scoring is subject to two-person verification. A 48-hour freeze applies between final scoring and announcement (futurecaribbean.com/judges).

That trio matters more than any single famous name. A shared rubric keeps a ten-track buildathon comparable when one team ships disaster early-warning agents and another ships tourism mobility agents. Two-person verification is an anti-capture control. The freeze window reduces last-minute lobbying after scores lock.

The page breaks mechanics into Evaluation Criteria (execution, relevance, deployment potential), Scoring Rubric (cross-track scorecard), and Integrity and Verification (two-person check plus freeze) (futurecaribbean.com/judges). Exact numeric weights are not fully pasted as a public spreadsheet on the landing summary. The design intent is clear: deployment potential sits beside relevance, matching the About page’s insistence on working infrastructure (futurecaribbean.com/about).

For Caribbean operators, including Trinidad and Tobago teams, this is closer to procurement logic than hackathon applause. If a product cannot deploy into real institutions, payment rails, or island operations, it should lose even if the demo video is pretty.

Judges on the public roster

Titles follow the Future Caribbean judges page (futurecaribbean.com/judges).

Todd Speece, Head of VC Coverage, Citigroup Tech Investment Banking. Capital-markets fluency for a path that includes an NYSE showcase.

Darlington Akogo, Founder and CEO, Mino Health. Health-AI founder seat for Healthcare Systems and Delivery.

Spencer Powers, Head of Special Investments, DRW. Markets and quantitative discipline for finance and payments tracks.

Olumide Durotoluwa, Senior Product Manager, M-KOPA. Emerging-market product DNA aligned with distributed-market claims in Observer coverage (jamaicaobserver.com).

Sukhveer Sanghera, Founder and Chief Architect, Potentially. Architecture pressure when agentic can otherwise mean brittle prompt chains.

Adrian Glace, Chief Technology Officer, Amalgamated Bank. Bank production constraints.

Hazel Bagwell, Vice President, Dynamic Talent International. Talent and workforce lens.

Kellyssia Robinson, Data and AI Architect, Salesforce Middle East. Enterprise deployment realism.

Thokozile James, CEO, EXECUCOMM. Communications and executive networks as company-building infrastructure.

Jarryon Paul, Founder / CO, Sunshine. Operator-founder seat.

Carolina Casas Forga, Co-Founder, Sangha Capital. Venture investability and category definition, themes also stressed by Bill Tai in Barbados Today (barbadostoday.bb).

George Oliver R Thomas, CEO, Sagicor Bank (Barbados). Clearest Caribbean institutional finance seat on the public judge list.

Adrian Dunkley, Founder, StarApple.ai. Caribbean AI founder judging AI founders. Market-fit questions offshore panels miss.

Kyle Sonlin, Co-Founder and President, Global Settlement Network. Settlement infrastructure for Finance, Payments and MSME Capital and Trade.

The homepage teaser had already highlighted Speece, Akogo, Powers, and Durotoluwa before the full roster expanded (futurecaribbean.com). That early foursome told the story in miniature: bank coverage, health AI, trading capital, emerging-market product.

Advisors and the wider bench

Advisors on the same page extend beyond scoring into mentorship and domain counsel (futurecaribbean.com/judges). Named advisors in the public snapshot include Val Alexandre Torres (Latino Executive Exchange), Nikola Simpson-Kellman (Sustainable Caribbean), Roxanne Waithe (Workmates BB), Navin Seeterram (Smart Mountain Inc.), Nigel Guy (CEO and Commercial Director, Iyansan Ventures), Kimberly Lawrence (Environmental Engineer), Roberto Schiano Lomoriello (Disaster Risk Finance and Public Finance Specialist), Anthony McGregor (McG6000 Inc), Sebakunzi Matemane (The Matemane Group), Steven Roy Smith (COLAB CREATIVE CIC), John Ervin (Allnet), Darnel Francois (Optimaize), and Tanya Radosavljevic (UNICEF).

Members listed include Matt Hamilton (Dharach), Albert Mensah and Christopher Bleau (Fortune Favours Productions), Dr. Aviane Auguste (McGill University), Matthew Stotts (Cerulean Ventures), MJ Jain (Unison Capital / Ideation3X), and Jessica Lewis Marshall (UWI Mona Library). Volunteers in the snapshot include Connie Ip (Claris International) and Sherika S R Herbert (Government of Barbados) (futurecaribbean.com/judges).

The mix is deliberate: Caribbean banks and founders, global markets, health and disaster specialists, creative producers, UWI library expertise, and government operations. That is how a coordination thesis gets scored by people who have lived coordination failure.

Why composition and process matter

Future Caribbean’s public thesis is that agentic AI can help fragmented regions operate with less friction (jamaicaobserver.com; futurecaribbean.com). A bench that includes Sagicor Bank Barbados, StarApple.ai, Sangha Capital, Citi tech IB coverage, DRW special investments, Nigel Guy at Iyansan, and disaster-risk finance advisors is evidence the thesis is staffed seriously.

Trinidad and Tobago readers should note two things. Caribbean institutional seats are present even when the Assembly is in Barbados and the showcase is in New York. Tracks that matter to T&T markets (energy-adjacent Electron Economy, tourism and transport, finance and payments, arts, trade) will be scored by people whose day jobs punish vapourware. Powertranz and other deployment partners in the prize stack raise the bar further; see partners stack.

Any multi-track global buildathon faces home-country bias, demo-day charisma over deployment, track incomparability, and last-minute score changes. Shared rubric, two-person verification, and the freeze window aim at those failures (futurecaribbean.com/judges). Rolling review during recruitment, described in GlobeNewswire, adds pressure to stay consistent while the applicant pool grows (globenewswire.com).

About-page timeline language puts submission review, live demos, and final judging around August 16, 2026, with Caribbean and NYSE showcases in fall (futurecaribbean.com/about). The Founding 1000 is therefore the mechanism that turns a 21-day sprint into a ranked set of companies eligible for OWC systems, Powertranz gateway months, DMZ soft landing, and NYSE pitch time.

Field note from Trinidad and Tobago: creative and tech shops here often monitor who sits on regional judging panels because those names preview which pilots and partnerships get taken seriously after the sprint. Ecosystem reading, not a call to apply.

Sources

Primary roster and process: https://futurecaribbean.com/judges. Programme definition: https://futurecaribbean.com/about. Homepage teaser: https://futurecaribbean.com/. Community colour: https://www.siliconcaribe.com/2026/07/24/momentum-future-caribbeans-ai-buildathon-184-applications-32-countries-deadline-is-tonight/. Rolling recruitment: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/07/09/3324841/0/en/Future-Caribbean-s-Global-AI-Movement-Accelerates-with-Inaugural-Agentic-AI-Assembly-Recruitment-Continues-Worldwide.html. Thesis: https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/2026/06/26/future-caribbean-launches-global-agentic-ai-buildathon/.

Cross-links: Buildathon overview · Partners stack.

Snapshot dated August 15, 2026. Names and role counts will move as the Founding 1000 grows; refresh from the judges page before republishing counts.