While funding rounds come later, the conversation that leads to it usually happens somewhere louder at a beer tent in Munich, a corridor in Lisbon, a coffee queue in Helsinki at 7 am. Europe’s best tech conferences are not just networking events. For a lot of founders, they are where fundraising actually begins.
The second half of 2026 runs from Copenhagen in August to Helsinki in November, with Amsterdam hosting four events over six weeks. Tech Funding News has covered most of these on the ground before. What follows is the full calendar with that context attached, not just what each event is, but what has come out of it.
TechBBQ
Dates: 26 – 27 August
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Tickets: €139 to €849 (including VAT)
TechBBQ started in 2013 as a park gathering of a few hundred entrepreneurs around a literal barbecue grill and has grown into Scandinavia’s largest startup summit, drawing more than 7,500 attendees in recent editions. The 2026 agenda leans into deep tech and climate innovation.
That focus tracks with what TFN has been seeing out of Copenhagen’s funding scene: Interhuman AI’s €2 million pre-seed for AI emotional intelligence, NobodyWho’s €2 million round for on-device AI models, and Climentum Capital’s €60 million climate hardtech fund II were all raised within a few kilometres of where TechBBQ’s tents go up.
IBC 2026
Dates: 11 – 14 September
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Tickets: Free visitor pass available; premium passes from €145 to €1,599.
IBC, the International Broadcasting Convention, opens Amsterdam’s four-event run in September and is the odd one out on this list: a broadcasting and media technology show rather than a startup-investor showcase.
Even so, its 2026 programme leans heavily on AI-generated content, cloud broadcasting, and virtual production, the same infrastructure questions that come up repeatedly in TFN’s coverage of European AI infrastructure funding.
It draws more than 40,000 visitors and over 1,300 exhibitors annually, according to organiser figures, making it one of the largest gatherings on this list by attendance.
HumanX
Dates: 22 – 24 September
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Tickets: €999 to €4,999 (excluding VAT)
HumanX is the newest name on this list, built by the team behind Money20/20, Shoptalk, and HLTH and making its European debut in September 2026 after two US editions in Las Vegas.
Its pricing, by far the steepest on this calendar, signals its intent: this is an event for chief financial officers, chief operating officers, and enterprise buyers, rather than pre-seed founders, with executive roundtables focused on AI governance, regulation, and deployment, rather than pitch competitions.
Where the HumanX pitch differs is precisely this corporate skew, and it is worth watching whether Amsterdam’s enterprise crowd embraces a US import the way Lisbon embraced Web Summit a decade ago.
Bits & Pretzels
Dates: 28 – 30 September
Location: Munich, Germany
Tickets: €499 to €1,999 (excluding VAT)
Bits & Pretzels pairs two days of structured investor matchmaking with a third day of networking inside an actual Oktoberfest tent, a format that has drawn speakers from Barack Obama to Michelle Obama over the years.
TFN’s ground report from Bits & Pretzels 2025 covered the Samwer brothers’ legacy in German tech, a $35 billion national push into space and defence technology, and the persistent funding gap facing female founders, only 4% of whom secure venture capital in Germany.
The event’s organisers, including co-founder Andy Bruckschloegl, have also appeared in TFN’s coverage of Slush’D Heilbronn. Germany’s startup scene, at least the part that talks to TFN, turns out to be a fairly small room. Updates from the organisers are posted on the event’s official LinkedIn page.
Wave by Vento
Dates: 7 – 9 October
Location: Turin, Italy
Tickets: €173 to €675 (exclusive VAT), for a limited time period.
Wave by Vento is the rebranded successor to Italian Tech Week, still organised by Vento, the early-stage venture firm chaired by Exor’s John Elkann, and still drawing names like Jony Ive and Dario Amodei to Turin.
TFN broke the news that Jeff Bezos would headline the 2025 edition, reporting that Italy’s tech enterprise value had doubled to over $82 billion in four years. That growth is directly tied to Vento itself, which TFN covered when it closed a €75 million second fund built specifically to back Italian founders wherever they are based.
World Summit AI
Dates: 7 – 8 October
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Tickets: €699 to €1,399. Discounted passes are available for startups, academics, charities, associations, and group bookings
World Summit AI marks its 10th anniversary in Amsterdam in 2026, the second of four events converging on the city that autumn. It draws upwards of 10,000 attendees across 10 tracks, splitting the programme between frontier AI research and the more commercially minded questions of enterprise adoption, ethics, and regulation.
Slot it in next to HumanX two weeks earlier and TechEx Europe two weeks later, and Amsterdam’s autumn starts to look less like four unrelated conferences and more like one long argument about how AI research turns into something enterprises will actually pay for.
TechEx Europe
Dates: 19 – 20 October
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Tickets: €899 to 1,399 (excluding VAT)
TechEx Europe closes Amsterdam’s autumn run by folding eight co-located events, spanning AI and big data, cybersecurity, IoT, data centres, intelligent automation, and physical AI, into a single ticket for around 8,000 attendees. It is the least founder-focused event on this list and the most infrastructure-focused, drawing CTOs and IT directors rather than pitch-stage startups, making it a useful bookend to a season that began with HumanX’s C-suite AI governance conversations.
The Business Booster (TBB) by InnoEnergy
Dates: 28 – 29 October
Location: Munich, Germany
Tickets: €745 to €845
The Business Booster, known as TBB, is EIT InnoEnergy’s flagship clean-tech event, rotating annually between European cities and landing in Munich in 2026 after previous editions in Barcelona. It showcases well over 100 sustainable energy technologies under one roof and is narrower than the software-heavy events elsewhere on this list, focused on the energy transition rather than AI or fintech.
TFN has covered the event on the ground for several years running: its report from TBB 2025 in Lisbon tracked InnoEnergy’s new 2030 Vision to mobilise €160 billion in investment and cut 2.3 gigatons of CO2, while a 2024 dispatch from Barcelona asked whether Europe’s cleantech sector was heading for a bubble.
TFN has also broken funding news live from the show floor, including CorPower Ocean’s €32 million wave energy round, Meva Energy’s €40 million from the European Investment Bank, and Skeleton Technologies’ €220 million supercapacitor factory, all of which were first met at past editions of TBB.
Web Summit
Dates: 9 – 12 November
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Tickets: €775 to €1,959 (including taxes)
Web Summit remains the one event on this list that tries to be everything at once, spanning AI, fintech, venture capital, and consumer technology across dozens of stages for more than 70,000 attendees.
TFN was tracking the event’s AI presence as far back as 2024, when its Web Summit Lisbon 2024 highlights coverage found AI-related exhibitors up 16% year on year and AI startups at the event collectively raising $72.6 million.
AI Summit Turku
Dates: 16 November
Location: Turku, Finland
Tickets: Yet to be announced.
AI Summit Turku is the smallest event on this list by design, a one-day, single-track gathering that bridges Finnish academic AI research with practical industrial and public-sector applications.
It has increasingly become an unofficial warm-up to Slush week two days later, a pattern TFN noted directly in its reporting on Finland’s 15 unicorns and $1.5 billion VC surge, which found the country’s AI and quantum computing momentum on full display at both the Turku summit and Slush itself.
Slush
Dates: 18 – 19 November
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Tickets: €395 to €1,195 (including taxes)
Slush closes the calendar as it always does, and it is also the most thoroughly covered event on this list in TFN‘s own archive. The 2025 edition brought together more than 3,500 investors representing $4 trillion in combined assets, a figure detailed inTFN’s exclusive on Slush 2025 becoming Europe’s best founder school.
A separate TFN report on the Slush Founder Factory data found that 15% of Slush alumni go on to found their own companies, more than twice the entrepreneurship rate among Finnish 18- to 24-year-olds. TFN has also covered the event’s 2024 and 2023 editions on the ground, and its wider footprint through spin-off events like Slush’D Heilbronn and the launch of Founders House Helsinki, an equity-free workspace backed by Slush and Lifeline Ventures.
