2026 Agenda

Once you've reached Series A, the game changes. Investors expect proven product-market fit, you need real customer traction, and your team needs to consist of operators who can scale. What does it rea …

The lack of local, late-stage growth funding has plagued European tech for years. But with the EU’s €5bn Scaleup Europe Fund starting to deploy this year, along with a host of other growth funds being …

The talent market is bifurcating. Many proven leaders operate traditional playbooks while high-potential innovators often lack scaling experience. Those elite talents possessing both qualities are rar …

As interactions with AI at work move from conversing with a chatbot to building and managing teams of agents carrying out tasks on a worker’s behalf, what it means to be human in the workplace is chan …

Due diligence can uncover problems founders didn’t know they had, but not every red flag is going to derail a deal. This practical roundtable with LegalEdge (fractional GCs) and Fyn (fractional CFOs) …

Raising your Series A requires good timing, storytelling nous, and knowing what investors are really looking for. In this session, three investors pull back the curtain on what actually moves a Series …

After years of buzz around text- and image-based large-language models (LLMs), world models are promising to take the technology to the next frontier with systems capable of understanding the laws of …

Startups are a legitimate asset class but with its own risk profile, dynamics, and strategies. This hands on workshop breaks down how to approach early-stage investing intentionally, whether you're ju …

What are our most compelling assets that give us a global competitive edge? What can UK Gov do to unlock that opportunity set? What it is in our power as a Deeptech community that will help unlock thi …

Several aspects of Europe’s financial world are dominated by US players, from digital wallets to card payments. But with a continental push for sovereignty in motion, will European fintechs finally ha …

Energy, robotics, health, biotech and more: Europe has the science, the talent and the industrial depth to lead, but the next five to ten years will decide where it can actually win and where it risks …

As financial institutions grow, transaction volumes, products and markets can outpace the controls built to manage them. This roundtable will examine what needs to change and what must remain.  

We hear the stats around funding to underrepresented founders but are which efforts to make changes are working. What do we need more or less of? Led by Amardeep Parmar, cofounder of Bae HQ, UK’s star …

Climate tech was all the rage, until it wasn’t. Trump’s return to power, alongside the failure of leading climate tech businesses, dampened investor appetite in the category. But one sector within it …

Expansion can be a great way to grow — or a fast way to burn cash and lose focus. The tricky part is knowing when you’re really ready to enter a new market. What should the first 90 day look like? How …

This session unpacks the key decisions, timelines, and stakeholder dynamics that shape M&A and IPO outcomes.

A combination of better AI models, cheap hardware and a race to collect reams of data has led to an investment boom in European robotics, as VCs take a bet that the scaling laws which have underpinned …

European quantum has had a bumper year featuring two of the leading startups in the space, Finland’s IQM Quantum Computers and Paris-based Pasqal, hitting the public markets. Is quantum entering a new …

The right time to patent your IP, building a portfolio that supports scaling and fundraising, what AI can do and avoiding common mistakes as companies grow. - Most founders do patent as an afterthough …

As European governments pour more money into defence, AI, energy and other strategic technologies, public-sector contracts are becoming an increasingly important prize for the continent’s startups. Bu …

As startups and small businesses struggle with balancing digital tools and systems, embedded services are increasingly becoming a solution. These systems integrate financial tools, vertical SaaS, and …

Over the past year, we’ve seen more fintech businesses move into investing, while government policy continues to encourage greater retail participation in capital markets. So what’s behind the shift? …

Scaling founders and operators know they need to change how they operate but aren’t clear what good looks like. This roundtable will discuss tactical frameworks you can apply immediately.

With AI making it faster and cheaper than ever to spin up tools in-house, companies are thinking twice before making acquisitions. This panel will ask whether businesses should still consider buying a …

The UK's academic expertise is spread up and down the country, but the value driven by its university spinout base is still largely concentrated in the Golden Triangle. This panel will get into what's …

The hardware path is brutal. In this candid, off-the-record conversation, we get into the financing, manufacturing, and go-to-market realities that make it so much harder than software, with one of th …

It’s an established fact that much of Europe’s digital infrastructure and tech relies on companies headquartered outside of the bloc. With an increasingly fraught geopolitical landscape, the need for …

Most founders know how to spend the capital they raise. Fewer know how to protect it. This roundtable brings together startup CFOs who've navigated real cash pressure for a candid exchange on what dis …

You're a founder, your company is growing - and then comes the question every scale-up eventually hits: how do you bring on the right people without slowing down or stepping into a legal grey zone? In this live session, you decide. Where you invest, who you hire, how you make it happen - and you see exactly where each choice leads.

The way people consume tech news is changing fast. Traditional publications are battling declining traffic, squeezed business models and the rise of AI search, while founders and investors increasingl …

Growth without thinking about its impact can’t be the only playbook. What are companies doing to ensure they’re thinking about more than the bottom line? In this panel we will get into what companies …

What got you here will not get you there. This interactive workshop looks at the realities of raising a later-stage round, from what investors now expect to whether your business is actually ready for …

Marketing budget is shifting from paid media to creators faster than anyone is measuring it, and the people spending it can't agree on what they're buying. Is this a durable channel with its own econo …

He’s perhaps Europe’s most famous VC. Harry Stebbings, podcaster and founder of investment firm 20VC, joins associate editor Freya Pratty to discuss everything from the future of tech media to Stebbin …

This practical workshop breaks down how founders can build productive relationships with journalists, understand what makes a story worth covering and craft pitches that actually land. We’ll explore h …

With deep-pocketed US labs having increased their presence in Europe over the past year, startups are under pressure to find new ways of securing and retaining their best people. This panel will touch …

AI answer engines are changing how startups get discovered. Increasingly, buyers are using AI to research vendors, compare options, and build shortlists before they ever visit a website. The startups that show up in those answers will have a significant advantage. Martina Simon from HubSpot's Revenue Marketing team breaks down what AEO is, how founders can increase visibility in AI-generated answers, and what happens when that visibility turns into demand. Learn how AI-sourced buyers behave, what makes them convert, and how to build a revenue motion that turns AI citations into pipeline and revenue.

As geopolitical tensions continue to escalate, Europe finds itself far behind in its ability to access space without the help of foreign companies. A new set of European space hopefuls ranging from ro …

How are defence techs managing supply chain risks? What does the landscape looks like now for investors? What is it like building a sustainable business with defence revenue?

As companies stay private for longer, employees are increasingly holding equity that can't be realised. Employee secondary transactions through the London Stock Exchange's (LSEs) Private Securities Ma …

Secondaries have gone from something founders did quietly to one of Europe’s hottest markets. But is the hype a sign of real maturity or a workaround for an IPO and M&A market that still isn’t opening …

Europe's AI ambitions span quantum-inspired computing to sovereign compute and enterprise-grade AI systems. This panel brings together founders building different pieces of that stack to discuss what …

The hardest companies to understand are the easiest to undervalue. In this closed workshop, scale-up CEOs hear their company described back by sharp peers who've never heard the pitch. They find exactly where its significance is getting lost, before it costs them.

This roundtable looks at what breaks when code arrives faster than teams can review it, and what’s actually working for the teams pulling ahead. Across 20 million CI workflows, feature-branch activity …

The promise of living a healthier life is convincing a growing number of consumers, who are increasingly turning to tools ranging from longevity clinics and body scans to AI-powered preventative medic …

When every company uses the same AI models, does human thinking become the advantage? AI is not just changing jobs, it is redefining who becomes valuable. The most valuable people will not simply know …

Europe is betting big on physical AI. From robotics and autonomous systems to AI-powered machines, the sector is attracting growing interest from investors and enterprise customers. Where the money is …