Xebia's annual data and AI festival, five days at its Amsterdam office on Wibautstraat: sessions and hands-on workshops on modern data platforms, analytics, MLOps and AI, with tech leads and product specialists from the vendors involved. Free this year with no ticket fee; seats are limited and attendees choose which days to attend once the full agenda is published. Session times were not yet published when this listing was written.
A side event to the GIIN Impact Forum, hosted by Aliança pelo Impacto, ApexBrasil and the Brazilian Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (ABVCAP) in partnership with the Embassy of Brazil in the Netherlands. The programme runs welcome remarks from the Embassy, ApexBrasil, Aliança pelo Impacto and ABVCAP at 14:15, a session on Brazil's impact investing landscape at 14:45, a roundtable at 15:15 and networking from 16:30. Aimed at Dutch impact investors meeting a delegation from Brazil's impact economy. Free, places limited, registration subject to host approval.
with Floris Weers (Co-founder, Biscuit) · Ives van Hoorne (Co-founder, Biscuit)
The fifth in UvA Founder Space's FOUNDERS fireside series, with Floris Weers and Ives van Hoorne, co-founders of Biscuit - a platform that connects vibe-coded apps into one evolving system and runs the infrastructure underneath. Weers was previously on Apple's foundation models team; van Hoorne co-founded CodeSandbox before joining Together AI. Run with Young Creators at The Floor, Building J/K on UvA's Roeterseilandcampus. Doors 16:30, fireside chat from 17:00, wrap and drinks at Krater from 18:00. Free, with spots capped to keep the session interactive. Why go: two founders who have shipped developer tooling at Apple and CodeSandbox scale, taking open questions in a small room. Best for technical founders and students building developer or AI products.
A monthly walking meetup in the Vondelpark for founders and entrepreneurs: an hour of walking conversation in small rotating groups instead of a venue and a stage.
A working session rather than a talk: bring a side project, a startup idea or something you started last week, and spend the evening building it alongside other people doing the same. Anyone who wants to can demo what they got done and take feedback from the room. Run by Rick Bossenbroek and Robbin Jansen of European Builders, the calendar that was DAY42, at StartDock on the Singel. Doors 16:00, a round at 17:00 where everyone says what they are working on, food at 18:30, optional demos from 20:30, close at 22:00. Arriving after 17:00 is fine. The hosts settle the food bill between the room on the night, and the page publishes no ticket price, so check before you travel. This edition is full. The only way in is the waitlist, which notifies you if a place opens up. Why go: Amsterdam has plenty of rooms where people talk about what they would build; this is one of the few where they sit down and do it, with a demo hour that makes you finish something. Best for builders with a project already in flight.
An evening at Picnic's Amsterdam headquarters, hosted by Net Impact Amsterdam, on how a data-driven online grocer approaches sustainability: an all-electric last-mile fleet, demand forecasting to cut food waste, and using purchase data to shift customer baskets toward healthier and more sustainable choices. From 18:00 on 27 October at Picnic HQ. Free, with registration on Eventbrite. Why go: one company opening its own numbers and trade-offs beats a panel of consultants on the same topic, and Picnic's model is unusual enough to be worth understanding whether or not you work in retail. Best for climate-tech and retail-tech people, data scientists working on forecasting, and operations leads.
with Christian Melendez (Principal Specialist Solutions Architect, AWS) · William Rizzo (Speaker, Mirantis)
The 13th AI Native Netherlands meetup, hosted at AWS's Amsterdam office, on a single engineering question: what should run where, on what hardware, and how do you keep it reliable in production. Christian Melendez, Principal Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS and author of Kubernetes Autoscaling, makes the case for CPUs and small language models on the structured, high-frequency work - classifying, routing, embedding, reranking - with a live pipeline demo. William Rizzo of Mirantis takes the same question to the far edge: LLM inference on immutable, disconnected clusters in factories, vehicles and retail sites, where connectivity is unreliable and remote access cannot be assumed. 18:00 to 21:00, with food and drinks provided by the host. Free. RSVP on Meetup in advance. Why go: a rare evening about cost and constraint engineering rather than model hype, from two people who run this in production. Best for platform and ML engineers weighing a GPU bill against a smaller model.
Demo night for people building with foundation models: seven-minute live demos of working code, no slide decks, with questions and discussion from the room between them. This edition is themed on A2A - agent-to-agent setups - and leans on practitioners showing what they are running in production. 18:00 to 21:00 at the JetBrains office on Gelrestraat, sponsored this month by Zed. Free, but attendance is screened: the organisers approve registrations and keep the room small to hold the technical level, so apply early. The exact room is confirmed on approval. Why go: Amsterdam has no shortage of AI panels and few rooms where someone shows the thing actually running and gets picked apart on it. Worth the application if you are shipping with agents and want to compare notes with people doing the same.
with David Beckett (Founder, Best3Minutes) · Rosie Turner (Founder, ADHD Untangled) · Stella Romana Airoldi (Founder, 22STARS Foundation)
Three founders tell the story they normally keep off stage: the deal that nearly sank the business, the investment that went wrong, the night they almost quit. Run by Amsterdam Founders Club at Mindspace on Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. Speakers are David Beckett (Best3Minutes, TEDx speech coach), Rosie Turner (ADHD Untangled) and Stella Romana Airoldi (22STARS Foundation). Doors 18:45, stories from 19:00, networking and drinks 20:30, close 21:30. Standard tickets EUR 59 with the first drink included; the EUR 149 VIP dinner upgrade is sold out.
The first conference dedicated to FastAPI, one day and one track at the Transformatorhuis, a former industrial hall in Amsterdam's Westerpark. Sebastian Ramirez, who created FastAPI, gives the opening keynote at 09:30. Also speaking: Jason Liu of OpenAI on building with FastAPI in Codex, Samuel Colvin of Pydantic on constrained optimism, Marcelo Trylesinski on the framework's performance history, Francois Voron of Polar on API versioning without a /v2, Pieter Cailliau of Redis on what agents need beyond an API, and Ben Falk of the Space Telescope Science Institute on data delivery. Mark Smith of JetBrains hosts, an open panel with the FastAPI team closes at 17:30, and there is an after party from 19:00. Check-in from 08:30. Invited speakers only for this first edition. Paid. Why go: the maintainers of FastAPI, Pydantic, Starlette and Uvicorn in one room, which has not happened before. For Python backend and ML-platform engineers.
A small-format two-day engineering-leadership atelier in Amsterdam — workshop-scale rather than conference-scale, aimed at principal engineers and engineering managers. Priced accordingly.
A one-day hackathon on real water problems, run by the University of Amsterdam and AISO at REC Impact on Roeterseilandcampus. Three partners each bring a challenge from their own work, with their own data: Waterschap Amstel, Gooi en Vecht, the water authority for Amsterdam and the area around it; TAI, which has operating data from hundreds of wastewater treatment plants; and VLE Global, an ocean data company working under the UN Ocean Decade. Mentors from the partners sit with the teams all day, and the teams pitch to them at the end. The challenges are published nearer the day. 09:00 to 19:00, free, food provided. Students only - bachelor and master, any university, any discipline. The organisers mix engineers and data scientists with law, design and business students, so you can apply on your own. Applications close Tuesday 20 October. The strongest teams are offered a place on the UvA Impact Challenge and access to the Founder Space community. Why go: the problem and the data come from an operator rather than a tidied-up public dataset, which is rare at student level. Best for Amsterdam students who want a project a water authority actually asked for.
An afternoon for AI and B2B tech founders and commercial leaders at B. Amsterdam, run by Scaler Company and Gradient with the Breaking Barriers programme of the AI Coalition for the Netherlands (AIC4NL). The premise is the quarter you hit target and the quarter you missed with nobody able to say why: results resting on two or three people, playbooks that do not really exist, a CRM nobody uses as intended. 25 to 40 people, seated by experience level - you bring your own problem and work it through live with peers and specialists, alongside a session on getting past a growth ceiling and what it takes to make a team run the system. 13:00 to 18:00, drinks from 16:45. For founders, heads and VPs of sales, growth or marketing at companies of 5 to 150 staff. Why go: small enough that your own situation gets looked at rather than someone else's in a keynote. Best for second-stage B2B teams whose sales still depends on the founder.
with Marcel Bartels (Impact Developer, IXA) · Ross Gordon (Investment Manager, Amsterdam Venture Studios) · Annemieke de Raad (Business Developer, IXA) + 3 more
A three-hour UvA mini workshop on the route from AI research to a company, built around people who have done each step. Marcel Bartels of IXA opens on turning science into impact, Ross Gordon of Amsterdam Venture Studios walks through the AI startup journey, Annemieke de Raad of IXA covers how a university spinout actually works, and Harro Stokman, founder and CEO of Kepler Vision Technologies, closes on what running one is like. Bernd Ensing welcomes and Peter Westerhuijs of TTT-AI introduces the session. It runs 14:00 to 17:00 at SustainaLab in the Matrix ONE building on Amsterdam Science Park, with an interactive session from 16:00 and drinks from 16:30. Free; registration is through the form on the event page. Why go: spinout mechanics - IP, shares, who owns what - are the part lab founders get wrong, and this puts three of the people who negotiate those agreements in one room. Best for researchers and PhDs weighing up commercialising their work.
A go-to-market session at B. Amsterdam run through the Amsterdam AI network, aimed at AI and deeptech teams working out how to take a technically strong product to a first commercial market — positioning, first customers and the awkward middle between pilot and contract.
with Joana Veiga (Global Strategic Design Leader, IKEA Retail) · Chris Allwood (Experience Design Director, Bloom & Wild Group) · Marc Meyer (Partner, In The Pocket)
A panel and Q&A on how large language models are rewriting the shopping journey: search and discovery shifting from SEO towards generative engines, personalisation, brand loyalty, and what that does to online and in-store experience design. Joana Veiga, Global Strategic Design Leader at IKEA Retail, Chris Allwood, Experience Design Director at Bloom & Wild Group, and Marc Meyer, Partner at In The Pocket, take the questions. In The Pocket hosts. Doors 18:00 with drinks and bites, discussion and Q&A from 18:30, networking from 20:00. Free, at Mindspace on Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. Seating is deliberately tighter than usual: an RSVP puts you on the waitlist and the organisers confirm attendees after reading the question you submit. Why go: retail and e-commerce teams rarely get practitioners from IKEA, Bloom & Wild and a product studio in one room arguing about the same shift. Best for product designers, UX researchers and e-commerce leads.
Appsterdam's long-running weekly social at Cafe Bax in Oud-West: developers, designers and makers from across the Amsterdam app and web scene, with no agenda, no tickets and no talks. From 19:00 until late. Find the table and join it. Why go: it has run every week for years, which makes it the one social in the city where you can turn up alone on a Wednesday and reliably find someone to talk to. Best for people new to Amsterdam or between jobs. Not where you go for technical content.
October's WordPress Amsterdam meetup, at the Stayokay hostel on Timorplein in Amsterdam Oost, on AI in development and in back-office work. Hussain Bharmal opens at 19:15 on getting more out of WordPress development with whichever AI tool you already use; Jens De Beule follows after the break on agentic workflows. Walk-in from 19:00, finish at 21:00. Free, and the group runs it monthly. Why go: WordPress still runs a large share of Dutch small-business sites, and this is the room where the people maintaining them compare what AI tooling actually saves them. Best for freelance developers and agency builders rather than platform engineers.
The Wednesday open evening at Technologia Incognita, Amsterdam's hackerspace in the ACTA building on Louwesweg. It runs every week and is explicitly aimed at newcomers: members are around, projects are out on the benches, and you can see what the space holds - electronics, hardware, software, the machines - before deciding whether to join. 19:00 to 22:00, free, nothing needed beyond the Meetup RSVP. Why go: the lowest-friction way into Amsterdam's hardware and maker scene, and the one evening a week when someone will walk you round and explain it. Best if you have a project that needs tools or people rather than a talk to listen to.
Two days at the Vrije Universiteit on AI in education, where the research meets the classroom: assessment integrity, tutoring systems, what the evidence actually supports and what it does not. Run by VU researchers, it draws teachers, university staff, policy people and the companies selling into them. Starts 09:00 on 29 October at De Boelelaan 1105. Why go: relevant to edtech founders and product people as much as to educators - this is the room where the buyers explain their constraints in public, before you build against them. Worth the two days if education is your market; a single morning will do if you are only curious.
with Feifei Li (CTO and President, International Business, Alibaba Cloud) · Xudong Guo (Research Scientist, Qwen, Alibaba Token Hub) · Zhao Xu (Head of AI Application and Products, MaaS, Alibaba Token Hub) + 3 more
Alibaba Cloud brings its Apsara Conference to the Beurs van Berlage for a day on the Qwen model family and agent-native cloud infrastructure. Welcome remarks at 09:30; Feifei Li, CTO of Alibaba Cloud and president of its international business, opens the keynote at 09:40. Xudong Guo of the Qwen research team covers real-world agents, Zhao Xu the Qwen AI platform, William Yao the Qoder coding agent, and Joaquin Cuenca Abela, CEO of Magnific, the multimodal work his company does with Alibaba. Two parallel forums follow - Foundation Model and Applications, and Agentic Cloud - alongside an exhibition where you can try the coding and e-commerce agents. Free to register. Why go: the Qwen team answering questions in person is rare in Europe, and the agenda is engineering rather than sales. For AI engineers, platform teams and anyone evaluating open-weight models in production.
A one-day conference for founders and leaders of small and mid-sized businesses, built around four themes: resource management, sales and marketing, finance and profitability, and innovation. Main-stage sessions, hands-on workshops and masterclasses, 30-minute expert Q&A slots, curated introductions and closing drinks. Runs 13:30 to 20:00 at the Kauwgomballenfabriek in Amsterdam Oost. The organisers describe the room as founders, C-level and leadership from teams of roughly 1 to 20, plus consultants and service providers. Tickets run from EUR 95.58 to EUR 202.54.
A structured co-founder matchmaking afternoon at the Kohnstammhuis on Wibautstraat, run jointly by AMS Institute, Venture Centre HvA, Demonstrator Lab and Startup Village Amsterdam. Participants are profiled in advance, then put through one-to-one introductions followed by open networking. Built for founders looking for a complementary co-founder, and for experienced people willing to commit at least sixteen hours a week to an early-stage team. 16:00 to 19:00, free, registration via Eventbrite. Why go: the sixteen-hour commitment in the sign-up filters out the browsers, and the pre-profiling means the introductions are deliberate rather than a room of strangers with drinks. Go if you are ready to start something; skip it if you only want to look.
A session from the Kin Center for Digital Innovation at the OZW building on De Boelelaan, on femtech data: what period-tracking apps infer from what you enter, where their models are wrong, and who ends up holding the data. 16:30 to 18:30, free and in person - note that registration runs through a separate Luma page linked from the Meetup listing. Why go: health apps are one of the few consumer categories where a bad inference has real consequences, and this is a research group taking the category apart rather than a vendor defending it. Best for builders and researchers shipping health features, and for anyone handling cycle or fertility data.
A hands-on masterclass on Nieuwe Herengracht where attendees build and ship a working AI application live during the session, using the Biscuit tooling. Aimed at people who can follow along technically but have not yet put an AI app in front of real users. Starts 17:30, registration via Eventbrite. Why go: the gap between a notebook demo and something with a URL is where most first AI projects die, and this session closes it in one evening with someone in the room to unstick you. Best for product people, analysts and junior developers. Too basic if you already ship AI in production.
An application-only evening for private-equity investors and operators hosted by Dutchess Capital with LEVEL20, focused on dealmaking and on women's representation in PE.
Startup Valley's Amsterdam networking and pitch evening at I Dock: open-floor networking with a short founder pitch segment. Cross-listed under several different titles on Eventbrite and Meetup; catalogued once here.
A free one-hour evening session from AI Natives, run by Gleb Starchikov and Evgeny Kalinin, on getting measurable value from AI tools a team already has. They go through the evidence on individual versus team adoption, show live how they run their own business on a team of AI agents including the mistakes those agents make, and demo use cases in Copilot, ChatGPT and Claude, then stay for questions. 18:00 to 19:00, twenty seats. The exact Amsterdam address is sent to approved guests.
with Daphne Laan (Speaker, Data Tribes)
October's Data Thursday, organised by Data Tribes at B. Amsterdam B3 on Johan Huizingalaan, with a Climate Week theme: moving from planetary thinking to planetary action. Doors 18:00, pizza and drinks 18:30, presentations from 19:00. Daphne Laan speaks at 19:15 on turning planetary thinking into action, followed by an hour of discussion and collective idea-building, then networking until the 21:30 finish. Free. Why go: a data-engineering community meetup that has picked a subject with stakes rather than another tooling talk, and the format leaves real time for discussion instead of a token Q&A. Best for data engineers and analysts, and for anyone working on climate or sustainability data.
A paid drinks-and-pitch networking evening at Hotel Fifty Five aimed at founders, operators and investors in the Amsterdam startup scene.
The fifth Amsterdam edition of the Claude Community meetup, a developer evening that has run roughly monthly since December 2025 for people building with Claude and Claude Code. The format is talks plus a long stretch of conversation about what works, what breaks and what is simply odd about coding with an AI agent. Organised by local Claude Community Ambassador Vincent Bruijn and hosted this edition at ML6, an Anthropic technology partner, in Amsterdam. Doors 19:00, talk 19:30, drinks from 21:30. The speaker lineup was still being finalised at the time of writing. Supported by Anthropic. Free and English-language, in person only with no stream. Registration is approval-based, the event is already full so the waitlist is the way in, and the exact address goes to approved guests. Why go: the one recurring Amsterdam room where people shipping agent-written code compare notes instead of reading launch posts. Best for developers and technical founders already using Claude Code in anger.
Tech Makers' monthly open evening for the Dutch tech and startup community: drinks, short startup pitches from the floor, and the kind of conversation where people compare what actually went wrong. Founders apply in advance through the organisers' form for a pitch slot. At TAG on Jacob Bontiusplaats, 18:00 to 21:00, free to attend. Tech Makers runs one of the larger founder communities in the Netherlands and also operates a co-founder matching platform, so the room skews early-stage, with the investors who look at that stage. Photos and video are taken for community and promotional use. Why go: the pitching is what lifts this above drinks. You leave knowing what three or four new Amsterdam companies are building and who is behind them. Best for early-stage founders, people hunting a co-founder, and angels.
Appsterdam's weekly Saturday morning co-working session, this week at The Coffee Room on Ferdinand Bolstraat. Bring a laptop and whatever you are working on; there is no programme, no speaker and no ticket. From 09:30. It has run for years and is open to anyone who writes code. Why go: a standing Saturday slot where you can get three focused hours done with company, and ask the person next to you when you get stuck. Best for freelancers and side-project builders who find working alone at home unproductive.
A pop-up co-making day at the 001 Commandantswoning on Marineterrein, hosted through Appsterdam: an open, low-barrier space where people from any discipline work alongside each other. Bring your own project, whatever it is - code, hardware, textiles, writing. 10:00 to 18:00 on Sunday 1 November, free. Why go: a full Sunday of quiet working space on the Marineterrein, with a deliberately mixed room rather than a developers-only one. Best if you want to finish something while surrounded by people doing the same, and would rather not sit through a programme.
The monthly computer-controlled-making session at Technologia Incognita's hackerspace in the ACTA building: laser cutter, 3D printers and CNC router all running. This edition opens with a basic FreeCAD tutorial, then goes into open machine time with members on hand to troubleshoot your model. 13:00 to 20:00 on Sunday 1 November, free, newcomers welcome. Why go: practical maker time on machines most people cannot justify owning, with someone there who has already made your mistake. Best if you have a part you want cut or printed and have never touched the software.