What's happening: Week of 28 September 2026
One of Europe's largest conferences for Black tech professionals returns to Berlin for a full day at Berlin Global Village: career and leadership tracks, technical sessions, hiring partners in the…
The payments edition of bitcoin++, the developer-focused conference series on Bitcoin and Lightning engineering, running three days in Berlin. Deeply technical rather than market-facing — protocol work, payment rails and the open-source tooling around them. For engineers working in crypto payments infrastructure.
with Keiron Shepherd (Speaker, F5) · Michael Felderer (Professor, DLR) · Elena Hoemann (Speaker, DLR) + 3 more
A curated half-day on the two-way relationship between AI and security: AI-driven defence on one side, the new attack surfaces AI itself opens on the other, plus security-by-design, skills development and the practical obstacles to implementation. Speakers come from F5, DLR, Deloitte, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, the CySec Institute and Universität Paderborn — a usefully mixed room of vendor, research and large-enterprise perspectives. Programme 13:00 to 17:20, then networking and dinner. Free, guest list curated.
Venture Cafe Berlin's weekly Thursday Gathering at CIC Berlin: a programme of talks and sessions, demo tables where founders show what they are building, and several hours of open networking across founders, investors, corporates and researchers. Free and open to all, no membership needed.
A pitch evening for South Asian founders and co-founders at early stage, with angels, early-stage investors and startup mentors invited to come and back them. Three startups pitch for seven minutes each with two minutes of questions. Check-in from 17:30 over chai and samosa, welcome at 18:15, pitches from 18:30. Separate ticket types for founders and supporters; free, currently waitlisted.
with Fabián Esqueda (Research Engineer, KORG) · Tim Bencker (Co-creator of Scyclone, Oudio.io)
Audio-software engineering at Ableton's Berlin office. Fabián Esqueda of KORG surveys three decades of virtual-analog circuit modelling research — white-box, black-box and the space between — and Tim Bencker draws cross-domain lessons for audio software from game and web development. Strictly RSVP-only with no entry after 18:30. Free.
One of Europe's largest conferences for Black tech professionals returns to Berlin for a full day at Berlin Global Village: career and leadership tracks, technical sessions, hiring partners in the room and an evening programme. Strong, well-established community event with a genuine recruiting function attached — worth the day whether you are hiring or being hired.
Christoph Jentzsch (beel)
The finale of the second Foundacious season returns to Berlin for an evening built entirely around fundraising, with three speakers including Christoph Jentzsch (CEO, beel) and exclusive networking with business…
A two-day Berlin conference on the longevity economy, on the premise that by 2050 one in three Europeans will be over 60 and health, care, housing, finance and work are…
Three days of Android engineering at Berlin Dev Week, the long-running droidcon conference covering Kotlin, tooling, architecture and the platform's direction, with an international speaker line-up. Co-located with FlutterCon Europe,…
with Christoph Jentzsch (CEO, beel)
The finale of the second Foundacious season returns to Berlin for an evening built entirely around fundraising, with three speakers including Christoph Jentzsch (CEO, beel) and exclusive networking with business angels and VCs from across the region. Supported by WeWork, CMS, BAND and the BACB. Held in English; five euros on the door.
A two-day Berlin conference on the longevity economy, on the premise that by 2050 one in three Europeans will be over 60 and health, care, housing, finance and work are all being forced to rebuild around that. Brings together startups, investors, corporates and care operators treating demographic change as a market rather than a problem to manage. Paid conference with tiered tickets.
Silicon Allee's first-Tuesday morning meetup at St. Oberholz in Kreuzberg — coffee, community and open conversation with Berlin's longest-running tech network. No agenda and no pitching: come with whatever you are building or thinking about. A reliable fixture and an easy entry point into the Berlin scene.
A breakfast panel making an argument worth hearing if you build hardware or deep tech: that German grants and non-dilutive funding are badly under-used while founders default to raising VC as early as they can. Pre-seed investors and non-dilutive funding specialists unpack the trade-off against long R&D cycles, capital-intensive prototyping and technology risk that simply does not fit a SaaS funding timeline. Five euros for non-members including a day pass, free for NLND members.
A matchmaking format that puts established industrial companies and startups in the same room, this edition on intelligent production. Themed tables cover the industrial value chain from sales and procurement through smart manufacturing to automation, with startups presenting solutions in supply-chain transparency, logistics and cybersecurity. Run by Berlin Partner with the Werner-von-Siemens Centre, the Berlin Chamber of Commerce and regional business associations under Berlin's startup agenda. Hosted at GE Energy Power Conversion in Marienfelde; free to attend.
with Yuriy Varshavskyy (Speaker — Agentic Workflows with GitHub Copilot, Global AI Berlin) · Luise Freese (Speaker — Beyond Proof-of-Concept Prison, Global AI Berlin)
Berlin's edition of the community-led GitHub Copilot Dev Days running worldwide through October. Two talks: Yuriy Varshavskyy on agentic developer workflows with Copilot, and Luise Freese on getting AI projects out of what she calls proof-of-concept prison and into something that actually ships. Networking from 18:00, hosted at adesso in Kreuzberg and sponsored by Microsoft and Neo4j. Free.
An evening of career stories, connection and belonging hosted by the Black community at GetYourGuide. Instead of a panel it runs as a human library: real people available for short conversations in small groups or one to one, on topics like changing careers at 31, failing a promotion, or navigating a visa application. Rotate, meet someone new, repeat.
The seventeenth edition of Berlin's Agile Round Table, hosted at DB Systel. This time the theme is AI and agility — where the future of SAFe and agile practice sits alongside AI. A free community evening with an audience of agile coaches, product and engineering people.
with Anatolii Timoshuk (Senior Observability Architect, Grafana Labs) · Tom Braack (Senior Software Engineer, Grafana Labs)
An observability evening at NLND in Neukölln, sponsored by Grafana Labs. Anatolii Timoshuk covers the parts of the Grafana ecosystem most teams never touch — the capabilities beyond dashboarding — and Tom Braack talks about running coding agents safely once they have real access to your systems: where to draw the boundaries and how much to trust them. Free, capacity 70.
with A Seshaditya (Speaker, Large Language Models and Physics-AI for Scientific Simulations) · Evgenii Demidov (Speaker, Better Knowledge Graphs Through Agent Steering) · Aakriti Jain (Speaker, Better Knowledge Graphs Through Agent Steering)
The monthly gathering of Berlin's AI community, hosted at Enpal in Friedrichshain with support from GitNation. Two talks this month: one on large language models and physics-AI for scientific simulation, and one on making knowledge graphs more reliable through agent steering. Open demo time follows, then networking. Free, and it regularly draws well over a hundred registrations.
A SaaS Week Berlin side event on what an AI-native company actually looks like in 2026 — not a tech company that uses AI, but one rethinking headcount, hierarchy and hiring around what the tools can now do. Hosted at Doctolib for women working in SaaS across product, engineering, go-to-market and operations.
The thirty-sixth edition of this morning networking breakfast, bringing the French and Berlin tech communities into the same room — founders, investors and innovation people from both countries. Short introductions to what French Tech Berlin and ai.berlin are currently working on, then open networking aimed squarely at Franco-German tech collaboration. Free, co-hosted with Berlin Partner; the venue is shared with you once your registration is confirmed.
Three days of Android engineering at Berlin Dev Week, the long-running droidcon conference covering Kotlin, tooling, architecture and the platform's direction, with an international speaker line-up. Co-located with FlutterCon Europe, reactCon, swiftcon and xr&gamesCon, so one ticket week puts most of Berlin's mobile and front-end community in the same building.
An unconference with no panels, no moderators and no sales pitches — 15 to 20 talks and workshops across parallel tracks on AI agents, creative tools, ethics and leadership, run on Law of Two Feet principles so you walk out of anything that is not working for you. Speakers are self-nominated from the floor. Aimed at creative, business and technology professionals; follow-up one-day intensives run on 8 October. 89 euros, 29 for students.
with Malte Kosub (Co-Founder & CEO, Parloa) · Marco Casalaina (VP Products, Microsoft) · Laura Modiano (Founder Experience, OpenAI) + 1 more
Two days on agentic AI and customer experience, run by Berlin-based Parloa at Wilhelm Studios in Pankow and built around taking enterprise AI from promise to actual performance. The line-up is unusually senior for a vendor conference: Parloa's own co-founder and CEO alongside Microsoft's VP of Products, OpenAI's founder experience lead and Booking.com's product manager for customer-service AI, with thirty-plus enterprise speakers across industries. Billed at 700-plus enterprise leaders from across Europe.
The Berlin chapter meetup of Women in Process Mining, hosted with Stromnetz Berlin at the InfraLab on the EUREF Campus — so the setting is a utility actually running process mining rather than a vendor demo room. An evening of networking, discussion and practitioner insight for women in the field and allies. Free.
with Mofazzal Hossain (QA Lead, Cybus)
A QA and testing talk on what happens to quality engineering when development accelerates past it: shifting QA out of gatekeeping into an advisory function, and using agentic AI to encode testing expertise as version-controlled, repo-based skills that run through CI. Mofazzal Hossain, QA lead at Cybus. Free; the listing gives a room number rather than a venue name.
with Tetiana Senna (Speaker — Trust, but Verify: Observability and Evaluations for AWS Agents, AWS User Group Berlin) · Milad Rezaeighale (Speaker — Engineering AI Agents for Production, AWS User Group Berlin)
The monthly AWS community session, this month entirely about getting AI agents into production. Tetiana Senna covers observability and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation for agents on AWS; Milad Rezaeighale works through the engineering side — Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Strands Agents, and the auth, context-engineering and memory patterns that decide whether an agent survives contact with real traffic. Free, at NLND in Neukölln; seats are limited and there is no waitlist.
with Alan Poensgen (Partner, Antler) · Isabel Eberhardt (Host, Antler)
A vetted co-founder matching evening from Antler and b2venture, for founders and teams looking for a co-founder and for senior commercial and technical operators getting ready to start something. Attendees also meet Antler Berlin's current founders-in-residence, which is the part that makes it more than a mixer. Sectors span software and AI, fintech, health, climate and energy, industrials, marketplaces and consumer. Doors 18:30, founder intros at 19:00 sharp, then open networking with food and drinks. Application-based with rolling review; free.
An interdisciplinary, interprofessional roundtable on patient monitoring, convened in the orbit of the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin network. The audience is health tech and medtech, and the appeal of the format is having clinical users and builders at the same table. Free.
The birthday edition of the weekly Thursday Gathering, as CIC Berlin and Venture Cafe Berlin mark another year. Expect the usual mix of programme, demo tables and open networking, with more of the community than a normal week and the celebratory extras that go with it. Free and open to all.
An investor-facing demo day for deep tech startups coming out of Fraunhofer HHI's venture lab, run with Silicon Allee. Pitches span AI, quantum computing, medical and biotech, education, real estate, defence and communications — companies carrying one to two years of institutional R&D behind them plus exclusive access to Fraunhofer IP. A livestream is available for remote investors, though the hosts encourage attending in person for direct founder access. Registration is approval-gated and the exact address is released once you are confirmed.
with Olav Carlsen (Innovation Manager, SPRIND) · Frank Nicolaisen (Managing Director, HypoVereinsbank – UniCredit) · Katrin Robeck (Managing Director, IBB Ventures) + 1 more
An investor panel on where German startup funding actually stands going into 2027 — what has to be in place before you raise, how these investors evaluate a company, and the mistakes they see founders make repeatedly. The panel is drawn from SPRIND, HypoVereinsbank–UniCredit and IBB Ventures, which is a usefully broad spread across public innovation funding, banking and a Berlin state-backed VC. Run online by Founder Institute Germany, free, and includes information on their accelerator programme.
with Angeley Mullins (Founder & CEO, Aetheris Ventures)
A hands-on workshop and networking evening on the gap between AI being everywhere and AI being explainable — frameworks for pitching AI concepts and getting technical ideas across to non-technical audiences. Angeley Mullins, founder and CEO of Aetheris Ventures, speaks. Hosted at a Berlin AI consultancy's offices in Prenzlauer Berg, co-hosted with Berlin Bytes and Kambria. Twelve euros.
Project Ada's pitch night at Enpal's Berlin headquarters puts a cohort of women-founded startups in front of investors and operators, with feedback delivered live rather than behind closed doors. Free to attend, and one of the more reliable places in Berlin to see genuinely early companies before they are on anyone's radar.
The ninety-seventh edition of a deliberately tiny breakfast meetup for Berlin's digital marketers, over coffee on Unter den Linden. Around ten seats, which is both why it has lasted ninety-seven editions and why it is already sold out — worth following the series for the next one. Nine euros.
with Vidushi Malhan (Host, cowork and)
A three-hour build session at CIC Berlin where you leave with a working content system rather than notes about one — wiring Claude Code to Notion so it generates for LinkedIn, Instagram, newsletters, blogs, Medium and Substack. Aimed at founders, marketers, creators and solo operators who publish regularly and are tired of doing it by hand. Capacity is ten; this is the second edition and the organisers say the first sold out.
A founder-focused evening at betahaus Kreuzberg on venture building, company creation and scaling, aimed at people who want to start, launch or grow a company rather than just read about it. The programme walks the path from validating an idea through to a funded venture, with founder stories from senior leaders at Disrupt.com and open networking with other operators and investors. Free to attend.
MeasureCamp returns to Berlin: a free Saturday unconference for the digital analytics industry, hosted at SumUp. No fixed agenda — sessions are proposed on the morning by whoever shows up, from people on their first rung to the most senior practitioners in the field. Good for analytics, martech and data people who want practice rather than vendor pitches. Tickets: releases #1 and #2 have sold out. Release #3 is waitlist-only — join the waitlist on Eventbrite and the organisers contact you if a place frees up. Free to attend.
An evening gathering of around 150 Berlin business and technology leaders at SPACE SHACK, built around a panel with executives from Taxfix, getolo, Sunday Natural, Rhapsody, Babbel and Charité Universitätsmedizin…
Venture Cafe Berlin's weekly Thursday Gathering at CIC Berlin, this week built around an advanced materials competition — deep-tech teams working on materials science presenting to the room, alongside the…
The flagship Scala conference lands in Berlin: several days on the language, its compiler and tooling direction, functional programming in production and the libraries the ecosystem runs on, with talks…
with Manfred Steyer (Angular-Trainer, JavaScript & Angular Days) · Sebastian Springer (Trainer, JavaScript & Angular Days) · Nils Hartmann (Trainer, JavaScript & Angular Days)
Five days of training in modern web development with JavaScript and Angular, with 40-plus workshops and 25-plus trainers. 12 to 14 October are workshop days; 15 and 16 October are the bootcamp days. Tracks cover JavaScript, Angular, testing, security, AI integration and fullstack architecture, with trainers including Manfred Steyer, Sebastian Springer and Nils Hartmann. The format is weighted far more towards working than listening. Tickets from 699 euros net for one day.
A Berlin conference for software architects and senior engineers on designing systems that survive contact with production — modularisation, distributed architecture, legacy modernisation and the decisions that are expensive to reverse. Practitioner talks rather than vendor sessions.
The flagship Scala conference lands in Berlin: several days on the language, its compiler and tooling direction, functional programming in production and the libraries the ecosystem runs on, with talks from core contributors. The one date of the year most of the Scala world travels for.
An edition of the long-running AI Monday Berlin series held at Publix, the Neukölln house for journalism and public-interest media, on the AI-enabled methods now entering newsrooms. Relevant well beyond journalism — much of what reporters are building to verify, search and summarise at speed is the same problem anyone working with messy source material has. Free.
with Sana Shah (Cloud Operations Lead, DEMICON) · Liya Wang (Solutions Architect, AWS)
A beginner-friendly hands-on workshop on spec-driven development and Claude Code, pitched at Level 200 and hosted at Amazon's Berlin office in Friedrichshain. Led by Sana Shah of DEMICON and Liya Wang of AWS with two workshop assistants on hand, so there is a reasonable chance of actually getting unstuck. Bring a laptop and photo ID for building access; food and drinks provided. Free, capacity 40.
Three days at Messe Berlin's hub27 on digital government and public-sector modernisation — Europe's main gathering for the subject, combining conference stages, an expo, workshops and guided tours. Eight themes run through the programme: digital government, AI and cloud, digital security, smart cities and regions, mobility, energy and sustainability, and digital skills. Portugal is partner country this year, and 15 October runs as a dedicated Resilience Day on cyberattacks, espionage, sabotage and critical-infrastructure protection, with a Career Day alongside it. Free, but tickets are online only — there is no box office on site. Run by Bitkom with Messe Berlin.
with Antje Duffert (Speaker, DigitalSchoolStory) · Philipp Amadeus Grassinger (Co-CEO, cleverly) · Ralph Müller-Eiselt (Executive Director, Forum Bildung Digitalisierung) + 1 more
An evening format bringing EdTech startups together with teachers, education policymakers and civil society, this edition on digital wellbeing in everyday school life. The startup pitches cover digital mental health and tools that help young people handle misinformation and online harassment, followed by an expert panel on what actually makes or breaks implementation in schools. Run by Bitkom with Forum Bildung Digitalisierung, at Bitkom's own office in Mitte.
with Lennard Schmidt (Co-founder & Co-CEO, Langdock) · Seb Hapte-Selassie (Co-founder & CTO, telli)
A fireside on the unglamorous thing that decides whether an AI product spreads inside a company: how you package and price it. Trials, usage limits, seats, credits, enterprise plans — and which of those turn one enthusiast's experiment into company-wide adoption. Lennard Schmidt of Langdock and Seb Hapte-Selassie of telli, run by Reasoning Project with Stripe's Metronome and Langdock for a deliberately small room of founders, engineering leaders and people building agents. Doors 18:30, fireside 19:00, food after. Currently waitlisted.
A joint business breakfast from SIBB, the Berlin-Brandenburg digital industry association, and BITMi, hosted at AI startup nenna.ai in Friedrichshain. A networking format for people running things in the regional digital economy, and a chance to meet two associations with different remits — one regional, one national and SME-focused — in the same room. Free.
A Berlin summit on product-led growth for product, growth and go-to-market leaders: onboarding, activation, pricing and the org design that makes a self-serve motion actually work. Speaker-led sessions from operators at companies running the model.
Berlin's domain-driven design conference, on modelling complex business domains in software and the architecture and collaboration practices that follow from it. Small, well-regarded and squarely aimed at senior engineers and architects rather than newcomers.
A one-day forum at the AI Campus in Wedding on how autonomous workflows and multi-agent systems move out of pilots and into production — and where Germany stands in the emerging agentic economy. The programme runs as three sequential tracks with no parallel stages: agentic commerce; regulation, compliance and AI sovereignty; and autonomous business models. Expect keynotes, enterprise adoption cases, live architectures, a closing panel and a forum dinner. Hosted by AI Agents Berlin with Merantix Momentum and capped at roughly 150 curated seats, with registration reviewed on a rolling basis — apply early.
with Sandra Ahlgrimm (Senior Developer Advocate, GitHub / Microsoft)
A hands-on workshop on agent-driven software development with GitHub Copilot, led by Sandra Ahlgrimm, who runs developer experience for Copilot's JetBrains IDE integrations — so this is closer to the source than most Copilot sessions get. Co-hosted by Deutsche Bank's Berlin Technology Centre with JUG Berlin-Brandenburg and JCON, which gives it an unusual mix of enterprise Java and AI tooling in one room. Free.
with Shahriyar Rzayev (Speaker — Code as Agent Harness: Protocol usage with Coding Agents, PyBerlin) · Ece Cinüçen (Speaker — Python Mobile App Development: Bringing PySide6 on iOS, PyBerlin) · Franz Bender (Speaker — Debugging in the Dark: Collecting Product Telemetry When You're Not Allowed to Track, PyBerlin)
The sixty-first edition of Berlin's main Python meetup, hosted and sponsored by Nelly Solutions in Mitte. Three talks with unusually little overlap: using code as a harness for coding agents, getting PySide6 running on iOS, and collecting product telemetry when you are not permitted to track users — the last being a problem more European teams have than talk about. Doors 18:30, talks from 19:00. Free.
A hands-on watch party for IBM Bob, IBM's AI development assistant for ideating, building, modernising and shipping code. It runs simultaneously across Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, Ehningen, Vienna and Zurich plus online, with beginner, intermediate and expert tracks — so it is worth going in person in Berlin mainly for the room rather than the stream. Free, at IBM's office near Hauptbahnhof; on-site places are limited.
Venture Cafe Berlin's weekly Thursday Gathering at CIC Berlin, this week built around an advanced materials competition — deep-tech teams working on materials science presenting to the room, alongside the usual demo tables and open networking. Free and open to all.
with Angelina Lesnikova (Founder, Neuroscientist-turned-founder)
A founder talk and Q&A with Angelina Lesnikova on getting from a neuroscience research background to a 1.2 million first round in Berlin — the specifics of translating lab credibility into investor confidence, which is the exact gap most deep-tech founders out of research get stuck in. Her company builds AI that organisations can trust. Hosted by SIBB at Deutsche Telekom's hubraum in Schöneberg, free.
with Olena Kutsenko (Speaker — Keeping data private in real-time pipelines, Confluent) · Marcin Stożek (Speaker — From Edge to Gateway: architecting your OpenTelemetry Collector deployment, Elastic)
A joint evening between Berlin's Kafka and Elasticsearch communities on handling data responsibly once it is moving at scale. Olena Kutsenko of Confluent covers privacy-protection patterns inside streaming pipelines; Marcin Stożek of Elastic works through OpenTelemetry Collector deployment architecture from edge to gateway. Hosted at EBCONT's office at Quartier Heidestraße, free, with food and drinks.
An evening gathering of around 150 Berlin business and technology leaders at SPACE SHACK, built around a panel with executives from Taxfix, getolo, Sunday Natural, Rhapsody, Babbel and Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin on practical AI implementation. Tickets include drinks, food and access to a networking app — the format is deliberately weighted towards conversations rather than talks.
with Sascha Lobo (Autor und Kolumnist, Keynote)
Two days at the WECC at Westhafen with 20-plus speakers and 30-plus workshops, on the promise that you work differently afterwards. The line-up is headlined by Sascha Lobo alongside AI leaders from Meta, Databricks and Deutsche Bahn. The workshop-to-talk ratio is notably high, so this is less a stage conference than a working one.
The long-running Entrepreneurship Summit at the Henry-Ford-Bau on Freie Universität's Dahlem campus, run by Stiftung Entrepreneurship under the banner "Entrepreneurship for everyone. Be an Entrepreneur!" The framing is deliberately broad — anyone thinking about starting something, not only tech founders. Ticketing runs from a free tier up to around 265 euros, so attending on no budget is possible.
NVIDIA brings GTC to Berlin for three days: a workshop day at STATION-Berlin, then a keynote at the Tempodrom and more than 100 sessions on AI infrastructure, accelerated computing, robotics…
1% for the Planet brings its Sessions series to Germany for the first time, hosted at member company SumUp's Berlin office. An evening with local environmental partners and the businesses…
NVIDIA brings GTC to Berlin for three days: a workshop day at STATION-Berlin, then a keynote at the Tempodrom and more than 100 sessions on AI infrastructure, accelerated computing, robotics and agentic systems. This is the largest AI developer event in Germany this year and the one the whole European AI-infrastructure industry organises its autumn around — expect the sovereign-compute and AI-factory debate to run through most of the programme. Passes from EUR 357.
1% for the Planet brings its Sessions series to Germany for the first time, hosted at member company SumUp's Berlin office. An evening with local environmental partners and the businesses funding them, aimed at operators who want their company's climate commitment to amount to more than a line in the annual report. Thirty euros; capacity is limited.
with Howard Wright (VP Startup Ecosystem, NVIDIA) · Neil Zeghidour (Co-founder & CEO, Gradium) · Silviu Homoceanu (Co-founder & CTO, Almetra)
A morning for founders on what building in physical AI actually demands, and where agentic systems and open models are heading, run by the AI Campus with NVIDIA. It opens with a founder panel — NVIDIA's VP of Startup Ecosystem alongside the founders of Gradium and Almetra — then turns into an interactive unconference across three tracks: physical AI, agentic AI and open models, and an open format. NVIDIA's Startup Ecosystem and Inception teams are in the room to meet founders, and it closes with a live watch party of Jensen Huang's GTC keynote.
with Alexander Martynau (Regional Startups Ecosystem Lead, NVIDIA) · Charlotte Hook (Head of Community Strategy & Programming, NLND)
A cinema-setting watch party of Jensen Huang's GTC Berlin keynote with around sixty curated founders, developers and investors working in AI and deep tech. NVIDIA's regional startup ecosystem lead follows the keynote with a read on what it means in practice, then a fireside with an NVIDIA Inception founder, Q&A, and prize draws for GTC Berlin exhibit passes. Free, hard cap of sixty, approval required — worth applying early.