Tech events in berlin

with Dr. Marco Buschmann (Former Federal Minister of Justice, Deutscher Bundestag) · Sina Dörr (Judge and legal tech expert, Judiciary) · Alisha Andert LL.M. (Executive Board, Legal Tech Association Germany)

An evening on AI inside the justice system, where a model error lands directly on someone's fundamental rights. The programme covers case management, speeding up legal processes and improving access to justice, set against data protection, transparency, fairness and judicial independence — and what a rights-based but innovation-friendly governance framework would have to contain. The panel is unusually senior for a free evening: former Federal Minister of Justice Dr. Marco Buschmann, judge and legal-tech expert Sina Dörr, and Alisha Andert LL.M. of the Legal Tech Association Germany executive board, plus further experts from law and policy. Hosted by the Berlin office of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom in the GLS Campus auditorium in Prenzlauer Berg, part of the series "Berlin & AI: Towards a Berlin AI Strategy" during Berlin Freedom Week. Free, 18:00 to 20:30. Why go: the people who would have to sign off on AI in German courts, arguing it out in public. Best for legal-tech builders, public-sector practitioners and anyone working on AI regulation.

with Laura Tacho (Senior Principal Technologist, AWS) · Bhavana Hindupur (Staff Software Engineer, Meta) · Darragh Curran (CTO, Fin) + 2 more

Two days for engineering leaders, back at the Estrel in Neukölln. The 2026 programme is organised around what AI adoption is doing to engineering organisations: measuring and proving results, managing leadership expectations that have run ahead of reality, high-stakes calls on org structure and tooling, and holding stretched teams together through it. Speakers include Laura Tacho (Senior Principal Technologist, AWS), Darragh Curran (CTO, Fin), Bhavana Hindupur (Staff Software Engineer, Meta), Mathieu Bastian (Principal AI Engineer, GetYourGuide), Becki Wordsworth (CTO, Meela) and Jasmine James Fuller (Senior Engineering Manager, Block). Alongside the talks: free 80-minute workshops, table talks, speaker office hours and coaching. Standard tickets €1,599 plus VAT, sold in waves; group rates from €1,199. The free DirectorPlus add-on is limited to Heads of, Directors, VPs and CTOs. Why go: one of the few rooms where engineering managers compare notes on AI mandates with people who have had to deliver them. Best for EMs, directors and CTOs rather than individual contributors.

A TEDxBerlin Salon — the intimate, conversation-led format TEDxBerlin runs between its mainstage events — on how leadership changes as AI reshapes work, decision-making and collaboration. The evening looks at the skills leaders need under uncertainty, how trust gets built, and what stays distinctly human in an AI-driven workplace. The programme pairs short talks with moderated conversation; announced speakers so far include Martin Gutmann, Isabel Hartung, Johan S Roos and Markham Heid, with more to follow. It is held in the evening at The Delta Campus, Donaustraße 44 in Neukölln; the exact start time is announced closer to the date. Tickets are required, with early-bird and student rates. Why go: a rare Berlin room to argue about what leadership actually means once agents do more of the work. Best for founders, team leads and anyone managing through the shift.

A Bitkom day on what happens to the software industry's value chain once AI writes code at speed: where software still creates value, which competences start to matter, and what German and European software and AI policy would have to get right to stay competitive. Deutsche Bahn hosts at the EUREF Campus in Schöneberg. The morning block brings Michael Drass, DB's Chief AI Officer, together with Frank Dobelmann, CTO of Adesso, Felix Becker, who runs internal developer platforms at DB Systel, and Dr. Lisa Steigertahl, Director Cloud & AI at Deloitte. Dr. Kim Lauenroth of FH Dortmund follows after lunch, and the afternoon closes with Bitkom's Niklas Veltkamp and Docusign DACH managing director Kai Stübane, then a get-together from 16:30. Held in German, 10:00 to 17:00. Why go: the platform and CTO side of this question, not the vendor side, with people who run large estates. Best for engineering leaders, platform teams and anyone whose business model depends on selling software.

with Dorothee Bär (Federal Minister for Research, Technology and Space, BMFTR) · Malte Kosub (Co-founder, Parloa GmbH) · Dr. Michael Förtsch (CEO, Q.ANT GmbH) + 3 more

The Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space brings research, industry and policy together for two days on one question: how do digital technologies get out of the pilot stage and into commercial value creation in Germany? Federal Minister Dorothee Bär opens at 14:00 and then sits on the panel on high tech "Made in Germany" alongside Malte Kosub of Berlin's Parloa, Dr. Michael Förtsch of Q.ANT, Dr. Iris Schwenk of HQS Quantum Simulations and Sebastian Klaus of ATMOS Space Cargo. Parallel expert forums run on commercialising generative AI, scaling humanoid robotics, the first real quantum-computing use case, and digital battery-cell manufacturing. The day closes with the QC Next competition awards, an exhibition and dinner. Doors 12:30 at the WECC. Why go: the rare room where a sitting minister, deep-tech founders and the funding side argue about commercialisation in public. Best for deep-tech founders, investors and anyone tracking German technology policy.

A full-day conference at the Maritim proArte Hotel in Mitte on the question now holding up AI projects in regulated industries: how do you evidence conformity when the system changes its own behaviour? It covers EU AI Act obligations turned into processes and responsibilities, AI governance in practice from data base to sign-off, control and liability for autonomous agents, and supervisory practice first-hand. Practice reports come from Zalando, Continental, Scout24 and Dussmann, with the Berlin data protection authority and the Bundesnetzagentur on the regulator side — 14 speakers in all. Run by COMPUTAS Fachkonferenzen with ISiCO GmbH. Paid: 640 euros net standard, 290 for ISiCO and SRD clients and partners. Why go: one of the few Berlin rooms where regulators and operators like Zalando and Continental compare AI-governance notes in the open. Best for compliance, legal and data-protection leads who own AI sign-off in a regulated organisation.

with Mark Branson (Präsident, BaFin) · Fritzi Köhler-Geib (Vorstandsmitglied, Deutsche Bundesbank) · Steffen Jentsch (CEO, Solaris) + 3 more

Bitkom's conference on the digitalisation of German financial services, at KOSMOS on Karl-Marx-Allee, 09:30 to 18:45. The agenda and speaker list are not published yet. What is public is the partner line-up, and it tells you who will be in the room: DKB, ING and LBBW on the bank side, SAP and swisscom on infrastructure, and IDnow, Nect and Signicat on identity and onboarding. Expect digital identity, KYC and core-banking modernisation to dominate. Conducted in German. Ticket prices are not shown on the registration page. Deutsche Bahn offers discounted travel for attendees, and booked tickets cannot be cancelled. Why go: this is where German banks, insurers and the vendors who sell to them talk to each other, which makes it useful if financial institutions are your market. Fintech founders chasing a bank partnership will get more from the partner floor than the stage. Worth checking the programme page before committing, since the price is not public.

with Katherina Reiche (Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy, BMWE) · Karsten Wildberger (Federal Minister for Digital Affairs and State Modernisation, BMDS) · Marjut Falkstedt (CEO, European Investment Fund)

The German private equity and venture capital industry's big annual day, run by its association BVK at the Futurium. Fund managers, LPs, Mittelstand owners and policymakers spend a day on the state of the market. Confirmed so far: Economy Minister Katherina Reiche, Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger, Family Minister Karin Prien and Marjut Falkstedt, CEO of the European Investment Fund. Charité CEO Heyo Kroemer and Ralf Hartmann of the Bundeswehr hospital in Berlin cover health. 10:00 to 17:30, with a separately ticketed BVK dinner party at the Titanic Gendarmenmarkt from 18:30. Tickets are €750, or €295 for BVK members. Mostly in German. Why go: the one day a year German VC and PE money and the federal government share a room. Worth it for founders heading into a growth round and anyone who works with funds; too early if you're pre-seed.

with Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln (President, WZB) · Martin Krzywdzinski (Research group head, WZB / Weizenbaum Institute) · Moritz Heuberger (Member of the Bundestag, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) + 2 more

A panel at the WZB on what AI is doing to how work is organised, how performance gets measured and who ends up with the opportunities. What makes it worth an evening is that the five people on stage come from genuinely different places: WZB president Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln and Martin Krzywdzinski, who runs the WZB's globalisation, work and production group and directs at the Weizenbaum Institute; Green MP Moritz Heuberger; Jochem Freyer, who chairs the employment agency in Frankfurt (Oder) and sees the labour market from the administrative side; and Nadine Müller of ver.di, for the union view. Gesa Ufer moderates, and questions follow. Part of the Berlin Science Week series AI, Power and Societal Control. In German. Free, registration required; Room A300, and the building is step-free. Why go: the labour-market consequences of AI usually get argued at conferences by people selling something. Here it is a researcher, an MP, a job-centre chief and a union official, which is a far better test of the claims.

with Andrzej Krzywda (undefined, Arkency)

The third Berlin.rb, a meetup for Berlin's Ruby community, at Le Wagon Berlin in Kreuzberg — a Ruby meetup at a school that teaches Ruby. One talk so far: Andrzej Krzywda of Arkency, over from Poland with “Rails architecture in the age of AI”. After fifteen years of domain-driven design in Rails, he looks at which parts still make sense alongside AI, when a rewrite beats a refactor, and where human legacy code stands against AI slop. The organisers are still after a second speaker. Doors 18:30, talk at 19:00, food and drinks provided, free with open registration. 47 people signed up so far. Talks are filmed from behind the audience; say so at the door if you would rather stay out of shot. The livestream is a separate registration. Why go: the organisers reckon the best part is the conversation between the talks, and that is the honest pitch — one substantial talk and a room of working Rails developers. Best for Ruby and Rails engineers in Berlin.

A SIBB evening at the Merantix AI Campus on AI agents moving out of the experiment stage and into daily work: which processes actually suit an agent, how agents get integrated technically and organisationally into existing workflows, and what it takes to get from a personal assistant to something that scales across a company. Diogo Guerner, CEO of Naviu, is among the speakers, with several practitioners giving short input on current approaches and best practice. The part that makes this worth the trip is what follows: the stage is open to everyone in the room for five- to ten-minute sessions on their own use cases, from a first experiment to an agent already in production. Two and a half hours, in person, held in German. Why go: open-stage format means you hear what mid-sized companies are really running, failures included, instead of a vendor's reference case. Best for SME technology leads and anyone building agents for internal operations.

with Armend Avdijaj (Founder & CEO, GlassFlow) · Ryan Sheldrake (Field CTO, EMEA, Staiker)

An engineering meetup about getting AI agents out of the demo and into production, hosted at adesso's Kreuzberg office and brought by GlassFlow. Armend Avdijaj, founder and CEO of GlassFlow, talks about running a software factory where coding agents work in shifts, and what broke when his team built it. Ryan Sheldrake, Field CTO EMEA at Staiker, takes the security side: agents already running in production with broad access and little oversight, and what teams can do about it now. A third slot is still TBA. Doors 18:00, talks from 18:30, networking until 21:00. Bring a laptop. Free, registration is approval-based. Why go: two practitioner talks on the unglamorous parts of agents, orchestration and security, instead of another launch demo. Best for engineers and tech leads already shipping agents.

A Wednesday-evening meetup on what AI agents actually do internally, and how to build a shared AI layer inside a company so tools get used instead of bought and forgotten. Berlin AI hosts it with Vonage. Jorge Ortiz opens at 19:10 with "The Anatomy of an Agent: What's Really Happening Under the Hood?", David Martinez follows at 19:35 with "Building the AI Layer Your Company Actually Runs On", and a third talk is still to be announced. The evening ends with open demo time for your own projects, plus a few founder pitches. Doors open at 18:30 at w3.hub in Kreuzberg. Free, but registration is approval-based, so apply early. Why go: two practitioner talks and real demo time, not a panel. Best for engineers and technical founders building with agents who want to compare notes.

with Rory McCune (Speaker — Kubernetes persistence exploitation, Datadog) · Alejandro Rusell (Speaker — GitHub OIDC vulnerabilities, Miro) · Kolja Grassmann (Speaker — SwitchBot smartlock hacking, Neodyme) + 2 more

Year six of Berlin's community-run information-security conference, two days at CIC Berlin on Lohmühlenstraße. Thursday is a state-recognised full-day training, "A Phishing Trip with the Bears", led by Marius Genheimer of the SECUINFRA Falcon Team: hands-on APT malware analysis tracing real Fancy Bear (APT28) and Cozy Bear (APT29) attack chains from the phishing email through to persistence. Beginner-friendly, 30 seats, free, certificate included, and recognised under the Berliner Bildungszeitgesetz so Berlin employees can claim paid education leave for it. Friday is the conference day, opening with Rory McCune on hiding in a Kubernetes cluster for years once you already have admin credentials. Why go: a CFP-driven security room with practitioners rather than vendors, and a training day most companies would pay four figures for. Best for security engineers, red and blue teams, and platform engineers running Kubernetes.

with Trevor Lohrbeer (Host, AI Safety Berlin) · Manuel Allgaier (Host, AI Safety Berlin)

A full working day rather than an evening talk: AI Safety Berlin takes over the Æthos space on the third floor of CIC Berlin and runs open coworking from 10:00 to 18:00, with the community dropping in around it. The fixed points are an 11:00 accountability group for people trying to move into AI safety work — reviewing training and career resources, making a plan, committing out loud to a next step — then introductions at 13:00, lunch at 13:15, and an afternoon talk still to be confirmed. Come for lunch only, lunch plus the afternoon, or the whole day. Free. The coworking tickets need host approval; newcomers are explicitly welcome and the hosts collect people from the lobby. Why go: Berlin's AI safety scene is small and mostly online, and this is the one standing slot where researchers, governance people and career-changers are in the same room long enough to actually get something done. Best if you are working in the field or seriously trying to enter it.

with Dr. Julian Boha (Strategic AI and Innovation, Siemens AG) · Holger Maibaum (Director Data Analytics & AI, Capgemini Deutschland Holding) · Antonia Zock (Digital Transformation, Capgemini Deutschland Holding) + 1 more

Merantix Momentum and HANNOVER MESSE on getting AI past the pilot stage in industry: production, logistics and energy, with startup showcases rather than slideware. The afternoon opens with a panel of Merantix Momentum and AI startups, then runs rotating 30-minute expert sessions and you pick three rounds. Dr. Julian Boha of Siemens AG leads on strategic AI, Holger Maibaum and Antonia Zock of Capgemini on data analytics and digital transformation, Stephan Schnieber of IBM Deutschland on hybrid cloud and enterprise AI. Arrival 15:30, panel 15:50, expert rounds until 18:00, then drinks and fingerfood. Why go: the rotating format means you actually talk to the Siemens, Capgemini and IBM people instead of watching them. Best for industrial AI builders and anyone selling into German manufacturing.

Free kickoff for people with an early startup idea who aren't in an incubation programme yet. Science & Startups, the founding service of the Berlin University Alliance, runs it at the Fraunhofer HHI Lanolinfabrik, 18:00 to 20:00, doors 17:30. No prototype, team or deck needed. Hosts Philipp Heinicke and Felix Willems open with an input on what makes a problem worth solving and how to test demand. Then a founder panel (no pitches, no success stories) and an advisor panel with reps from the Berliner Startup Stipendium, EXIST, AI NATION and xG Incubator on how they select. Name tags show who wants a co-founder. Registration is required and spots are limited. Why go: you hear the funding programmes' selection criteria from the people applying them, before you apply. Best for pre-team founders.

Venture Café's weekly Berlin gathering, this week with a panel on what quantum computing does to Bitcoin's cryptography. Race Against the Machine runs 18:45 to 20:00 with Fabian Jahr (open source contributor), Matthias Mrozewski (Associate Professor for International Entrepreneurship, ESCP Europe) and Wadim Wormsbecher (Senior Innovation Developer, Bundesdruckerei-Gruppe), on where the cryptographic risk actually sits and which mitigations are real. Before that, 17:30 to 18:30, ESCP Business School runs Pitching for Impact, with AI pre-seed startups presenting solutions and business models. Demo and info tables and open networking run across the whole evening. Free, registration required. The demo tables are a no-hard-sales zone. Why go: a specific technical question put to people who work on the primitives rather than the price, plus a pre-seed AI pitch session in the same three hours. Best for security and crypto engineers, and for pre-seed founders who want to see what is getting backed.

with Ferdinand Mühlhäuser (Managing Director, Founder Institute Germany)

Guided founder and co-founder networking at the KERB Food Hall, Potsdamer Platz 2, 19:00 to 21:00. It's for people with a startup idea or a pre-seed tech company, anyone eyeing an accelerator, and anyone looking for or offering a co-founder role. Hosted by Founder Institute Germany with Ferdinand Mühlhäuser (Managing Director) and Kai Malkwitz (Impact Director), plus Mats Kuuskema, Country Director Germany at e-Residency Estonia. Softup Technologies, Orrick and Qonto back it. The format is guided networking with drinks, not a free-for-all. RSVP through Meetup. Why go: the guided format makes it practical to find a co-founder in one evening. Best for pre-seed founders and the mentors around them.

Two days at CODE University in Neukölln for developers, designers and founders working with AI, capped at 300 seats. The format is deliberately not a lecture series: fireside chats and live pitching competitions on the main stage, parallel workshop rooms, and a 75-minute speed-dating round before the sessions start so the room knows who is in it. Julian Teicke opens with what building company after company actually teaches you, and what it does not. Friday ends with dinner and drinks; Saturday adds side events — an early run, a padel match, company visits to fast-growing Berlin startups — and an afterparty. The schedule is still being finalised, so sessions and speakers can move. Why go: the networking is the programme here, not the filler around it, and 300 people is small enough that you meet most of them. Best for AI builders and early-stage founders who want the room more than the slides.

A full-day, hands-on workshop for founders, freelancers and side-hustlers who run a business alone or nearly alone. Claude Community Events hosts it with Taxfix in Berlin. The morning is demos and 15-minute talks from people who use Claude in their own businesses. After lunch at 13:00 you pick a Marketing & Sales, Finance or Ops track, start from a ready-made agent and build one for a real task from your own work, with mentors on hand. Bring a laptop with Claude Code installed; no engineering background needed. Free, but the host approves guests. Approved guests get $50 in Claude API credits. Why go: you leave with a working agent for a job you actually do, not a slide deck. Best for solo founders who keep meaning to automate their back office.

A one-day AI security and alignment hackathon: around 100 people in 20 teams of five attack a purpose-built vulnerable AI range, then find and fix the holes in LLM systems. Three tracks: securing recursive, self-executing LLM loops; catching covert channels and collusion in multi-agent setups; and an open track for new prompt injections and guardrail bypasses. Sponsors are Anthropic, HackTheBox, Circuit and Nebius. Prizes are $10k, $6k and $4k in Claude credits, plus $50 of Nebius compute per person. Catering included, 10:00 to 22:00. Judges still to be announced. Free and application-only: the organisers are selecting for a balanced room of alignment researchers, ML engineers and CTF players. The exact Berlin location comes with approval. Solo applicants get matched into teams. Why go: a hands-on red-teaming day with frontier-lab sponsorship, which Berlin rarely gets. Best for ML engineers and security people who want to break models, not talk about it.

Five days of machine-learning engineering at the Maritim proArte on Friedrichstraße: bootcamps Monday and Tuesday, the main conference Wednesday and Thursday, workshops Friday. Conference tracks are AI agents and agentic workflows, MLOps and open-source LLMs, multimodal AI, advanced RAG, and AI strategy, organisation and governance. Bootcamps cover vibe coding and GenAI, agentic software engineering, platform engineering and ML fundamentals. Named workshops include building your own MCP server and turning LLMs into agents. Tuesday also carries an AI Product Validation Day. Pricing is modular: two-day conference pass from €1,079, four-day from €1,619, conference plus a bootcamp from €2,069, a single workshop day from €659, all plus VAT, with 10 per cent off for three or more. Freelancers and scientific-institution staff can request individual rates. Why go: the agent and RAG tracks are pitched at people putting this into production, and the bootcamp days send you home with something built. Best for ML and platform engineers; the governance track is the part for leads.

The engineering and architecture strand of AI Native Week, and the most practitioner-facing one: five days at the Maritim proArte on how teams get AI into systems that already exist. Monday is a Lab Day. Tuesday and Wednesday are workshop days built around five themes — agentic software engineering, quality, testing and code review, enterprise AI governance and security, legacy modernisation with AI, and developer experience and AI toolchains. Thursday and Friday are bootcamps, where you pick either Agentic Engineering and AI-Assisted Architecture or AI Engineering. Speakers had not been published at the time of writing. Paid and not cheap: passes run from 1,199 euros for two days to 2,399 for all five, excluding VAT, and the summit is ticketed separately from MLcon, VibeKode and the API Conference sharing the venue. A diversity ticket is available from the organisers. Why go: legacy modernisation and governance are the tracks most AI conferences skip, and this is a room of engineering leads with production systems rather than demos.

with Mads Pankow (Keynote, media scholar and publicist, Independent) · Nicole Steng (Digital education, KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau) · Jakob Tesch (Partnership Management, Gretchen AI) + 2 more

An afternoon at Publix on a narrow and useful question: AI systems compute probabilities rather than judge what is true, so what happens to credibility when much of what we read, see and hear is no longer clearly of human origin. Media scholar Mads Pankow opens with a keynote on how social media and AI have shifted the criteria people use to decide what to believe. The panel that follows is unusually well mixed — Nicole Steng from the digital education team at the Dachau memorial, Jakob Tesch of Gretchen AI, AI ethics professor Dorothea Winter of Universität Osnabrück, and Technologiestiftung chair Nicolas Zimmer. Labelling of AI content, AI-edited photographs and data poisoning are all on the table. Get-together from 16:30, close at 17:00. In German. Free, hosted by Technologiestiftung Berlin. Why go: putting a memorial-site educator next to an AI vendor is a sharper framing than the usual misinformation panel. Best for journalists, educators and anyone building provenance or labelling into a product.

A monthly builders' night from the AI Builders community at CIC in Kreuzberg, hosted by Andrei Mărcuț, Simon Schreiner and Lingkesh Vijaya kumar. Walk-in 17:30, networking from 18:00, pizza at 18:30, three talk-and-demo slots between 18:45 and 19:45, then drinks until 21:00. The stated topics are vibe coding, OpenClaw, distills, evals, LLMOps and anything about agents, with innovative AI demos and builder tool demos. The speakers for this edition are still listed as to be announced. Name-your-own-price at checkout with around €14 suggested, which covers food and drinks; there is a student and bootstrapper tier for anyone short on cash. Why go: a demo-first room where people show what they actually built this month instead of slides about strategy, and the pricing keeps it unpretentious. Best for engineers shipping LLM features. The talk line-up is not up yet, so come for the demos and the people rather than a specific session.

with Andreas Krauss (Speaker, 'Designing for users you'll never see', Wikimedia Deutschland) · Adrien Hobt (Speaker, creative research, gentle.systems)

Berlin's design communities put one evening together around a single question: who are we designing for now that AI answers before people reach the page, agents act on users' behalf, and leadership picks the shiny thing before anyone tests it. Talks, hands-on workshops and a closed room for design leads run in parallel on the fifth floor of The Delta Campus, with the foyer lounge open all evening for food, drinks and tables from the partner communities — IxDF, Service Design Drinks Berlin, Usability Testessen and Ladies That UX among them. Doors 17:30, opening 18:25, two rounds of sessions, drinks until 21:00. Andreas Krauss (Wikimedia Deutschland) speaks on designing for users you will never see. Free; registration is approved to keep the mix, and workshop seats open a week before. Why go: eight design communities in one building for one night. Best for product designers, UX researchers and design leads.

with Jonas Geiping (Research Group Leader, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems)

A 45-minute research talk from the BLISS AI Speaker Series, with Jonas Geiping, Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, on the safety and security of LLM reasoning: where reasoning chains can be attacked, and what that means for systems already in production. Hosted by BLISS Berlin e.V. at TU Berlin's chemistry institute on Straße des 17. Juni. Talk first, then open discussion over free drinks and pizza. Aimed at students, PhD candidates, academic researchers and industry people doing ML research. RSVP on Luma is required for entry and doors close at 19:15. Photography may take place. Why go: Geiping's group publishes some of the sharpest adversarial work on language models in Europe, and this is the applied end of it. Best for people building or red-teaming LLM systems rather than following safety as a policy topic.

with Olga Troeger (AI Ethics Strategist, ) · Anca Katara (Futurist, keynote speaker and founder, )

A morning breakfast for women founders at NLND Neuland in Neukölln, built around a conversation on using AI responsibly. Olga Troeger, an AI ethics strategist working on AI governance, covers the practical frameworks for governing AI. Anca Katara, futurist, keynote speaker and founder, takes the human side: the intention behind the tools you build and use. The rest is structured networking that starts with an intro round, so be on time. Coffee, juice and croissants included. 09:00 to 11:30. Tickets from €15, with a waitlist once it fills; few spots were left when we checked. Why go: a small, structured room of women running their own companies, with a topic that's useful if you're putting AI into your product or operations. Less suited to deep-tech or VC-track founders.

with Cato van Willige (, ) · Emma Pulbrook (, ) · Gráinne McKnight (, ) + 2 more

Women in AI Berlin and ML6 run an evening of short talks on building AI agents people can rely on, at Merantix AI Campus in Wedding. Four talks from women working in AI engineering: Cato van Willige on building trust on shifting ground; Emma Pulbrook on approval gates that sit outside the model; Gráinne McKnight and Bozhidara Ognyanova on how to define and evaluate successful agent work; and Fatime Zekjiri on why the EU AI Act doesn't trust your LLM and your architecture shouldn't either. Walk-in 18:00, talks from 18:40, networking after. Food and drinks provided. Free. No agent-building experience needed. Why go: a tight programme on evaluation, guardrails and compliance, the parts that decide whether an agent survives real users. Good for ML engineers, product people and anyone building under the AI Act.

An application-only evening for people looking for a co-founder, and for senior commercial and technical operators getting ready to start a company. Antler hosts it, with founders from the current Antler Berlin residency in the room. Doors open at 18:30 and the programme starts at 19:00 with short founder intros, followed by open networking with food and drinks until 21:30. Alan Poensgen is listed as host. Entry is free, but Antler reviews applications on a rolling basis and only approved guests get the exact Berlin address. Why go: it's a pre-vetted pool, so you meet people who are serious about starting something instead of browsing. Best for senior operators and early founders who want to build with someone, not just chat.

The fourth HÄRTING KI-Tag is a full day on AI, the AI Act and data protection, run by the Berlin law firm HÄRTING from 9:30 to 18:00 on 19 November. Confirmed speakers so far: Michael Will, president of the Bavarian data protection authority (BayLDA), on AI from the regulator's side; Patrick Aurin of the Bundesnetzagentur on the AI Act; Dr. Sibylle Gering, legal counsel at REWE; Daniel Abbou, managing director of the KI Bundesverband; and consultant Markus Breuer. Programme is talks, discussion and a get-together. The page is in German, tickets start at 178.50 euros, and further speakers and the keynote are still to be announced. Why go: you hear the regulator, a large in-house legal team and the AI industry association in one room. Best for founders and product leads selling AI into regulated German markets, and for the compliance people who buy from them.

with Dr Jens Baas (CEO, Techniker Krankenkasse) · Prof. Sławomir Stańczak (Professor, Fraunhofer HHI) · Prof. Frank Giordano (Clinical perspective, )

Silicon Allee's final Deep Tech Night of the year, run with Fraunhofer HHI and with Techniker Krankenkasse as partner, on moving a health innovation out of the lab and into routine care. The panel is billed as live and unscripted, on barriers, trade-offs and what scaling actually requires, with Dr Jens Baas (CEO, Techniker Krankenkasse), Prof. Sławomir Stańczak (Fraunhofer HHI) and Prof. Frank Giordano on the clinical side. Then four startup pitches of five minutes each with questions, an open mic at one minute per startup and no slides, with some slots held for people who apply from the audience, and curated networking at four themed tables: demand, research transfer, clinical validation, and funding and scale. Food and drinks provided. Registration on Luma; the address is shared after approval. A livestream-only ticket is offered. Why go: the payer, the research institute and the clinic are on the same panel, which is the combination health-tech founders usually have to chase separately.

Venture Café Berlin's weekly Thursday evening at CIC Berlin, 17:00 to 20:00, with a Polish-German healthtech and medtech focus this week. It runs with the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development (PARP). At 17:30 there's a panel on getting Polish healthtech and medtech startups from pilot to real adoption in Germany, covering regulation and data hurdles. At 18:30 sixteen Polish startups pitch, among them OncoBag, Mentalio, Bodyscope and ACCREA Medical Robotics. The usual Info and Demo Tables and Networking & Beats run all evening, and it's explicitly a no-hard-sales room. Free. Why go: a concentrated look at how Polish healthtech founders are trying to break into the German market, with the Polish embassy's economic head in the room. Best for medtech and healthtech founders, investors and anyone partnering across the border.

with Mario Liebrenz (Program Manager, SIBB)

Structured co-founder matching for founders and people who want to join a startup, run by SIBB on the fifth floor of CIC Berlin as part of Venture Café. Mario Liebrenz, Program Manager at SIBB, moderates. You fill in a matching questionnaire after registering, get one-on-one sessions via TribeSquare, then open networking, plus a short intro to the SIBB Incubator (cybersecurity, trustworthy AI, deep tech). Doors close at 19:00 and a quick on-site registration is required. It's a paid ticket; the page doesn't show the price, and refunds run until one day before. Why go: it's a scheduled way to meet co-founder candidates instead of hoping for one at a mixer. Best for solo founders and technical people ready to join a team.

A FLINTA* edition of the Unicorns in Tech afterwork, on 19 November from 19:00 at Curly Bar, Adolfstraße 17 in Wedding. Unicorns in Tech is the LGBTIQ+ tech community founded in Berlin in 2014, with 4,000+ members, and this format opens a regular evening to FLINTA* people in tech and their allies. There's no programme: you meet people, talk and share a drink. A free ticket is required so the organisers can book the right table size. Allies are welcome. Why go: a low-pressure room to meet FLINTA* people working in Berlin tech, run by a community that has been doing this for over a decade. Best for newcomers to the scene and for anyone who wants peers outside the usual startup-event crowd.

The annual summit from IHK Berlin, Berlin Partner and visitBerlin, this year themed "Hidden Champions of Berlin's Innovation Ecosystem", in the main auditorium of the IHK on Fasanenstraße on 20 November. Three blocks of short talks and startup pitches (10:15, 12:40 and 14:40) are mixed with an exhibition of research projects and products from the region. Topics run from AI and cybersecurity to games and immersive tech, DLT/Web3, robotics, MusicTech and wearables. Registration opens at 9:15, lunch is at 11:40, and there are networking breaks throughout. The pitch line-up is still to be announced. Why go: the quickest way to meet Berlin's creative-tech and hardware-adjacent startups alongside the city's economic development people. Best for founders and investors looking beyond pure software, and for anyone who wants introductions to Berlin Partner and the IHK network.

A one-day AI hackathon from AI Builders Club with commIT, hosted at ImmoScout24 in Berlin. Bring an idea or come alone: the morning runs idea pitches and team matching, then teams of up to four build through the day. Three tracks: go-to-market AI (lead research, outreach, sales agents, monetisation), an agentic-AI track built on Nebius Token Factory, and an open track. Doors 09:45, challenges 10:00, feature freeze 15:30, live demos 16:00, judging and awards from 17:00, then pizza, drinks and networking until 22:00. Local hosts are Martin Kaiser, Lingkesh Vijayakumar, Andrei Marcut, Simon Schreiner and Vitalina Alipova. Tickets are 16 euros standard, 10 for the first 42 commIT members and 5 for students, which the organisers approve one by one. A waitlist opens once it fills. Why go: a full build day with a deadline and a live demo at the end, not a panel about AI. Best for engineers, product people and founders who want a working prototype by the evening.

The second HackLab: a 48-hour robotics and AI hackathon with the Nebius Developer Community, at CIC Berlin. Doors 09:00 Saturday, hacking from 11:00 through the night. Sunday: submissions close 17:45, judging 18:00, live pitches and awards from 19:00. Four sponsors run their own tracks: Prior Labs on TabPFN for spatial awareness; Hugging Face, with the SO-101 open-source arm and LeRobot; NormaCore, an open-source data layer for robotics; and Durance AI, brain-inspired chips. Prizes are over €10,000 in cash, credits and robots. A Luma registration alone does not get you in: Hacklab ran a mandatory selection form and has confirmed 200 places from over 1,000 applications. Didn't get one? The organisers say come to the entrance anyway: no-shows free up spots on the day and they let in as many as possible. Why go: robot hardware plus sponsored compute for a weekend is hard to assemble alone, and judging is live pitches rather than a submission form. Best for robotics and ML engineers who want to ship something physical.

The second FemTech Germany Summit brings founders, clinicians, investors and researchers in women's health together for an afternoon at The Delta Campus in Neukölln, with talks, hands-on workshops and networking. Headliners are Ida Tin and Prof. Dr. Frank Louwen, with Dr. Sabine Gogolok, Prof. Dr. Sara Nasser, Ralf Gansel and Larissa Merkl also on the line-up. Saturday, 13:30 to 18:00. Paid tickets via Eventbrite, refundable up to seven days before. Why go: women's health is still underfunded for the size of the market, and this is the afternoon the German femtech scene gathers in one room. Best for founders and investors in health tech who want clinicians in the conversation.

The twelfth edition of the AI Campus unconference: no preset agenda, no speaker line-up, sessions proposed and shaped by whoever is in the room. Bring a technical question, a problem you are stuck on, or something you learned recently. Past rounds give a fair sense of the level — whether fully generated codebases can be secure and scalable and where human design still matters, keeping complex models reliable and cost-efficient in production, what multi-agent orchestration actually looks like in practice, and which meta-prompting techniques measurably improve generated code. The hosts are explicit that it is curated for people currently hands-on in full-stack, ML or AI development, and that doors close at 18:30 sharp. Free, at the AI Campus in Wedding. Why go: eleven previous editions means the format works and the regulars are good. Best for working engineers who would rather argue about a problem than watch slides.

with Karl Broich (Präsident, Bundesinstitut für Arzneimittel und Medizinprodukte) · Stefanie Kemp (Chief Transformation Officer, Sana Kliniken) · Ralf Kuhlen (Chief Medical Officer, Fresenius) + 2 more

Bitkom's digital health conference, at KOSMOS on Karl-Marx-Allee, 09:00 to 18:00. Six themes are published: health policy for 2026, covering statutory-insurance finances, care structures and digitalisation; Digital First in care, including digital first assessments, patient steering and the electronic patient record; resilience, meaning cybersecurity and data sovereignty; big data and the European Health Data Space; AI and future health, on scaling AI into actual care; and Time to Care, on the working time of doctors and nursing staff. Speakers sit on a separate page and were not published at the time of writing. Conducted in German. Ticket prices are not shown on the registration page, and booked tickets cannot be cancelled. Why go: the electronic patient record and EHDS sessions are where German digital-health regulation gets explained by the people implementing it, which matters if you are building anything touching patient data here. Best for health-tech founders and CTOs, and anyone selling into insurers or clinics.

An evening for the people funding European defence and security tech: fund managers, family offices, institutional and strategic LPs, run by the European Defense Tech Hub. The organisers say it skips the 'why defence matters' debate and goes straight to where the market is heading: emerging managers, new investment theses, and the openings created by Europe's changing threat picture, from autonomous systems to electronic warfare and real-time intelligence. 18:00 to 21:00. Application-only: the EDTH team reviews every request and replies by email. The Berlin venue is shared once you're accepted. Ticket terms are on the registration page. Why go: one of the few Berlin rooms where defence-tech GPs and LPs talk shop. Best for founders raising in defence or dual-use and investors building a thesis there.

Impact Hub Berlin swaps its regular Pitch & Pizza for an AsiaBerlin special, run with Impact Hub Phnom Penh and timed to the end of the AsiaBerlin Summit, when founders visiting the city are still here. Two hours built around Germany and Cambodia as the featured pair: Cambodian food and drinks, an interactive cultural quiz, a Germany–Cambodia pitch slam with a twist, and an open World Café on the problems startups in both countries actually share. Founders who want to pitch for the German side can email the organisers in advance. Aimed at impact-driven founders and anyone working on sustainability or social impact across borders. Free, and an official satellite event of AsiaBerlin Summit 2026. Why go: most summit satellite events are receptions; this one has a working format and visiting founders you will not meet in Berlin again soon. Best for impact founders and anyone building into Southeast Asia.

TÜV-Verband's AI conference, 08:30 to 16:00 at the Forum Digitale Technologien on Salzufer. The 2026 theme is safe, trustworthy and responsibly deployed AI, across generative AI, industrial applications and safety-critical systems. The 2026 speaker list is not published yet. The 2025 edition gives the register: Martin Ulbrich from the European Commission's AI regulation and compliance unit, Prof. Philipp Slusallek of DFKI Saarbrücken, Franziska Weindauer of TÜV AI.Lab, Dirk Stenkamp of TÜV NORD and Robert Heinrich of the federal digital ministry. Contacts for this year are Patrick Gilroy and Maria Sürig at TÜV-Verband. Registration is through a form on the event page; no ticket price is listed. Why go: conformity assessment under the AI Act is about to be somebody's problem, and this is the room where the people who will do the assessing explain how they intend to. Best for founders shipping AI into regulated or industrial settings, and anyone writing compliance documentation they would rather get right first time.

betahaus's weekly community breakfast at betahaus | Kreuzberg, running Thursday mornings for years and one of the oldest standing appointments in the Berlin startup calendar. An hour over coffee from 10:00, with founders, freelancers, creatives and people new to the city dropping in. No agenda and no pitch unless there is a guest speaker that week; the format is deliberately low-key. Programme details for individual editions go up on the betahaus events page closer to the date. Free for betahaus members, and historically free or a small door contribution for everyone else depending on the week's guest. Why go: the gentlest on-ramp into the Berlin ecosystem there is, and the one room where turning up alone and knowing nobody is the normal case rather than the awkward one. Best for people new to Berlin, solo founders and freelancers.

HIIG's first ideathon in its 'Forum. Zukunft unternehmen.' series asks why so few German AI ideas turn into companies that stay and grow here, and what conditions would change that. The pain points are concrete: waiting on permits while the market moves, the paperwork around a first international hire, procurement rules that keep the state out of reach as an anchor customer, data access and funding. Prof. Thomas Schildhauer and Prof. Ali Aslan Gümüşay open, moderated by Dr. Alica Repenning, and mika founder and CEO Agnieszka Walorska gives a lightning talk over dinner. It runs 16:00 to 21:00, then drinks. The start is 16:00, not the 14:00 shown in the listing time. Invitation only, with expressions of interest via the HIIG page. Held in German. Why go: a small working session where AI founders sit with the policymakers and administrators who set the rules. Worth it if you have a specific permit, hiring or procurement problem to bring.

with Alsu Bikkulova (Software Engineer, Yelp) · Alice Chan (Founder & Investor, Chan Venture) · Agnieszka Szymańska (Founder, STEPWISE)

Venture Café's weekly gathering, this edition run with the Embassy of Sri Lanka in Germany and the Sri Lanka Export Development Board as an Asia Berlin satellite event. Two sessions sit on top of the usual format. Sri Lanka: An Island Rising covers the country's tech and export ecosystem. Building Across Borders: How AI Is Changing Entrepreneurship is a panel with Central Asian Women Hub, Female Founders Berlin and IT Kurultai, co-hosted by the first two, with audience Q&A; the individual panellists are not named yet. Featured attendees include Alsu Bikkulova (Software Engineer, Yelp), Asel Garaeva (Central Asian Women Hub, Swiss chapter) and Agnieszka Szymańska (Founder, STEPWISE). Demo and info tables and open networking run 17:00 to 20:00. Free, registration required. Why go: a direct route into South and Central Asian founder networks without leaving Kreuzberg, with the embassy and the export board actually in the room. Best for founders looking at those markets, or hiring from them.

This edition of the Merantix AI Campus digital-health evening puts the clinicians on stage. Physician-led and researcher-led teams from the BIH Digital Health Accelerator at Charité each get five minutes to show what they are building, and every team closes with the question it most wants the room to answer — whether their data can actually answer the clinical question, or what it takes to move a research tool into a product. Projects include CALA-XR, extended-reality therapy for phantom limb pain; OnKIboard, an agent system aiming to give tumour boards fast, valid and traceable treatment decisions; and CellTracer, on the path from cell therapy to patients. Then the floor opens to founders, investors, clinicians and operators. Why go: unusually honest showcase — the teams present their open problems, not a pitch. Best for health-tech founders, clinical AI teams and investors in the space.

A seven-hour build afternoon where teams of up to five ship a working AI agent demo. AI Agents Berlin runs it with Tavily, Nebius, Affinidi, Quality Clouds and n8n at The Delta Campus. Pick a track: Research Agents, which search, check and reason over information (market intelligence, due diligence), or Agentic Commerce, which find, compare and transact on products or services. Partners bring challenges and mentors, and a jury of partners, operators and investors judges the demos. The best builds go through to AIB Demo Day on 10 December. Solo builders get paired up, and at least one person per team has to be on site. Runs 14:00 to 21:00. Why go: finalists get a Demo Day slot, so this is the front door to it. Best for engineers who would rather build than listen.

A two-day hackathon for 350 builders from across Europe, run by {Tech: Europe} with Google DeepMind (frontier AI models), CODE Events and The Delta. Saturday: doors and networking from 10:00, opening and team matchmaking at 10:45, lunch at 12:30, dinner at 18:30. Sunday: project submission at 14:00, finalist pitches at 15:30, awards at 16:30. Technology partners include Aikido, ClickHouse, Gradium, Tavily and Vonage, with company tracks from Almedia, Arbio, Cortea, Distil Labs, F13, Qontext and Reonic. Teams get free credits from the tech partners. Free, but every ticket (founder, engineer, researcher, product/design) needs host approval. The exact address, at The Delta Campus or CODE, is shared on registration. Why go: 350 builders, real company tracks and a DeepMind co-host in one weekend. Best for engineers and founders who can give it the whole weekend.