Birmingham — Week of 28 Sep 2026

IGNITE26 is billed as the biggest female-founder conference outside London, taking over Millennium Point for a full day of main-stage sessions, practical workshops and investor conversation. A flagship date in the Birmingham founder calendar and the standout event of the week.

A small recurring digital marketing mixer.

A session at the University of Warwick on cash management for growing businesses.

A paid commercial one-day Copilot training course.

Two days at the Birmingham & Midland Institute on model-based systems engineering — tooling, methodology and how MBSE is actually landing in automotive, rail and defence programmes in the Midlands. Run by Scarecrow Consultants for practising systems engineers and engineering managers.

A free morning for female founders in Birmingham to connect, compare notes and get practical input on the stage they are at. Hosted at Scholars School System on Hagley Road.

Women in Tech Birmingham's evening of tech talks at Bluetel Solutions, with Dr Honey Yadav and Dr Claire Doswell. Two named researchers, a known host venue and a community that consistently delivers — the strongest community listing in the week.

Journalist and author Jamie Bartlett — best known for The Dark Net and The Missing Cryptoqueen — comes to Waterstones Birmingham to discuss his new book How to Talk to AI, covering both the promise and the genuine dangers of everyday AI. A rare chance to hear one of the sharpest writers on technology and society, for a fiver.

Rooftop networking for Birmingham tech founders, operators and investors at the Premier Inn City Centre rooftop. Recurring paid-entry series; fourth edition currently listed.

An open coworking and networking day at Assay Studios in the Jewellery Quarter — a free desk for the day alongside other people running businesses in the city.

A one-day beginners' Python course in Birmingham covering syntax, data types, control flow and writing a first working script. Classroom-delivered at Regus.

An in-person session at Aston University Library on assistive technology — the tools available, how they are set up and what they change day to day for the people using them. Free, with pizza; currently showing sold out on Eventbrite.

Cloud Native Computing Birmingham at Bluetel Solutions on service mesh in production — traffic management, observability and whether the complexity pays off.

An evening networking session at Cosy Club run by the Web Pulse Business Network, aimed at founders, freelancers and professionals across the city. Informal, low-cost, no speakers.

fizzPOP opens its Digbeth makerspace to the public: a tour of the workshop, laser cutters, 3D printers and electronics bench, and a chance to meet members before deciding whether to join. Free, recurring weekly.

A paid morning business-networking meeting at the Leonardo Royal, with structured introductions for Birmingham SMEs and professional-services firms. Sold out.

A paid training morning for solo business owners on turning content into visibility, run by The Soul Angels in Hall Green.

A morning combining an AI workshop with open networking for Birmingham businesses.

A vendor user conference for callas software's PDF tooling.

A private one-to-one introduction to Microsoft Project covering scheduling, resourcing and baselines, delivered at One Victoria Square.

John Martin walks through what actually changes when you run SQL Server on AWS — licensing, EC2 versus RDS, high availability, backup strategy and the performance traps that catch teams migrating off on-premise hardware. Hosted by the Microsoft Data Platform Birmingham group.

A careers and creative-technology afternoon at Nettl of Birmingham.

Nettl of Birmingham hosts a short session on website, e-commerce and brand decisions for small businesses planning their next phase of digital work.

The Birmingham Databricks user group meets at KPMG's Snow Hill offices for an evening of practical data-engineering and lakehouse talks. Aimed at data engineers, analytics leads and platform teams working with Spark, Delta and the wider Databricks stack, with time for questions and informal networking afterwards.

The Birmingham Small Business Meetup's recurring evening networking session, sponsored by Holland & Co Chartered Accountants.

An early-morning breakfast networking meeting for Birmingham businesses at the Holiday Inn Birmingham Airport. Sold out.

An early-morning session at Aston Business Hub on where industrial AI goes after predictive maintenance — prognostics, remaining-useful-life modelling and the data foundations manufacturers need to get there. Free, and squarely relevant to anyone applying machine learning to physical assets.

The fifth edition of the Tech Founders Lunch Club, a quarterly lunch for Midlands-based tech founders at The Old Joint Stock. Small, peer-led and deliberately unstructured — a place to compare notes with people running comparable companies.

An in-person meet-and-share session for founders and professionals in south Birmingham, focused on skills exchange and peer connection. Paid entry.

A free Library of Birmingham business-support session on market research: establishing whether there is real demand for your idea before you build it, and the free data sources available to test that.

An afternoon meetup at Arca for Birmingham entrepreneurs on building additional revenue lines alongside a main business. Free, informal, with open discussion rather than a speaker programme.