Birmingham — Week of 9 Nov 2026

Two in-person days (9 and 16 November) for technically skilled jobseekers: build a Case Management System with AI tools in a team led by an industry tech coach, then present to West Midlands employers with open tech roles. A showcase follows on 25 November. Sponsored by Coventry City Council and the West Midlands Combined Authority. Free; sign up through The Cloud Crew's website. Venue listed only as Summer Road, Birmingham.

A student debate on AI, run jointly by the Computing Society and the Law Society at Birmingham City University's Curzon Building. Free to attend. The listing gives no motion or speakers yet.

An investor-pitch fundamentals workshop in the Birmingham NatWest Accelerator's Fund Your Business Your Way series, following the Financials for Funding session. Free.

The Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce annual business expo at Edgbaston Stadium — exhibitors, seminars and structured networking across all sectors including a technology presence. Free to attend.

An afternoon on UK fintech hosted by Mastercard at the University of Birmingham, with fintech founders, regional fintech associations, industry experts and policymakers in the room. The programme covers the future of UK payments and Mastercard's role in it, account-to-account and agentic AI payment models, fraud, trust and financial inclusion, a growth story from a founder who went through a Mastercard Start Path programme, BIN sponsorship from a business actually using it, and a policymaker's view of what is coming. 13:15 welcome and lunch, main session 14:00 to 16:30, at the Green Heart Forum in Staff House. The registration page states no price. Why go: a corporate host talking partly about its own capabilities, so read the Mastercard-services sections for what they are — but the founder and BIN sponsorship sessions are operational detail fintechs rarely get in public. Best for fintech founders and payments people in the Midlands.

BCU Women in STEM hosts six industry professionals from across STEM for a careers panel aimed mainly at students: career journeys, placements, challenges and advice, followed by Q&A and networking. Room CST204 at STEAMhouse. Free, open to all, pizza provided.

A seated dinner for around 20 senior leaders from the automotive aftermarket, hosted by Magneto IT Solutions with Shopify at the table. Two fireside chats with Vanmatic and Heritage Parts Centre: one on moving complex B2B trading to Shopify, one on agentic commerce, AI customer service and fitment. Then a facilitated roundtable on EVs, fitment and telematics data, and marketplaces versus owned commerce. Free, approval required, aimed at owners and directors of non-OEM aftermarket businesses.

A long-running monthly meetup for Birmingham founders and people still at the idea stage, upstairs in the front room at 1000 Trades in the Jewellery Quarter. There is no set format: you turn up, introduce yourself and talk shop. Testing an idea on people who will be constructive about it, comparing notes on raising investment, swapping the practical details of starting something. Second Tuesday of the month, 18:30 to 20:30, free, hosted by Dave Evans. The group publishes a code of conduct and explicitly refuses sales pitches, crypto and MLM marketing, which is a large part of why it has stayed usable across 719 reviews. Why go: it is the least performative founder room in Birmingham, and the no-pitching rule is actually enforced. Best if you are early enough that you still want to say an idea out loud before committing to it.

The Birmingham Tech Network's monthly evening drinks at Slug & Lettuce Brindleyplace, for software engineers, product managers, designers, data and AI people and startup operators. No talks and no slides. The organiser describes the gatherings as self-hosted with no designated host; venue staff point you to the table booking. Runs every second Tuesday of the month until April 2027, 19:00 to 22:00. Attendance requires an OkGather membership at GBP 2.99 per month, which also gives 20 per cent off food and drinks at the venue.

The Automotive Management trade show for car retail and dealer management at the NEC, with a digital tools and skills theme in its agenda. No ticket price is published. 9:30am to 4:30pm.

A digital skills and wellbeing session for women in Birmingham, delivered by the Women's Consortium with Octavius Learning at the OLDP Women's Hub, St Paul's Square. Free for unemployed learners on benefits; a £20 contribution for employed learners. 10am to midday.

The annual UK conference for rehabilitation engineers, clinical scientists, clinical technologists and technicians, in its second year, at STEAMhouse. The 2026 theme is "Developing an assistive technology device, how?": the practical route from prototype to a device you can legally put on the UK market or into clinical use, with invited speakers on digital manufacturing and on applying the medical device regulations. Paul Hewett opens at 09:45 and Abigail Attwell follows at 10:00 on designing assistive technology for the future. There is an Innovation Space, an attendee-chosen hot-topic session, and an exhibition with around three and a half hours of contact time. Doors 08:00, sessions 10:00 to 16:00. Tickets GBP 50, no refunds, paid parking on site. Why go: assistive-technology regulation is where most NHS and university AT projects stall, and this is the one UK room where the engineers and the regulatory specialists are both present. Best for clinical engineers and medtech founders building hardware for care settings.

with Florian Götting (Trainer, Analytics Pioneers) · Marcus Stade (Host, Analytics Pioneers) · Patrick Mohr (Host, Analytics Pioneers)

A two-hour live training on the JSON Server Tag for server-side Google Tag Manager, run by the Analytics Pioneers community. The session covers building flexible JSON payloads and sending them to any HTTP endpoint, schema validation and data quality checks with Drag & Drop Analytics, and worked examples of further use cases. Led by Florian Götting with Marcus Stade and Patrick Mohr. Held in English, 10:00 to 12:00 UK time. Free, and not recorded. Registration is on the Analytics Pioneers site rather than through Meetup. Online only, so it is not on the Birmingham city page.

Business Buzz's monthly Birmingham drop-in: two hours of unstructured morning networking in a city-centre restaurant, no pitches or speaker slot. Part of a national franchise network. GBP 13.55 on the door price online.

A women-only, special-edition hackathon run by the University of Birmingham's Builders Club with UoB Women in Tech, WISE and the AI Society. Theme reveal, a few hours to build a prototype in teams, then quick pitches. No experience needed; a prep workshop runs on 9 November. Free, registration needs approval. Room LG12, Murray Learning Centre.

A CIBSE West Midlands technical evening on designing building services around large delta-T heat pumps, hosted at Cundall's Colmore Row office. Free.

with Craig McVoy (Founder & CEO, Turnkey) · Nigel Hall (Investor, The Digital Consigliere) · Ayesha Kotecha (Investor, RandalSun Capital) + 3 more

Female-founded startups and SMEs pitch live to a panel of four investors — Katherine Hill of Mercia Ventures, Ayesha Kotecha of RandalSun Capital, Nigel Hall of The Digital Consigliere and Craig McVoy of Turnkey — in front of an audience of investors and founders. The panel names a "One to Watch" and an overall winner, and the evening closes with a networking session with angel investors and VCs. Also speaking: Professor Deb Leary OBE of Forensic Pathways, Henrietta Brealey of the Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce, Fran Williams of The Calmness Crew, and Harinder Kunor of NatWest Accelerator. Free, 17:00 to 20:00, delivered with NatWest. The venue is published only as "GBCC Venue TBC", so with no address and no stated location-on-registration arrangement it cannot go on the city page yet.

with Rosie Ginday MBE (Founder, Miss Macaroon)

Rosie Ginday MBE, founder and CEO of Miss Macaroon, in conversation at Aston's John Cadbury House on Corporation Street, 17:30 to 19:30. Professor Paula Whitehouse, Director of the Aston Centre for Enterprise and Entrepreneurship, hosts. Welcome drinks and networking from 17:30, the conversation itself from 18:00 to 18:45, audience questions until 19:00, then networking. Ginday built Miss Macaroon as a social enterprise, training young people out of work or care alongside running a commercial food business, and the session covers the business journey and what running a company with a social mission actually demands. Why go: a founder who has held a double bottom line together for years, in a format with real audience time rather than a stage interview. Best for social enterprise founders and anyone building a business with a mission attached.

fizzPOP, Birmingham's makerspace, opens to the public: look round the workshop, see the laser cutters, 3D printers and electronics benches, and talk to members about getting started. Free, weekly.

fizzPOP, Birmingham's makerspace on Coventry Street, turns its second-Wednesday open night into a software and microelectronics social, 18:30 to 20:30. It is a working session rather than a talk: bring a home automation project, an empty breadboard, a coding problem you are stuck on, or turn up and see what other people are doing. Members work in Python, JavaScript, Go, Rust, C and 6502 assembly, and the hardware ranges from Raspberry Pis and Arduinos to ESP32s and robot vacuums. The space has a stocked electronics room and benches to work at. Beginners are welcome and you do not need to be a member. Free. Why go: one of the few places in the city where you can get unstuck on a hardware problem with someone looking over your shoulder. Best for hobbyist and professional embedded and electronics people.

The Birmingham .NET and MAUI user group runs a watch-and-discuss evening around .NET Conf 2026, the launch of .NET 11 and the latest .NET MAUI release. The group picks the session, live or recorded, once Microsoft publishes the full programme, and the room then works through what the changes mean in practice for C#, .NET and MAUI codebases. At Bluetel Solutions on Temple Row, next to Snow Hill station; ring the bell. Food and networking from 18:30, introductions 18:45, session and discussion from 19:00, close 20:30 and on to the pub. Free. Hosted by Dave Evans and Ryan Glenn Smith, with the venue from Bluetel and food from ParentPay. Why go: watching a release keynote alone tells you what shipped; watching it with the people who maintain .NET estates in Birmingham tells you what will actually bite. Best for C# and MAUI developers and anyone responsible for a .NET upgrade path.

Free evening networking for Birmingham professionals, small business owners and founders in a Great Western Arcade bar. Open-floor format, no programme or speakers published.

A one-day conference on order-to-cash and credit operations, including the automation and decisioning tooling now standard in collections and risk teams. Held at IET Birmingham, Austin Court.

BCIC West Midlands annual conference on lowering energy costs and opening new markets for regional manufacturing and supply-chain firms.

with Mihaela Savu (Consul General, Consulate General of Romania in Birmingham) · Cllr Zaker Choudhry (Lord Mayor, Birmingham City Council)

A day of structured roundtables matching West Midlands companies, public bodies and research groups with a delegation of Romanian startups, many of them science-led or deep tech. The focus is real operational problems in the region, and whether a startup can solve them. It runs as part of How to Web's DELTA Bootcamp Winter Edition and the UK-Romania Economic Mission, hosted by the Consulate General of Romania in Birmingham. Consul General Mihaela Savu and the Lord Mayor, Cllr Zaker Choudhry, open it, then three roundtable blocks run from 10:30 to 17:00 with networking in between. TechWM, Rise Hub, Launch Romania and Fourth Space are among the partners. Free, but registration needs approval and the exact address is shared on registration. Why go: a rare chance for West Midlands corporates and public-sector buyers to put a real problem in front of founders and get answers the same day. Best for innovation leads, procurement teams and anyone scouting deep-tech suppliers.

A general business expo and networking day at Alexander Stadium.

An ERP discovery day at Edgbaston Stadium: pre-qualified one-to-one meetings with ERP suppliers matched to your requirements, plus sessions on selection and implementation. Free to attend; vendor-matching format.

A free half-day martech event at Edgbaston Stadium, 10:00 to 14:00, built around a format the organisers call 5inTwenty. Speakers are given twenty minutes and challenged to deliver five genuine strategic takeaways, with product promotion explicitly ruled out. Around the sessions is The Marketplace, set up as a consultation hub rather than an exhibition hall, where you can take a specific technical problem to vendors and specialists one to one. Framework Media expects more than 200 marketing professionals, mostly in-house teams from across the Midlands. Free. Why go: the time limit is the point, and it makes this denser than most free vendor-funded events. Best for in-house marketers with a concrete martech problem and half a day to solve it.

with Will Crawford (Guest speaker, Fireside Chat Networking)

The November edition of this paid networking evening, with a fireside-chat interview with Will Crawford, at the Harvest Fields Centre.

with Steve Wade (Platform engineering consultant, )

Steve Wade takes over the DevOps Society's Birmingham evening at AND Digital on Brindley Place, 18:00 to 21:00 - three acts rather than a speaker line-up. It opens with a 15-minute keynote on what is changing across Kubernetes, AI and platform engineering. The main talk, The Human API, asks why engineers who communicate fluently with machines struggle to explain an architectural decision to the person next to them; it is participatory, so you practise on the people around you. The last hour is a presenting workshop in small groups, closing with PowerPoint Karaoke. Wade founded Platform Fix, is a Kubernetes Ambassador, a former Flux maintainer and Istio contributor, and has trained over 6,000 engineers. Free. Why go: communication training for engineers is usually corporate and generic; this one is run by someone with 15 years in production infrastructure and KubeCon talks behind him. Best for DevOps, SRE and platform engineers.

The West Midlands launch of SoPHE's TM70 engineering guidance document, held at Aston University. Free.

A weekly evening business strategy and networking session for small-business owners, run through the Birmingham Business Meetup group at Manahatta on Temple Street.

A day of coworking for freelancers and micro-businesses at x+why Foundry, with a talk from Gus Bhandal of The M Guru on what he calls the infinite strategy. 9am to 4:30pm.

A regional forum for freelancers and micro-businesses working in creative technology, at BOM on Dudley Street, 10:00 to 12:00. It is part of a series of four free gatherings across the West Midlands, run through the CreaTech Frontiers programme, delivered by the University of Warwick with sector lead Amy Dalton-Hardy. The organisers are clear about what it is not: no skills programme, no funding workshop, no application clinic. It is a room for people working independently in games, immersive tech, digital arts, creative AI, tech-enabled performance, motion capture and spatial design to meet each other and shape what the regional sector looks like. CreaTech Frontiers cohort members and everyone else equally welcome. Free. Why go: freelancers in this field rarely have anywhere to compare rates, clients and pipeline. Best for independent creative technologists anywhere in the West Midlands.

with Stuart Goldsmith (Guest speaker, People Planet Pint)

People Planet Pint's Birmingham edition with Stuart Goldsmith — an informal sustainability meet-up for people doing climate and social-impact work inside ordinary jobs. Free, no pitching, at the BRIG Café in The Warehouse. Relevant to climatetech founders and anyone with sustainability newly landed on their desk.

A Birmingham City University conference on men's and young people's mental health in a digital world, at the Seacole Building. Paid.

A Saturday morning coworking session for women building their own businesses: coffee and introductions, focused work time, then a short strategy circle to talk through what you're stuck on. Free, at Runway East in Arca on Temple Row. Small capacity.

An entrepreneur meetup framed around turning an industry you already spend money in into an additional income stream.