Dublin tech events this week: Wednesday asks you to be in four places at once (25 Sep–1 Oct 2026)

Wednesday evening, Dublin asks you to be in four places at once. At 17:00, a Mastercard office in Leopardstown, agentic AI explained to the people who will have to run it. At 18:00, a cinema at Point Square for the second instalment of a public argument about who owns the models — or Trinity's Edmund Burke Theatre, clinicians working through what AI is doing to Irish healthcare. At 18:30, the basement of Kennedy's on Westland Row with the security crowd, no speakers at all.

Eleven tech events in Dublin between Friday 25 September and Thursday 1 October. Five are on Wednesday. Ten of the eleven are free; the eleventh costs €11.

The Big One: Quantum Ireland, Wednesday morning, before any of that

Quantum Ireland TechBREK: Optimisation and Machine Learning runs Wednesday 30 September from 08:30 at Trinity's Innovation Hub, free.

The TechBREK series works the applied end of the field, and this session takes where quantum optimisation and machine learning genuinely meet rather than where a slide says they might. If your job already involves optimisation — routing, scheduling, pricing — the real question is whether this is a 2030 problem or a 2027 one. A morning with the people doing the work beats another year of headlines.

Free, on campus, half eight on a Wednesday — the highest-scoring event on our Dublin board this week, and over before the evening pile-up starts.

The week ahead, by what you are actually there for

Where people argue about AI

The collision is all on Wednesday 30 September. Discovering Agentic AI hosted by Mastercard opens at 17:00 at Mastercard, South County Business Park, Leopardstown, free, from the Emerging Tech Pros User Group — autonomous agents discussed inside a payments company's own building, which keeps the talk honest about what ships.

An hour later, AI, Power & Our Future (Part 2): Empire of AI at ODEON Point Square, 18:00, €11, from Dublin City Council Culture Company: concentration of compute, who owns the models, what that means downstream. The only paid listing on our board, and the only one the city runs.

Same hour, other side of town: AI in Our Healthcare: Promises, Pitfalls and the Path Ahead in the Edmund Burke Theatre, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin, free. Patients and students, not products.

The strand closes Thursday 1 October at 18:30 with Introducing Machine Learning to a business for the first time at Dogpatch Labs, free, from Dublin Data Science — Neill on a recommender system he built for a car rental website a decade ago, and what it took to get it into production. The unglamorous first ML project teaches most teams more than the frontier does.

Founders, opening and closing the week

The window opens Friday 25 September at 09:30 with Pitch a Startup Idea for $500 in Prizes | Talent Hub Friday at Dogpatch Labs, free, from Superteam Ireland. A pitchathon is a hackathon for pitches, run in the lead-up to Colosseum's Crypto World's Fair hackathon (online, 14 September to 12 October).

Tuesday 29 September, 18:00: Launchy Party at Whelan's on Wexford Street, free — the first of its kind here, built on the fact that almost 50,000 new businesses were registered in Ireland in 2025 and almost none got a launch moment. Whelan's is a very Dublin answer.

Thursday 1 October gives founders two: BGIT X Squarespace: Beyond Visibility at Squarespace House, Ship Street Great, 17:00, free, a fireside with Black Girls In Tech; then The Founders' Table Dublin: Hugh McAlinden & Jason Cooper at the ISME offices, 17 Kildare Street, 18:00, free.

Two founders in conversation, deliberately small and deliberately unpolished. The useful sentence at these things is almost never the prepared one.

Properly technical, properly small

Linux Tech Talk: GPUISP in libcamera, Tuesday 29 September, 19:30, at Anseo, 18 Lower Camden Street, free. GPU-based image signal processing from the Dublin Linux Community, co-listed with the city's C++ and Linux groups. No product, no panel — a talk in a pub.

Dub|Sec Autumn Social, Wednesday 30 September, 18:30, in the basement of Kennedy's Pub on Westland Row, free, with no speakers by design. Behind Trinity, and the easiest of Wednesday's four to combine with anything finishing early.

Who should go where

Founders. One evening only? Thursday at the ISME offices — the smallest room on the board, and the one where you will actually get a question in. Friday's pitchathon is the better morning if you have an idea you have never said out loud.

Builders. Tuesday at Anseo for libcamera, Wednesday morning at Trinity for quantum. Both free, both technical, neither spends your evening on a roadmap slide.

Investors. Quiet, and we will say so: no demo day, no pitch night with cheques attached. Friday's pitchathon is $500 in prizes, not a term sheet.

Sales and marketing. Thursday at Squarespace — a fireside and a room of people building brands. Go to listen.

First-timer's note

Dublin's easiest doors this week are the ones with the lowest production values: Dub|Sec has no speakers, Anseo is a pub, Launchy is in Whelan's. Nobody there will interview you about what you are building. Start with those; save the lanyard rooms for a week when you know three people in them.

Worth knowing

• Wednesday's four-way clash is a geography problem, not a scheduling one. Leopardstown at 17:00, Point Square at 18:00, Trinity at 18:00, Westland Row at 18:30. South County Business Park is not a ten-minute hop from the North Wall. Commit the night before: pick Mastercard and you have given up the other three.
• Bring photo ID to the corporate-office events. Mastercard and Squarespace both run managed reception desks, and organisers across our network have started asking for ID matching the name on the RSVP. Register in the name on your passport, not a nickname.
• "Free" is nearly always free here, but check the ticket tiers. Ten of eleven Dublin listings cost nothing outright. Elsewhere on the network we corrected one this week that had gone out as free when its free tier was restricted to approved investors and partners. Dublin's board is clean — we checked — but read the tier before assuming.
• Nothing on this week's Dublin board is waitlisted. Last week's CHAI session hit capacity before the doors opened; every listing in this window still reads as available. A good week to register late — though not one for walking up to a Mastercard desk unannounced.

Coming up

Put SaaStock Dublin, 6 to 8 October in the diary now. It sits just outside this window and will bend the calendar for a fortnight. Investors, that is where your week went.

Eleven rooms, ten free, and a Wednesday that would be a full week in a smaller city. The complete board is at anopenroom.com/dublin. Running something we missed? Send it over and we will list it while it still matters.