Paris tech events this week: sixteen rooms, and not one of them has a ticket price (25 September – 1 October 2026)

Sixteen tech events sit on our Paris page for 25 September to 1 October, and not one of them wants your money. All sixteen are free: no badge, no early-bird tier, nothing. Last week's page carried a EUR 390 conference and a EUR 450 one. This week the bill has stopped arriving.

The week is lopsided. Friday and Monday are empty. The weekend gives you a hackathon and a demo night, Tuesday carries five rooms — most of them institutional — and Wednesday 30 September holds seven by itself, three starting at the same minute.

The Big One: Google DeepMind takes the Open Platform

Startup Day France 2026 — Google for Startups & Google DeepMind — Thursday 1 October from 13:00, STATION F, 5 Parvis Alan Turing. Free.

Google for Startups and Google DeepMind take STATION F's Open Platform for an afternoon and evening built around what French startups are actually shipping. Featured on our page, free, and the only room this week putting a frontier lab, a platform team and the French startup establishment under one roof.

Free plus STATION F plus DeepMind closes registration fastest in this city, and it lands at the end of the window — sort it early, not on Thursday morning. Listed as running in both French and English.

The weekend: build on Saturday, watch on Sunday

{Tech: Europe} AI Gaming Hack — Saturday 26 September, 09:30. Free. Venue on registration.

A one-day hackathon on AI in video games from {Tech: Europe}, the pan-European community behind some of the continent's busiest hack days. No address on our listing — the location arrives with your confirmation, so register before Saturday.

Generathon 2 — Demo Night — Sunday 27 September, 16:00, La Cristallerie, 12 Rue Martel. Free.

Closing night of the second Generathon, a hackathon on the future of content creation: teams show what they built across the weekend. It carries the highest score on our Paris page this week, and a Sunday demo night is rare here. If you would rather watch things get built than hear them described, this is your Sunday.

Tuesday is the institutional day

Présentation du Projet Souveraineté numérique européenne 2026-2030 — Tuesday 29 September, 08:00, Cercle Europe IA & Finance, 58 Rue d'Hauteville. Free, in French. The Cercle presents its digital sovereignty programme for 2026-2030: cloud and AI independence, public procurement, what it would take. The only policy room on the board.

MOSAIC² DAY 2026 — Tuesday 29 September, 14:00, Université Paris Cité, Faculté de Médecine, Site Bichat, 16 Rue Henri Huchard. Free, in French. The annual day of the FHU MOSAIC² research federation, where clinical research meets methodology. Hospital-university rather than startup — worth an afternoon if you sell into health systems.

The evening splits at 19:00. AI Builders and Databases Paris puts the ClickHouse France user group in Equativ's offices at 44 Rue de Châteaudun, free, on where AI applications meet the database layer. Across town, Retour du Flutter Paris : Edge AI & autre talk restarts at Ippon Technologies, 43 Avenue de la Grande Armée, free, in French: models running on the device, and what that costs in battery.

Wednesday: seven rooms, one evening

STATION F opens the day twice. AI Growth Summit Paris — Q4 2026 runs from 09:00, free, a full day for SaaS founders and growth leaders on AI across go-to-market — not model building, but where AI earns its place in the funnel. At 11:00, VC Talk - Inside an Investor's Head, with Dominique Vidal gives you an hour with Eurazeo's Dominique Vidal on how an investor really reads a company: what earns a second meeting, what kills a deal.

The evening then fractures three ways at 18:30. [[WTM Paris x Google] AI Healing the World: AI4Health & AI4Med](https://anopenroom.com/paris/events/wtm-paris-x-google-ai-healing-the-world-ai4health-ai4med-0930) at Google France, 50 Rue d'Amsterdam — clinical decision support, imaging, and the regulatory reality of deploying it in Europe. PyLadies Paris Tech Talks #22 at Criteo, 32 Rue Blanche — featured, twenty-second edition, a series that keeps its standard. Durable AI Meetup Paris @ ScorePlay at La Fabrique République, 32 Rue de la Fontaine au Roi — the Temporal community on retries, long-running agent state, and pipelines that die halfway.

Two more at 19:00. Storytime by Hexa: Building a $150M SaaS Suite on Content at Hexa, 12 Rue Martel: one founder, one story, no deck. Cafe Compute Meetup: Paris brings Cerebras in for a practitioner evening on inference speed and wafer-scale hardware — venue on registration.

Thursday runs a second room alongside the Google afternoon: Builders & Brews: Hack Edition - Paris, 15:00, free, venue on registration — AI Tinkerers Paris building alongside the Nebius Global AI Hackathon with NVIDIA.

Hidden gem: two public institutions, one free evening

NLP Santé, Les Rencontres de l'ANS et d'Inria — Tuesday 29 September, 17:30, PariSanté Campus, 2-10 Rue d'Oradour-sur-Glane. Free, in French.

The Agence du Numérique en Santé and Inria hold a joint session on natural language processing for health data. We flagged it for who is in the room rather than what is on the slides: two of the institutions that will decide what French health AI is permitted to do — and nobody in there is selling anything.

Who should go where

Investors — better than usual. Sunday's Generathon demo night is where the dealflow is, unpolished and pre-seed; Thursday's Startup Day is the same people with a deck.

Founders — Wednesday at STATION F twice over: the growth summit for the day, the VC Talk for the hour that will change how you write your next cold email. Then Thursday.

Builders — Tuesday 19:00 is the real choice: databases at Equativ or edge models at Ippon. Wednesday, Durable AI at ScorePlay if you run agents in production, PyLadies at Criteo otherwise.

Growth and marketing — the AI Growth Summit is the only room aimed at you this week. Free, full day: it costs a Wednesday, not a budget.

Health and research — Tuesday belongs to you: Bichat in the afternoon, PariSanté in the evening, WTM at Google the next night.

Worth knowing

• Three of the sixteen publish no venue — the AI Gaming Hack, Cafe Compute and Builders & Brews. That is the listing, not an omission: the address comes with confirmation.
• Wednesday's 18:30 collision is real — three events at the same minute, twice in the 9th and once in the 11th. Nobody is doing two. Choose on Tuesday.
• 12 Rue Martel hosts twice in four days — La Cristallerie for Sunday's demo night, Hexa for Wednesday's Storytime. Same street, different doors.
• All sixteen are free — but read the ticket tiers. Elsewhere on our network we corrected a listing this week after an organiser restricted its free tier to approved partners.
• Four of the sixteen run in French — the sovereignty presentation, MOSAIC² DAY, NLP Santé, Flutter Paris. Two are bilingual, including Thursday at STATION F; the other ten are in English.

Sixteen rooms, no ticket prices, and one Wednesday that asks you to choose three times over. Everything live sits on the Paris listings page — if you run an afterwork, a demo night or a hackathon that is not on it, send it over.