Edinburgh — Week of 20 Apr 2026

The Chartered Institute of Marketing brings Craig Edwardson (Founder, Edwardson Digital; Advisory Board Member, Marketing Society Scotland) to Princes Street for a focused breakfast session on what actually drives B2B lead generation success via digital advertising. Topics include expectation-setting, attribution, sales-marketing alignment, and account-based marketing. 1 hour of CPD credit included. Free for members and non-members alike. Pastries from 8:30 AM, session from 9 AM.

A half-day workshop exploring creative funding approaches for business growth — from grants and angels to revenue-based finance and alternative sources most founders overlook. Hosted at the Royal Bank Accelerator in Edinburgh, this session is practical and founder-focused. Free to attend.

Edinburgh's best monthly founders event — colour-coded speed networking, a tactical fireside chat from experienced operators, and drinks at The Jolly Botanist. Hosted at Shepherd and Wedderburn by the UK Startup Hub team. Worth every penny of the £5.

Monthly blockchain community gathering at the Bayes Centre. Two featured speakers this month: Peter Aitchison (CEO, NanoData) on data-driven crypto copy trading, and artist Trevor Jones on 'Authorship in the Age of AI'. Includes dinner and networking across multiple venues — free entry for developers, students and members.

Sold out at Skyscanner HQ — Andy Irvine's strategic workshop on using AI agents to build a 'product brain'. Strongest product event of the week.

Weekly after-work drinks and tech conversation at The Abbey. Bring what you're building, what you're learning, or just yourself. Free and informal.

Barclays Eagle Labs brings Edinburgh's professional and founder community together at CodeBase for a quarterly morning network — consistent quality, cross-sector crowd, and a good way to start a Thursday.

Foras Ventures and Anderson Strathern give founders the term sheet education most only wish they'd had before their first fundraise. Free, hybrid, and approval-required — which means the room will be genuinely engaged.

Research seminar with Dr Alan Perotti (CENTAI, Turing Institute collaborator) on explainable AI techniques for natural language processing. Hosted in Informatics Forum G.03 and marked 'selling fast'. A short, high-signal session for ML engineers, researchers and product teams working on language models.

A lunchtime guided tour of the 'Between Glass and Magnetic Fields' exhibition at Inspace — a shorter, drop-in friendly follow-up to the 16 April interactive talk. Walks through how glass art and medical imaging data are combined in this Design Informatics collaboration with Fraunhofer MEVIS.

Earth Day edition of Venture Café Edinburgh's weekly Thursday Gathering. Focused on practical sustainability action for Scotland's innovation community — from climate tech founders to investors and researchers. Free, open, and built around serendipitous networking across the Edinburgh Futures Institute.

Two technical talks for engineers and security practitioners at CodeBase. Oleksandr Piekhota (Principal Engineer, Teaching Strategies) walks through 'AI Agents Explained: Skills, Loops and MCP', then Security Operations Analyst Cameron Cottam pulls back the curtain on practical threat intelligence work. Networking, pizza and drinks afterwards.

Edinburgh's PostgreSQL user group returns for its April meetup at Paterson's Land. Expect community talks on real-world Postgres usage plus casual networking with the city's database, backend and data-engineering scene.

Demo night for Edinburgh's applied-AI community, focused on the messy reality of shipping AI products when models, tooling and user expectations keep shifting. Expect short, technical lightning talks from practitioners taking AI from prototype to production, plus post-talk networking.

Scottish Parliament election hustings on tech, AI and the digital economy at the Bayes Centre — six named political and expert speakers including three MSPs and Prof Fiona McNeill (Edinburgh).