Edinburgh — Week of 4 May 2026

Hands-on session for Scottish founders considering how to fund a startup without losing control. Covers equity vs alternative funding routes, and brings in practitioners from NatWest's Edinburgh accelerator cohort. Useful for early-stage founders making live funding decisions.

Edinburgh International Data Facility's bi-annual town hall, open to companies, academics and public sector users of Scotland's HPC research infrastructure. Hear use cases from Garandor, the National Collection of Aerial Photography and the Genomic Data Analysis Centre, with Q&A and networking. Hybrid format — attend in person or remotely.

An online research-grade talk from AIoT Hub Scotland on federated learning at the edge applied to smart grid management. Strong fit for engineers, researchers and climate-tech teams working at the intersection of AI, IoT and energy.

CodeBase's relaxed monthly morning for anyone in or around Edinburgh's tech ecosystem. Good conversations over coffee, community announcements, and the chance to meet new faces — from seasoned founders to people exploring a career in tech. No agenda, no pitch, no pressure. First Wednesday of every month.

Edinburgh's flagship pre-seed to Series A founder-investor summit returns to The Biscuit Factory. A full day of honest conversation about what's working, what's not, and where the opportunities are for early-stage founders and the investors backing them. Second release tickets now available — connection over pitches.

LFDT Scotland hosts the lead author of the State of DLT 2026 report for a one-hour conversation on DLT adoption across financial services. Useful primer for fintech teams, researchers and curious engineers tracking the post-hype reality of distributed ledger technology.

The AWS Edinburgh user group returns to Skyscanner HQ for its May session. Community-led talks on building on AWS, plus pizza and networking for cloud engineers, architects and platform teams across the Edinburgh tech ecosystem.

A technical evening talk at Computershare on the observability gap in agentic AI systems — why traditional monitoring misses silent failures, and what engineers are trying instead. Strong fit for ML engineers, SREs and architects building with LLM agents.

Scotland's embedded systems and hardware community gathers at CodeBase to explore the latest in embedded tech, tools and best practice. Technical presentation, live demo and networking for firmware engineers, hardware developers and anyone working at the silicon-to-software boundary. Organised by non-profit Open Circuit Scotland.

Venture Café Edinburgh's weekly Thursday Gathering turns the spotlight on the researcher-turned-CEO dilemma. Panels, open conversations and drinks for deep-tech founders, academics and spin-out teams working through whether the science lead should also run the company.

CreateFuture gathers senior Scottish technology leaders for a frank panel discussion on practical AI implementation. Hear from Paul Gillespie (Director of Engineering, Skyscanner), Sarah Thomson (Head of Tech UK, People's Postcode Lottery) and Stuart Bell (Head of AI & Innovation, M&G) on identifying real opportunities, avoiding costly distractions and building board-level trust in AI. Selling fast.

Edinburgh PostgreSQL community returns to Patersons Land for an evening of lightning talks, pizza and networking — followed by drinks at The Canons Gait. Open to all levels, sponsored by pgEdge.

Launch evening for artist Sarah Calmus's immersive installation Right to Roam — a multisensory exploration of the river Forth and the climate crisis, combining moving image, sound and print. Creative-tech and design-informatics crowd.

CIMA's Edinburgh event asks a harder question than most AI panels: where is AI actually generating business value, and where is it just expensive theatre? Aimed at finance leaders, operators and founders trying to assess AI investments with clearer eyes.

Rust and Friends returns with a May evening of talks — including a session on Aetherus and Monte Carlo simulation in Rust — plus post-talk drinks. A staple for Edinburgh's systems-programming community.

Weekly Friday co-working and community session for tech founders hosted by ScotlandIS and the Bayes Centre at the University of Edinburgh. Drop in for focused work time, informal roundtables and peer support with other early-stage and scaling founders.