Tech events in edinburgh

A short, self-directed dev jam built around Jev, TypeSafe's new decision model. It does not write text: you give it messy unstructured input and it returns typed decisions with a confidence score, in well under a second. Think of it as a smart if-statement you can drop into normal code - classify this, route that, pick the right option from a long list. Run by new stacks, the Edinburgh nocode, visual development and AI community, hosted at CodeBase. 16:00 intro and setup, build until 18:00, then a couple of minutes each for show and tell. No prior experience needed; bring a laptop and an idea. You need your own Jev credits. Why go: two and a half hours actually building with a model most people have only read about, in a room small enough to see what everyone else got working. Best for engineers and technical founders who learn by shipping something.

with Sid Kathirvel (Growth advisor, Unlock Growth)

Barclays Eagle Labs Scotland runs a half-day working session at CodeBase on the thing most early-stage founders get wrong: they treat stalled revenue as a sales or marketing problem when it is a customer problem. Sid Kathirvel of Unlock Growth leads it across three stages - why customers actually switch, turning that into positioning and messaging they recognise, and spotting the moment someone is ready to act. Kathirvel has spent 25 years on revenue ceilings and mentors founders through Barclays Eagle Labs, CodeBase Techscaler, Geovation and Edinburgh Innovations. He stays on afterwards for a round table on attendees' own problems. Free and in person, 09:00 to 12:30 at CodeBase, 37a Castle Terrace. You leave with a messaging framework you can use on a website, a pitch and a sales call. Why go: Edinburgh has plenty of founder breakfasts and few sessions that make you rewrite your positioning before lunch. Best for pre-launch and early-revenue founders who cannot say why growth stopped.

The Scottish Social Services Council's day-long symposium at the COSLA Conference Centre on using AI responsibly in social work, social care and children's services. The SSSC launches its new guidance for workers and employers here, putting into practice the five principles it published earlier this year. Presentations, workshops and a panel across 10:00 to 16:15, covering where AI is already used in social services, how ready an organisation is to adopt it safely, what research says about AI's effect on professional judgement, and a human-rights approach that keeps dignity and choice central. Deliberately interactive — what the room says shapes how the SSSC supports the sector next. Free with lunch, and currently sold out. Why go: this is applied AI where getting it wrong harms people, discussed by the people accountable for it. Best for anyone leading AI adoption in a public-service or care setting.

with Javier Ruiz Diaz (Technology and Human Rights Lead, Amnesty International UK) · tèmítópé lasade-anderson (Executive Director, Glitch) · Haylea Campbell (Senior Associate, Pro Bono Practice, Hogan Lovells Cadwalader) + 2 more

A fireside chat in the Edinburgh Futures Institute's large event space on how AI is reshaping fundamental rights — speech, labour, privacy and freedom of movement — and the politics around them. Chaired by Dr Zeerak Talat of the Centre for Technomoral Futures, the panel is Javier Ruiz Diaz (Technology and Human Rights Lead, Amnesty International UK), tèmítópé lasade-anderson (Executive Director, Glitch), Haylea Campbell (Senior Associate in the pro bono practice at Hogan Lovells Cadwalader) and Professor Michael Veale (Technology Law and Policy, UCL). Part of the Technomoral Conversations series. Free, 18:00 to 19:30, with audience questions. The event is hybrid and live-captioned, with a real room at Lauriston Place. Why go: a human-rights lawyer, a digital-harms organiser, a City pro bono lawyer and a tech-policy professor rarely share a stage, and the questions are the ones AI teams get asked by their own legal departments. Best for people shipping AI in regulated or public-facing products, and for policy and legal staff who have to review it.

CodeBase's monthly drop-in morning at its Castle Terrace building: coffee, a loose agenda, and the Edinburgh tech community in one room on the first Wednesday of the month. Open to everyone, no tech background needed. Two structured bits inside an otherwise unstructured hour and a half. The Community Bell is an open floor for anyone to announce an opportunity or an event in the month ahead. The Spotlight is a five-minute slot to tell the group something — a founder journey, an investor's lessons, an odd career path — with no slides and no pitch. Drop in any time between 08:30 and 10:00. Free, but register, because CodeBase checks people in on the door. Why go: it is the cheapest way into Edinburgh's startup network, and the Community Bell means you leave knowing what else is on. Best if you are new to the city's tech scene, or recruiting for something.

A full-day in-person masterclass from Scottish Enterprise at the COSLA Conference Centre, aimed at SME leaders who have to make decisions about AI investment and governance rather than build models. The day is built around frameworks and peer work, not technology: establishing AI governance, drafting usable policies, and getting from scattered pilots to a strategy with measurable value. You work on your own business through the day and leave with a draft AI strategy, a prioritised list of AI opportunities and an outline governance and policy framework. Aimed at senior decision-makers and functional leads in digital, operations, innovation, technology and HR. Runs 09:30 to 16:30. Free, and currently sold out with a waitlist. Why go: most AI sessions for leaders stop at awareness; this one makes you produce the documents your board will ask for. Best for SME leaders already running AI pilots who need to make them official.

with Kuan-Chuan Pao (Co-Founder and Principal Scientist, Outrun Therapeutics) · Elijah Nazarzadeh (Founder & CSO, Nebu-Flow) · Dr Poonam Malik (Investor and Executive Board Chair, Independent)

Bae HQ brings its scaling panel to Edinburgh with HSBC Innovation Banking and CMS equIP, aimed at founders working out how to grow past the early stage. Three speakers. Kuan-Chuan Pao, co-founder and principal scientist at Outrun Therapeutics, a healthtech unlocking the therapeutic potential of protein stabilisation, backed by M Ventures. Elijah Nazarzadeh, founder and CSO of Nebu-Flow, rebuilding nebuliser technology for biologic drugs, backed by Scottish Enterprise and SIS Ventures among others. Dr Poonam Malik, a serial entrepreneur, board chair and investor across biotech, medtech and healthtech. Networking with the speakers and the Bae HQ community follows. Registration is by host approval and the exact address goes to registrants. Bae HQ is the UK ecosystem for Asian-heritage founders and investors. Why go: three people who have actually raised and scaled life-sciences companies, in one room - which Edinburgh gets less often than its research base would suggest. Best for founders raising now or soon, and investors covering healthtech.

with Marc Burgauer (Speaker, BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT)

Marc Burgauer's talk for BCS, hosted in Skyscanner's Quartermile office, argues that the practices a development team writes down are not the practices it actually uses — and that this is the gap where AI tooling either helps or quietly makes things worse. Billed as "Nobody Knows Where We're Going", the session offers methods for surfacing how delivery really happens inside a team and then deciding where AI belongs in it. Seventy-five minutes, 18:30 to 19:45, free, in person at a working engineering office rather than a hotel suite. Why go: nearly every engineering-management talk this year is either an AI demo or a scepticism piece; this one is about the organisational mechanics underneath, which is the part that decides whether the tools land. Best for engineering managers, tech leads and delivery leads with a team whose process has drifted from its documentation.

with John Owen (CEO, The Investment Association) · Sandra Boss (Senior Managing Director, Chair, BlackRock) · Kirstie MacGillivray (CEO, Aegon) + 4 more

The Investment Association's flagship Scottish conference, at The Exchange in Edinburgh — 20-plus sessions across more than eight hours, for an expected 300-plus asset managers, regulators and policymakers. Technology runs through most of it: a leadership panel with Xavier Meyer (Aberdeen), Kirstie MacGillivray (Aegon) and Sandra Boss (BlackRock); a tokenisation spotlight with Janus Henderson and Baillie Gifford; an operational-resilience fireside with M&G; Lucy Castledine of the FCA on consumer investments; and a Power Pitch from Dr Sonia Schulenburg of Level E Research. Stephen Flynn MSP, Cabinet Secretary for the Economy, is in conversation. Free for IA full members, £49 plus VAT for affiliate members, £199 plus VAT otherwise. Why go: Edinburgh's investment-management industry is one of the UK's largest buyers of financial technology, and this is the one day a year its decision-makers are all in one building. Best for fintech founders selling into asset managers, and anyone working on tokenisation or AI in regulated finance.

The weekly Venture Cafe Edinburgh Thursday Gathering at the Edinburgh Futures Institute on Lauriston Place — the thirty-first edition. Free, no ticket and no application. Doors from 17:00, with parallel sessions and an open networking floor running to around 20:00, and you can leave whenever it stops being useful. Each week's specific programme goes up on the Venture Cafe community site a few days beforehand; the shape of the evening does not change. The Venture Cafe network runs the same Thursday pattern in cities across Europe, and in Edinburgh it has become the one weekly fixture founders, students, investors and support organisations all pass through. Why go: it is the most reliable room in the city — on every Thursday, so it is the easiest place to be found and the easiest thing to bring someone along to. Best for founders who want conversations rather than talks, and for anyone new to Edinburgh tech.

The Friday co-working morning for founders building scalable technology businesses, run by ScotlandIS and hosted at the Bayes Centre. The shape is fixed: 9:30 arrival and networking, 10:00 a round table of asks, offers and ideas, then ad-hoc discussions and co-working until 13:00. The space stays open until 17:00 if you want to keep working or take calls. ScotlandIS covers the refreshments, and guest speakers and office hours are being added to the schedule. The group gathers in the Bayes Lounge, at the large white tables to the left of the main concourse. Free, and experience levels run from pre-launch to scaling. Why go: the round table is what earns the morning. You say what you need and what you can offer in front of a room of other founders, which beats any amount of coffee-chasing. Best for Edinburgh founders building alone who want a standing fixture in the week.

with Dr Rupert Nash (Research Fellow, EPCC, University of Edinburgh) · Steph Wright (CEO and Co-Founder, Our AI Collective) · Dr Victoria Plutshack (Coordinator, No Gyle Data Centre campaign, Independent research consultant) + 2 more

A one-hour lunchtime panel arguing that hyperscale AI datacentres are a political choice rather than a foregone conclusion: what they draw in power and water, who carries the cost, and what communities have actually managed to stop. Dr Rupert Nash of EPCC, the UK's national supercomputing centre, sits alongside Steph Wright of Our AI Collective, who worked on Scotland's first national AI strategy, Dr Victoria Plutshack of the No Gyle Data Centre campaign, and Kim Pratt of Friends of the Earth Scotland. Anna Komendantskaya of People & Planet chairs. Part of Edinburgh's Radical Book Fair at Assembly Roxy. Free, with a £5 ticket and a pay-it-forward fund for those who can. Why go: a supercomputing researcher and a datacentre campaigner on one panel is rare, and the Gyle proposal makes it local rather than abstract. Best for anyone working on AI infrastructure, energy or public policy.

Eleanor Drage on her book What If We Got AI Right? (Profile, 2026), as part of the New College Festival of Books and Belief. Marion Thain chairs. Drage's argument is that the real risks of AI sit in the systems, incentives and power structures already deployed rather than in doomsday scenarios, and that feminism, reparative justice and climate politics belong in the debate rather than at its margins. She is an AI ethicist and co-author of The Good Robot. One hour, 17:30 to 18:30, in Martin Hall at New College on Mound Place. Enter through the glass door at the main gated entrance. Supported by Kenneth and Isabel Morrison. Why go: a serious critique of how AI actually gets built and governed, argued without the existential-risk framing that dominates everything else. Best for people working on AI policy, ethics or responsible-AI teams.

EdLUG's monthly Edinburgh meeting. It moved venue in late October: now the study space at the Futures Institute, entered through the Canopy Cafe door off Middle Meadow Walk, not Old College. The format is open: people bring laptops and work through whatever is broken, and the group trades notes on distros, shell scripting, desktop customisation, server management and self-hosting. There is a show-and-tell strand too: hardware projects, open-source replacements for everyday software, and which machines run Linux cleanly. Beginners are explicitly welcome — several regulars arrived wanting help moving off Windows or macOS. The group also runs a public mailing list at lists.edlug.org.uk. Free, two hours, no speaker list and no programme. Why go: one of the few Edinburgh rooms where you can turn up with a broken GRUB or a driver problem and leave with it fixed by someone who has seen it before. Best for sysadmins, self-hosters and anyone moving a daily driver to Linux.

Edindies is Edinburgh's indie game development group, and this is its standing Saturday session: three hours of co-working at LEVELS cafe and lounge on Holyrood Road, on the large benches near the entrance. Hosted by Norgg and Fallible. There is no programme. People bring whatever they are building, work alongside each other, hand round builds for playtesting and talk through problems. Experience is not expected and nothing needs to be finished. The series runs every Saturday until 13 December. Free, drop-in, nothing to book beyond the Meetup RSVP. Why go: playtesting is the part that is hard to arrange on your own, and this is a dependable weekly slot where someone will pick up your build and tell you what they actually felt. Best for solo and small-team game developers in Edinburgh who want company and a second pair of eyes on a Saturday.

A full-day industry conference on Scotland's solar and battery storage pipeline, covering domestic rooftops and home batteries through commercial and industrial installations to utility-scale projects, with the policy and investment conditions attached to each. Run by Solar Energy UK and hosted by its Solar Energy Scotland arm, 09:00 to 17:00 at the COSLA Conference Centre in Haymarket. The organisers are assembling industry leaders, policymakers, investors and local authorities. The speaker list was not published at the time of writing and ticket prices are not shown on the registration page. Why go: this is where Scottish solar and storage deployment gets negotiated — grid connections, planning, procurement — rather than discussed in the abstract. Best for cleantech founders, energy developers and investors who need the policy side and the buyer side in one day. Less useful if you came for technical depth.

A three-hour pitching workshop at the Royal Bank Accelerator on Princes Street, the sixth session in its 12-week Funding Accelerator programme. You can come to this one alone without signing up for the full series. The agenda covers storytelling principles for a memorable pitch, the ingredients every pitch needs, practical exercises on message and structure, and real founder stories. It ends with a Pitch Club slot where you practise delivery and get feedback. It runs 9:30 to 12:30 and the speaker is still to be confirmed. The listing doesn't show a price. Why go: it's hands-on, not a talk. If you've got a pitch to give in the next few months, you leave having said it out loud to a room and heard what lands. Best for early-stage founders pitching for funding.

with Dmitriy Fedoryshchev (Lead Software Engineer, Independent)

Dmitriy Fedoryshchev, a lead software engineer, on how to tell whether agent-written code is making a codebase safer or riskier. His case study is modernising a 600-table, 21TB legacy core into microservices — the fifth attempt after four that failed — with a squad that went AI-native on a custom multi-agent system under one rule: only merge code you can explain. He also covers turning the rules the agent kept breaking into checks it cannot skip, built into his own open-source tooling. Tenth edition of the TechTalks Edinburgh series, at CodeBase on Castle Terrace. Doors 18:00 with pizza and drinks, opening talk 18:30, main talk 18:40, Q&A 19:30, pub afterwards. Free, 100 places on Meetup. Partners include CodeBase and Scottish Technology Club. Why go: the most concrete Edinburgh talk this autumn on AI-generated code in a real legacy migration rather than a demo repo. Best for engineers and tech leads deciding how far to let agents into production.

GameDevEd's November social for Edinburgh game developers, one of a fortnightly run of informal Tuesday evenings for the city's games community. Ground floor of OX184 on the Cowgate, at the grid of four tables by the western entrance, usually with the group's logo on the table. 18:00 to 21:00, free, no ticket. All stages and disciplines — studio staff, indies, students, artists, audio and community people. Bring a build or a video if you have one and you will get an audience; the hosts are explicit that nobody has to drink, and plenty of the group eat dinner instead. Hosted by Ewan Fisher and Fallible, with a Discord for the wider local gamedev calendar. Why go: games hiring and collaboration in Scotland runs almost entirely on who people know, and this is the most regular room in Edinburgh where that happens. Best for anyone working in or trying to get into games.

Edinburgh Tech Network's monthly evening drinks for people working in tech — engineers, product managers, designers, UX. No talks, no slides, no agenda; the whole format is conversation in a pub. From 19:00 at The Slug and Lettuce on George Street, free, RSVP on Meetup. It runs on a repeating Wednesday pattern, so there is another one along shortly if you miss it. The group is one of the larger general tech networks in the city and the room is mixed by discipline and seniority rather than organised around a stack. Why go: it is the lowest-effort way to meet people in Edinburgh tech — no ticket, no talk to sit through, and you can leave after twenty minutes. Best if you have just moved to the city or are between roles; less useful if you want substance on a specific technical topic.

Founders Coffee Club is a monthly coffee morning for founders at Jamaica Yard, 3 Jamaica St, EH3. No speeches, no presentations, no selling. You turn up, get introduced to someone on arrival and talk. Founders only. Registration goes through Luma and needs host approval. The ticket also covers coworking at Jamaica Yard for the rest of the day, so you can stay and work after the 10:00 start. Why go: a low-pressure hour to meet other Edinburgh founders without a pitch in the way. Best for early-stage founders who work alone and want peers, not for anyone hunting investors or customers.

The weekly Venture Cafe Edinburgh Thursday Gathering at the Edinburgh Futures Institute on Lauriston Place — the thirty-second edition. Free, no ticket and no application needed. Doors from 17:00, Connection Collider and parallel sessions through the evening, open networking floor to around 20:00. The week's programme is published on the Venture Cafe community site closer to the date. Edinburgh's edition has run continuously since April 2026 and draws founders, university researchers, investors and the city's support organisations without anyone needing a particular reason to be there. Why go: a standing weekly slot does more for a network than an occasional good event, because you can come back the following week with the person you were told to meet. Best for founders and operators who want unstructured time with the ecosystem rather than a panel.

with James Buchan (Founder and CEO, ePass) · Tirtho Dasgupta (Founder, Nirmanaa)

UX Edinburgh marks World Usability Day with two founders who have built public-good products, talking about what it actually took. James Buchan, founder and CEO of ePass, traces the route from a CivTech challenge to national government infrastructure: doing discovery when every council works differently, designing for citizens, businesses, licensing officers and policy teams at once, and building one common component that 160+ licence types can configure. Tirtho Dasgupta, founder of Nirmanaa, built an accessibility co-pilot solo in nine weeks and talks about designing for uncertainty rather than certainty. Doors 17:15, talks from 17:45, close 19:30, at CodeBase. Free. Why go: both talks are first-hand delivery stories rather than theory, and the government-services one is material you rarely hear outside closed service-design circles. Best for designers, researchers and product people, and anyone working on public-sector digital in Scotland.

OutGeekWomen's Edinburgh evening at The Melting Pot on Calton Road, with short talks and open networking for women working in technology. The group describes itself as built for women in tech and open to anyone who wants in, and runs the same format across several UK cities. The Edinburgh edition is free, starts at 18:00 and runs to about 20:30, with the talks kept short so most of the evening is conversation. The Melting Pot is a co-working space rather than a bar, which keeps the room usable for actually talking. Why go: Edinburgh's technical meetups skew heavily male and this is the city's most consistent counterweight — a room where the networking is the programme rather than an afterthought. Best for women working in engineering, data, product and design, and for anyone recruiting into those teams who wants to meet people outside their referral network.

A six-hour co-working day at CodeBase for people building digital products: a new MVP, UX work, the marketing outreach you keep deferring. Run by new stacks, the Edinburgh nocode, visual development and AI community. There is no programme. No presentations, no sponsored lunch, no pitching. Ambient music and a room of other people working on their own thing, with the implicit deal that you turn up and move something forward. Free, 10:00 to 16:00. The door is locked, so buzz it. Why go: Edinburgh has plenty of evening talks and very few long daytime blocks where founders sit and build alongside each other. If your side project only moves when someone else is in the room, this is the format. Best for solo founders, indie builders and anyone with something half-finished.

The annual in-person gathering of the Trusted Research Environment community, in Edinburgh for three days. TRE Communities brings together the people who build and run the secure data environments behind health and population research — platform engineers, data managers, information governance leads and the researchers who depend on them. Grown from an informal meeting of 30 into a multi-day conference, it is the one time this community meets face to face each year. Currently sold out; a returns list may open closer to the date.

The November edition of Edinburgh's monthly founders meetup, hosted in the offices of Shepherd and Wedderburn. An informal evening for people building companies in the city — early-stage founders, people thinking about starting, and the operators and investors around them. No pitches and no agenda beyond good conversation; the £5 ticket covers drinks.

EdinburghJS's November meetup pairs developer wellbeing with open-source maintenance — two talks and the usual pizza-and-questions second half. The group is Edinburgh's longest-running JavaScript community and draws engineers from across the city's product teams, not just front-end specialists.

A morning of networking and co-working for women founders at the Royal Bank Accelerator on Princes Street. She Scales runs monthly and mixes structured introductions with unstructured desk time, so you leave with both new contacts and a morning's work behind you. Open to founders at any stage, not only Accelerator members. Free.

The Apache CloudStack project's annual community conference, in Edinburgh this year and running three days. Wednesday 18 November is a hackathon for developers, engineers and project committers working on live issues; 19 and 20 November are technical sessions, talks and panel discussions on CloudStack and cloud infrastructure. At the John McIntyre Conference Centre on Holyrood Park Road. Ticket prices are not listed. Project committers and students can request a free ticket by emailing info@cloudstackcollab.org, and those registrations are approved against criteria rather than granted automatically. The speaker programme had not been published at the time of writing. Why go: an upstream open-source project bringing its contributor conference to Edinburgh is rare, and the hackathon day is the part that is genuinely hard to get elsewhere. Best for infrastructure and platform engineers; of little use if you do not run virtualised compute.

with David Reid (Founder, Because Brands Matter)

An evening on job hunting and personal brand, run by the Denholm team on George Street. The first half is an open Q&A with Denholm's consultants on how hiring actually works right now in Scotland's digital, marketing and tech market; the second is a session from David Reid of Because Brands Matter on building a personal brand that holds up. Useful whether you are actively looking or just keeping an eye on the market. Free.

The closing session of the Royal Bank Accelerator's Grow Your Sales series, pulling the run of workshops together into a written playbook you leave with. Practical rather than theoretical, aimed at founders doing their own selling. Free.

with Joycelyn Longdon (Climate researcher and founder, ClimateInColour)

Dr Joycelyn Longdon on 'Justice-led Conservation Technology' — designing biodiversity monitoring with forest communities in Ghana, using machine-learning bioacoustics to turn recorded sound into ecological data, and what changes when the people living in the forest shape the tooling rather than receive it. One hour, 16:00 to 17:00, at Inspace on Crichton Street, part of the Design Informatics seminar series run by Edinburgh College of Art. Longdon is an environmental justice researcher, writer and technologist, and the work discussed comes out of her PhD research at the University of Cambridge. No price is listed on the registration page. Why go: a concrete case of applied machine learning where the hard problems are participatory design and data ownership rather than model performance. Best for ML practitioners, designers and anyone building in climate or environmental tech.

with Claudia Cavalluzzo (Director, Venture Café Edinburgh)

Venture Cafe Edinburgh marks a year of Thursday Gatherings at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. The format is the usual one — Connection Collider from 17:00, a welcome from director Claudia Cavalluzzo, then programming and conversation until around 20:00 — but this is the birthday edition, so expect a fuller room and a look back at what the past twelve months built. Free, no ticket needed, open to anyone in or near the city's innovation community. Lauriston Place, as every week. Why go: the anniversary edition is the one Thursday when the people who normally come on alternate weeks all turn up at once, which makes it the highest-density networking evening in Edinburgh this autumn. Best for founders and investors who want breadth in a single evening, and for anyone who has been meaning to try Venture Cafe and wants to see it at full strength.

with Sarah Hale (Host, CTO Craft) · Tobi Tonner (Host, CTO Craft) · Alastair McFarlane (Host, CTO Craft)

CTO Craft brings its Mixers format to Edinburgh: an evening for CTOs and senior engineering leaders built around conversation rather than talks. The Mixers series runs as relaxed evenings of shared stories, peer networking and informal learning among people with comparable jobs. This edition is hosted by Sarah Hale, Tobi Tonner and Alastair McFarlane, with around 15 attendees registered at the time of writing. Registration is free and the exact address is shared on sign-up — the listing confirms a venue in Edinburgh. Why go: Edinburgh has plenty of engineering meetups but very little at the level where the problem is a board conversation, a reorganisation or a platform bet, and this format keeps the group small enough that people say the real version. Best for CTOs, VPs of Engineering and heads of platform; it is explicitly a peer room, not a talk you watch.

The weekly Friday morning founder co-working session at the Bayes Centre, run with ScotlandIS. Bring your laptop, work alongside other founders for the morning, and use the breaks for the conversations that are hard to schedule. Free and drop-in.

Edindies is Edinburgh's indie game development community, meeting every Saturday afternoon at LEVELS for co-working, playtesting and chat. Drop in with whatever you are building.