ChangeNOW: The world’s largest event for the planet

The second half of 2026 is packed. Between July and December, there are more than 30 confirmed events worth your time across Europe, the US, and the Middle East, covering everything from AI infrastructure to retail tech, cybersecurity, developer tools, and the full founder-investor circuit. This is not a list of every conference. It’s a selection built around a single filter: does this event put you in a room with people who can move your company forward? Use it as a planning tool, not a bucket list. A mediocre event on the right date still costs you more than three days OOO. GITEX AI Europe 2026 📍 Berlin, Germany  |  🗓 30 Jun–1 Jul 2026 GITEX AI Europe returns to Messe Berlin for its second edition, bringing together 25,000+ tech and business leaders, 1,400+ global enterprises and startups, and 600+ investors from over 100 countries. The event runs four co-located programs: AI Everything Europe for real-world AI applications, North Star Europe for startups with a €50,000 equity-free pitch prize, GISEC Europe for cybersecurity, and GITEX Quantum Expo for quantum commercialisation. The first edition in 2025 drew 21,650 attendees and 755 startups.gitexeurope.com RAISE Summit 2026 📍 Paris, France  |  🗓 8–9 Jul 2026 RAISE Summit 2026 brings together 9,000+ AI leaders, founders, investors and policymakers at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, with 350 speakers, enterprise AI discussions, a startup competition with a €10M+ prize pool, and an AI hackathon drawing 7,000 developers. The 2026 edition adds an invitation-only CxO Summit for Fortune 1000 executives, with closed-door sessions featuring executives from Mercedes, AXA, and Capgemini. Speaker lineup includes Yann LeCun, Mark Cuban, and representatives from OpenAI, Anthropic, and NVIDIA. raisesummit.com Love Tomorrow Summit 2026 📍 Boom, Belgium  |  🗓 23 Jul 2026 The fifth edition of Love Tomorrow Summit takes place on 23 July 2026 at De Schorre in Boom, Belgium, the same site as Tomorrowland, on the Thursday between its two festival weekends. The 2026 theme is the future of intelligence: exploring how AI, leadership, and human resilience interact as technological systems accelerate. The Summit brings together 7,000+ attendees across six programming pillars: Impact Entrepreneurship, Natural Intelligence, Science & Technology, Socio-Economic Perspectives, Health & Mindfulness, and Entertainment. There is no equivalent format anywhere on the calendar: a serious impact investing roundtable that ends with a festival. lovetomorrow.com LEAP 2026 📍 Riyadh, Saudi Arabia  |  🗓 31 Aug–3 Sep 2026 LEAP 2026 takes place at the Riyadh Exhibition and Convention Center in Malham, bringing together global technology leaders, startups, investors, entrepreneurs, and government organizations from around the world. The 2025 edition hosted 201,000 visitors, 1,800+ exhibitors, and 1,900+ investors with a combined AUM exceeding $22 trillion. LEAP has grown into one of the few places outside Silicon Valley and Europe where you access truly deep pools of sovereign and institutional capital. Not a startup networking event in the typical sense. Worth the trip if MENA or Gulf markets are on your roadmap. onegiantleap.com TechBBQ 2026 📍 Copenhagen, Denmark  |  🗓 26–27 Aug 2026 TechBBQ 2026 takes place at the Bella Center Copenhagen on August 26–27, bringing together 10,000+ founders, investors, and innovators from across Europe and beyond. Forbes named TechBBQ one of the hottest startup events in Europe for 2026. The event features dedicated matchmaking, pitch competitions, and a strong life sciences program, particularly valuable given Denmark’s outsized position in European biotech and pharma. The format is known for its deliberately warm, hygge-infused atmosphere: the kind of event where meaningful conversations actually happen rather than badge-scan exchanges. Side events run across Copenhagen throughout the week. techbbq.dk IFA Berlin 2026 📍 Berlin, Germany  |  🗓 4–8 Sep 2026 IFA 2026 takes place at Messe Berlin from 4 to 8 September. In its 102nd year, one of the most established consumer electronics and home appliances trade shows globally draws 215,000+ visitors from 140 countries and 1,800+ exhibitors. IFA Next is the dedicated startup zone connecting early-stage companies with investors, global retailers, and tech media. For hardware founders, consumer tech builders, and anyone touching smart home, AI devices, or connected mobility, this is a commercial platform rather than a networking conference. The distinction matters: you come here to sell and to be discovered, not to collect business cards. ifa-berlin.com Infobip Shift 2026 📍 Zadar, Croatia  |  🗓 13–15 Sep 2026 Infobip Shift 2026 takes place September 13–15 in Zadar, bringing together developers and engineers from around the world. The 2026 edition welcomes confirmed speakers from NVIDIA and Apple, with central themes covering cutting-edge technology platforms, career growth in tech, and practical AI tools. The 2025 edition gathered 5,500 attendees from 40 countries. The format rewards founders building technical products who need direct access to engineering talent and developer community: the conference where a junior developer can have a casual coffee with a Netflix senior engineer. Relaxed Mediterranean setting, serious technical content. shift.infobip.com Big Data & AI Paris 2026 📍 Paris, France  |  🗓 15–16 Sep 2026 Big Data & AI Paris 2026 takes place 15–16 September at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, held under the High Patronage of the President of the French Republic. The event describes itself as the meeting place for IT and data decision-makers industrialising AI. The 2026 Advisory Board includes Chief Data & AI Officers from AXA France, Suez, and L’Oréal, alongside the CEO of Hub France IA. The program covers enterprise AI deployment, data infrastructure, and an Advanced Computing Village focused on quantum and HPC. Practical, enterprise-first, and with direct access to the senior buyer community in French tech: if you’re selling data or AI solutions into large organizations, the room here is more relevant than most. bigdataparis.com NRF 2026: Retail’s Big Show Europe 📍 Paris, France  |  🗓 15–17 Sep 2026 NRF 2026: Retail’s Big Show Europe returns to Paris Expo Porte de Versailles with more than 12,000 attendees from over 60 countries, 4,200 brands, 525 exhibitors, and 200 speakers across three days. The event includes a Startup Hub spotlighting the newest retail tech companies and a

London-based AI laboratory Ineffable Intelligence has emerged from stealth with a $1.1 billion seed round at a $5.1 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed on 27 April 2026. The financing is the largest seed round ever raised by a European company and one of the largest first-money-in rounds in the global history of artificial intelligence. The round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Participating investors included Nvidia, DST Global, Index Ventures, Google, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund, the British government’s recently established vehicle for backing strategic AI capacity on home soil. A bet on a different path to general intelligence Ineffable Intelligence was founded in 2025 by David Silver, the former Vice President of Reinforcement Learning at Google DeepMind and the principal architect of AlphaGo, AlphaZero and AlphaStar. He is joined by three further DeepMind alumni: Wojciech Czarnecki, Lasse Espeholt and Junhyuk Oh. All four have spent the past decade at the frontier of reinforcement learning research, the discipline behind some of the most consequential demonstrations of machine learning over the past ten years. The company describes its objective as building a “superlearner” — an AI system capable of acquiring knowledge directly from its own experience rather than from human-generated text or imagery. “Our mission is to make first contact with superintelligence,” Silver said in a statement accompanying the launch. “We are creating a superlearner that discovers all knowledge from its own experience, from elementary motor skills through to profound intellectual breakthroughs.” The framing is a deliberate departure from the dominant industry trajectory. Most leading AI laboratories, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind itself, have built large language models trained primarily on the corpus of the internet, then refined that training with human feedback. Ineffable’s wager is that the marginal returns on scaling text-based pretraining are diminishing and that the next leap in capability will come from agents that learn endlessly from the consequences of their own actions, in much the same way AlphaZero learnt the game of Go without studying any human matches. Why $1.1 billion at seed The size of the round is unusual even by the inflated standards of the 2026 AI capital cycle. Two factors appear to explain it. First, frontier reinforcement learning at the scale Ineffable describes is computationally extraordinarily expensive: the company will need to operate vast simulation environments and train very large models against them, an undertaking that consumes capital at a rate closer to physical R&D than to traditional software. Second, the round signals a strategic move by Europe’s investor and policy ecosystems to retain the most ambitious AI researchers on the continent. The presence of the UK Sovereign AI Fund alongside Sequoia, Lightspeed and Nvidia is the clearest expression of that intent. The British government has publicly framed the investment as a bet on breakthrough AI that “can discover new knowledge”, positioning the country as a willing co-investor in domestic frontier laboratories. For Ineffable, the implication is access not only to capital but to compute, regulatory engagement and the still-resilient academic talent base around UCL, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial. Founder pledge of historic scale Alongside the funding announcement, Silver disclosed that he is committing 100 per cent of any personal proceeds from his Ineffable equity to charity via the Founders Pledge network — described by the organisation as the largest pledge in its history. At the round’s $5.1 billion valuation, that commitment could ultimately exceed several billion dollars if the company succeeds. It is a meaningful gesture in a sector where the reputational stakes around concentrated AI wealth are escalating, and one likely to be referenced in subsequent founder-led commitments. Implications for the European AI landscape Ineffable’s emergence reshapes the European AI map in three concrete ways. It establishes London as the home of the continent’s largest-ever seed-stage company, complicating Paris’s recent narrative of frontier-AI primacy after Mistral’s earlier rounds. It validates a thesis — that reinforcement learning, not transformer scaling, is the next frontier — that has lately been losing capital share to language-model incumbents. And it confirms that the UK government is now willing to act as a balance-sheet co-investor in domestic AI laboratories, a posture much closer to the French model than to the predominantly grant-based regimes elsewhere in Europe. The execution risk is non-trivial. Reinforcement learning at frontier scale has historically required years of careful environment design before producing competitive systems, and Ineffable’s “first contact” framing sets a high bar against which it will be judged. But for now, with a billion dollars on the balance sheet, four of the discipline’s most accomplished researchers in the founding team and a sovereign co-investor at its back, Ineffable Intelligence is the most heavily resourced new entrant in the European AI cycle. Sesamers covers European fundraising rounds across deeptech, fintech and AI. Source: tech.eu.

Belfast's Cloudsmith has raised $72M Series C led by TCV, with Insight Partners participating, to expand its artifact management platform and secure the AI-era software supply chain.