TechBBQ 2026: Copenhagen Startup Conference Expects 10,000 Attendees
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden
TechBBQ is back in Copenhagen on Aug. 26–27, 2026, with more than 10,000 people expected. This year’s theme is agency: who still steers tech when AI starts making the moves.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
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TechBBQ is heading back to Bella Center Copenhagen on August 26–27, 2026, and the organisers are expecting a crowd north of 10,000. That includes more than 2,000 people from venture capital funds, plus founders, policymakers and the usual swarm of people trying to be in the right room at the right time.
The conference has come a long way from its start in 2013 as an informal meetup in a Copenhagen park. Now it’s one of Europe’s bigger startup gatherings, and this year’s pitch is built around a single idea: agency. Or, more bluntly, who gets to make the decisions when agentic AI systems are doing more of the work.
That theme runs through the whole program. The organisers say autonomous tools can speed up execution, but human judgment, ethical governance and founder grit are still the real moat. They also frame technology as a matter of diplomacy, which feels very on-brand for a conference trying to be part startup forum, part policy machine.
The speaker list leans hard into that mix. Meredith Whittaker, Howard Wright, Max Welling, Paul Rippon, Hedda Båverud Olsson, Philipp Schröder, James Hawkins, Luke Pappas, Bastian Hasslinger, Fabrizio Del Maffeo, Maxim Romain and Rob Huckin are all on the bill, with the full program posted on techbbq.dk/speakers. Trending Topics says it will be on site in Copenhagen.
Beyond the main stage, TechBBQ is widening its life science and deep tech area, placing it next to the main tech hall. The space will bring together health, medtech, therapeutics and planetary well-being, with matchmaking sessions for biotech, healthtech and deep tech founders, live demos, pitch sessions and a track on deep tech, bio-engineering and climate resilience.
There are also separate tracks for fintech, Nordic-Africa and Nordic-India startup links, defence and dual-use, investor formats, governance sessions and ecosystem events like Hero Academy and IPO & Stock Market Day. The conference is trying to cover a lot of ground. Maybe too much ground, which is also a pretty good summary of European startup politics right now.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Tech conferences love to say they’re about the future, but the real product is access: to capital, to policymakers, to the people who get invited into the room. TechBBQ seems to understand that better than most, which is why the agency theme lands — the whole industry is obsessed with autonomy, yet still desperate for human gatekeepers. Nice irony, terrible branding for the robots.
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