TechBBQ started in 2013 as an informal founder gathering in a Copenhagen park. Thirteen years later it is one of Europe’s larger startup conferences: more than 10,000 people are expected at the Bella Center on August 26-27, 2026, including upwards of 2,000 investors and a Founders BBQ Showcase featuring 100 European startups.
This year’s theme is “Emerging from Agency,” which is the organizers’ way of asking a question that a lot of founders are already sitting with: as agentic AI takes on more of the actual execution, what’s left for the humans to decide? It’s a fitting theme for a conference that has quietly become a bellwether for where Nordic and European tech is headed, from climate hardware to AI infrastructure to fintech.
We’ll be there too, mostly hanging around the AI and marketing tracks. Before we go, here’s who else is on our list to see.
Startups and founders we’re watching
PostHog — The open-source product analytics platform has become the default answer for engineering teams who got tired of paying enterprise prices for basic event tracking. Co-founder James Hawkins is speaking, and PostHog’s own build-in-public approach to product and pricing is worth studying regardless of your stack.
1KOMMA5° — Founded by ex-Tesla executive Philipp Schröder, 1KOMMA5° bundles solar, batteries, heat pumps and EV charging into one install for homeowners, betting that the energy transition needs fewer vendors, not more. It’s grown into one of Europe’s fastest-scaling climate tech companies in just a few years.
Flatpay — A Danish fintech making card payments and point-of-sale terminals simple for small merchants, the kind of business that usually gets ignored by bigger payment providers. Founder Sander Janca-Jensen is co-hosting TechBBQ’s Future of Fintech track this year.
CuspAI — Cambridge-based and co-founded by machine learning researcher Max Welling, CuspAI applies AI to materials discovery, the unglamorous but massive problem of finding new chemical compounds for things like carbon capture and semiconductors. It’s the kind of deep tech bet that takes years to pay off and, if it does, changes entire industries.
Lassie — A Stockholm insurtech that rebuilt pet insurance around prevention rather than just paying out after something goes wrong. Founded by Hedda Båverud Olsson, Sophie Wilkinson and Johan Jönsson, Lassie has expanded from Sweden into Germany and France on the strength of a genuinely different product, not just cheaper pricing.
AIRMO — A Munich-based startup that uses drones, aircraft and eventually its own satellites to detect methane leaks at oil and gas sites, filling the gap between infrequent manual inspections and the emissions that leak out in between. Founder Daria Stepanova is part of TechBBQ’s expanded Life Science & Deep Tech track this year.
Cellugy — A Copenhagen biotech growing cellulose through fermentation instead of extracting it from wood or petrochemicals, aimed first at replacing microplastics and synthetic polymers in cosmetics. It’s the kind of unglamorous materials science that rarely makes headlines but quietly ends up in a lot of products.
Dott — The Amsterdam-based micromobility operator has been one of the steadier survivors of Europe’s e-scooter shakeout, expanding city by city while several competitors burned through funding and shut down. Worth watching as a case study in scaling a capital-intensive, city-by-city business without losing discipline.
Why this list looks the way it does
None of these companies have much in common on paper. A materials science lab, a pet insurer, a payments startup, a methane detector. What they share is that they picked a specific, unglamorous problem and stuck with it long enough to get good at it. That’s a decent filter for judging any startup, at TechBBQ or otherwise.
If you’re at Bella Center this year, come find us. We’d rather hear what you’re building than talk about what we do.