We track 22 organisations in this sector across 6+ countries.
22 entries.
Finland's legendary demoscene and gaming festival, running since 1992, now combines its traditional demo competitions with esports tournaments, indie-game showcases, and creative-coding workshops. 5,000+ attendees bring their computers for a LAN party atmosphere. Relevant to gaming, creative-coding, and entertainment-tech startups as both a community event and a recruiting ground for engine and graphics talent.
A summit at the intersection of culture, technology, and business, gathering founders, investors, and cultural institutions in Vienna. Useful for founders building at the culture-tech edge.
Premier game industry conference in Krakow featuring an indie game showcase, publisher meetings, and strong startup presence across VR/AR, AI tools, and creative tech. Attracts 2,000+ game developers, publishers, and investors. Valuable for gaming and creative-tech startups seeking publishing deals and development partnerships in the CEE region.
Ireland's first national Creative Economy Summit, bringing together founders, studio leaders, investors, and policymakers in digital creative industries. A niche but durable flagship for founders in gaming, animation, content tech, and creative IP.
The world's largest arts festival includes a significant digital-arts and creative-technology strand, with immersive installations, AI-generated art exhibitions, and creative-tech showcases. Edinburgh during August is also a magnet for informal tech-community meetups and founder dinners organized by the Scottish startup ecosystem. While not a pure tech event, it's a key cultural moment for creative-tech, content-tech, and entertainment startups looking to connect with media buyers and cultural institutions.
One of Oulu's biggest autumn tech events, free and in English, gathering professionals, researchers, and entrepreneurs around AI, human-machine collaboration, and dual-use and cybersecurity themes.
France's main annual gathering of video game professionals, in its 8th edition, organised by Game IN and the SNJV at the Université Catholique de Lille. For game-studio founders and developers it is two days of industry talks, workshops, and B2B networking.
The Nordics' largest design festival, running for 10+ days across Helsinki with 200,000+ visitors, 250+ events, and a dedicated design-business program for creative startups, service designers, and UX studios. Features exhibitions, pop-ups, talks, and the Design Forum pitching event. Most events free. Useful for creative-tech, UX tooling, and design-software founders looking to connect with Nordic design buyers.
The Benelux's leading B2B games-industry event at WTC Rotterdam, bringing together game developers, publishers, and investors. The key annual deal and showcase venue for gametech and interactive-media founders in the region.
Katalist is a Slovenian-founded generative-AI startup building an end-to-end pre-production workspace for video: writers and directors can import or draft a script, let the system break it down into beats, shots, and storyboards, generate consistent character and location renders, and iterate on the look of every scene before a single frame is filmed. The key differentiator is character- and setting-consistency across shots — the hard problem that plagues early image and video models — which Katalist addresses with reference-conditioning and scene graphs rather than naive prompt chaining. The target users are in-house content teams at brands, boutique production studios, and advertising agencies that have to produce far more video than their traditional pipelines can absorb, and that need a visual ideation layer that survives client feedback cycles. The company graduated from 500 Global's Eurasia program and is one of the more interesting European pre-production tools competing with the LTX Studio / Showrunner generation of US AI-film products.
City-wide celebration of games in London with a strong B2B core at the Games Finance Market, connecting studios with publishers and investors. Industry passes cost about GBP 150-300. Covers gaming technology, VR/AR innovation, and interactive media. Valuable for gaming startups seeking publishing deals and creative-tech partnerships.
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, known by his online moniker Nalden, is a Dutch entrepreneur and angel investor who co-founded The Next Web (TNW), one of the world's most influential tech media platforms and conference series. Starting as a blogger in the early 2000s, Nalden built TNW into a global brand with millions of readers and an annual conference in Amsterdam attracting thousands of founders and investors. Through his media network and personal investments, Nalden has backed dozens of early-stage European startups, especially in media, creative tech, and consumer internet. He is known for investing in founders with strong brand sensibility and storytelling ability, and his network across European tech journalism and event organizing gives his portfolio companies exceptional visibility.
A Web3 and creative-economy summit bundling eight sub-events — including the Non Fungible Conference, Stablecoin Day, an agents-vs-agents hackathon, and Longevity Day — at Lisbon's Unicorn Factory. Useful for web3, AI, and creative-tech founders wanting exposure to major brand sponsors and the crypto-creative crossover.
A large tech-and-culture festival reimagining the ancient Athenian festival, with around 10,000 attendees, 250+ speakers across five stages, and 70+ side events. Includes a startup pitching competition putting founders in front of top investors.
Athens-based music-tech and creative-economy conference running alongside the Reworks Festival, with a dedicated business program covering music streaming, rights tech, AI in music production, and live-entertainment platforms. 2,000+ attendees from the European music-tech scene. Tickets EUR 150-400.
A full-day game-industry summit at Fantasía in Reykjavík, now in its second year, organised by Game Makers Iceland. Talks from Icelandic and international speakers for game designers, developers, and creative leaders — the anchor event for Iceland's notable gamedev cluster.
Second Home Lisbon is a design-forward coworking and community space located in the Time Out Market building at the Mercado da Ribeira in Lisbon's waterfront Cais do Sodre neighborhood. Part of the London-founded Second Home network, the Lisbon location opened in 2016 and provides workspace and community programming for startups, creatives, and remote tech workers in a distinctive plant-filled, architecturally acclaimed environment. Beyond desks, Second Home Lisbon hosts cultural events, startup workshops, speaker series, and cross-disciplinary programs bringing together founders from technology, design, and the arts. The space has become a gathering point for Lisbon's international startup community, particularly attracting founders from the UK, US, and Northern Europe who have relocated to Lisbon for its quality of life, timezone advantages, and growing tech ecosystem.
Signal Festival 2026 transforms Prague over four October nights (15–18 October 2026) with large-scale light installations, projections, kinetic sculptures and digital art across the city, under the theme 'Dream on! – Dreams and Visions'. The Czech Republic's largest festival of digital and creative culture, it pairs free outdoor installations with the ticketed Signal INSIDE zone; the full 2026 artist programme is unveiled on 2 September 2026.
Slovenia's annual games-industry conference, covering development, design, marketing, and the business of game development, with an Indie Expo and awards. Recent editions drew around 600 attendees — a focused flagship for founders in gaming and interactive media.
Inaugural European SXSW edition across Shoreditch and East London, mixing startup pitches with tech, music, and interactive media programming. Strong fit for media-tech, AR/VR, and consumer innovation teams.
Decentralized city-wide startup festival across 50+ partner events over nine days with 10,000+ international attendees, 1,500+ startups, and active investor matchmaking. Most sessions free or low-cost; main-stage passes around EUR 200. Tracks span social impact, smart city, life sciences, and creative tech, a key CEE entry point for founders.
The sixth edition of Estonia's emerging-tech festival, held at Vaba Lava in Narva on the EU's eastern edge. Gathers builders, founders, and operators around Web3, AI, and creative industries with a substance-over-hype focus — a rare flagship tech event outside the capital.