As early-stage investors, our mission has always been to provide more than capital and networks. Amidst a new paradigm of company building, it became clear that the way entrepreneurs built enduring companies was changing.

Gradient Descending was started to facilitate technical deep dives on the AI engineering decisions that will shape the moats of this new paradigm. 

Since launching in London in July 2025, Earlybird has hosted 14 Gradient Descending round tables. At each roundtable, we bring together founders, researchers, and engineers for deep discussions. Each roundtable focused on one technical challenge facing AI infrastructure builders. 

Sessions have featured speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, SPACING, Alibaba Cloud, and Cloudflare, to name a few.

Leveraging Micro-Events

Compared to other event formats, we opted for roundtables that enabled deeper discussions. The sessions kicked off in London, where Akash spearheaded the launch and growth of our London office. We’ve also co-hosted with Dogpatch Labs in Dublin.

The format is streamlined: invite-only attendance, tackling one technical topic per session, and featuring an expert speaker. Recent topics have included AI-native design, Agent Frameworks and Memory, Evals and Fine-Tuning, knowledge graphs and ontologies, open-source models, and more.

Attendees are actively building AI infrastructure companies first-hand. So they're there to share knowledge and learnings with fellow builders.

SLMs, Context Engineering and MCP with Marlene from Microsoft Azure AI

Getting Technical

This aligns with our philosophy of being a founder’s sparring partner, especially when it comes to thinking through markets and products. Roundtables are an extension of that.

“Gradient Descending is meant to facilitate smart conversations and elevate the ecosystem by helping builders navigate technical infrastructure challenges. We hope valuable connections come out of the events, but above all, people come away smarter about how to build enduring companies in the AI age.” - Akash Bajwa, Earlybird Principal

The European AI ecosystem is inflecting, and curated events play a small but important role. As Akash puts it:

“Technical builders coming together to share challenges and opportunities as we all navigate how to build products and companies in the AI-native era."

Everyone comes prepared to discuss the topic and share their own learnings, with attendees coming from big labs, early-stage startups, and scale-ups.

Evals & Fine-Tuning with Wulfie Bain from OpenAI

What's next

Gradient Descending is still in the early days. If you want to be part of it, apply to join the next session planned for January 15th, 2026 in our Munich office. We will host our recently announced portfolio company Black Forest Labs, as we explore ‘Visual intelligence: What’s next for image and video generation?’

To keep up with our related events, subscribe to our Luma calendar here.

New Opportunity

As we continue to grow Earlybird’s community efforts, we’re seeking a new teammate to join us in this endeavor! If you enjoy building meaningful connections, curating thoughtful events, and working closely with founders and operators, this is a rare opportunity to do exactly that at the heart of the ecosystem.

Apply now via this link and help us build communities behind Europe’s most ambitious founders!