Baku is about to get a serious tech upgrade. The INMerge Innovation Summit, Azerbaijan's biggest annual innovation event, lands at the Baku Congress Center on November 30 and December 1, and the 2026 speaker list reads like a greatest-hits album of Silicon Valley.
Confirmed names include Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph, Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, former Google X business chief Mo Gawdat, ex-OpenAI executive Zack Kass, tennis star Maria Sharapova, former Nike CMO Greg Hoffman, and 2025 Nobel economics laureate Joel Mokyr of Northwestern University. That's a dense concentration of founders, technologists and athletes on one stage over two days.
The summit is organized by PASHA Holding, one of Azerbaijan's largest conglomerates, and has run since 2021 with a clear mission: position Baku as a connector between the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe. The programme mixes keynote speeches and panel discussions with heavy networking — the previous edition pulled in more than 5,000 participants, over 180 speakers, 122 startups and 80 investors.
For travellers, the timing works nicely. Late November and early December are low season in Baku, meaning lower hotel rates and thinner crowds at the Old City, the Flame Towers and the Caspian waterfront. If you're attending the summit, you can bolt a proper city break onto it: the Heydar Aliyev Center's sweeping Zaha Hadid architecture, the car-free lanes of Icherisheher (the walled old town), and the mud volcanoes outside town are all easy add-ons before or after the conference days.
Wozniak, a repeat visitor, called his earlier trip to Azerbaijan an experience he'd never forget, praising the pace of development in the country, while Shazam founder Chris Barton singled out the event's energy and the density of innovators in one room. Either way, it signals that Baku is steadily building credibility as a regional tech hub — which is useful context if you like visiting cities just before everyone else catches on.
If you work in tech, startups or investment — or simply want to hear Netflix's and Pixar's origin stories from the people who lived them — this is one of the more reasons to book a late-autumn flight to the Caspian. Registration details and ticket tiers are available via the summit's own channels, and flights into Heydar Aliyev International Airport are well served from Istanbul, Dubai and European hubs.
