Four years of Civo Navigate London... and we're not done yet
Written by
Digital Marketing Executive at Civo
Written by
Digital Marketing Executive at Civo
Looking back over the past four years is a real reflection on something special. When we announced Civo Navigate London, we couldn't imagine what it would look like in the years to come... but here we are. Four years later, we have announced a fifth London event, and it is honestly something we couldn't have fully predicted.
After having wrapped up an incredible event this month, I wanted to take some time to reflect on the past four years in London and what you can expect from our next event, Civo Navigate London 2027!
2023: Where Civo Navigate London started
The first Civo Navigate London was a two-day event at The Brewery, and it was a lot. I mean that as both a compliment and an admission. To this day, people still tell us that they remember this event, and we couldn't be happier that we started off so big.
Across two days, we held forty-plus talks, live demos, product launches, panels, and workshops (it even sounds a lot looking back).
Kelsey Hightower spent two days at the venue, not just on stage but actually out in the sponsor hall talking to whoever wanted to talk to him, which is the kind of thing you can't fake and can't really manufacture. We also had the pleasure of being joined by both Marty Weiner and Nick Caldwell as they opened the event with a keynote on scaling companies that managed to be both grounded and genuinely useful. Amanda Brock also hosted the sustainability panel, which turned into one of the most important conversations of the day. Four years on, we have had the incredible opportunity to welcome both Kelsey Hightower and Amanda Brock back to the Civo Navigate stage more than once.
The main learning from Civo Navigate London 2023 was that with such a strong schedule came a lot of attendees missing sessions. This is something we sat with after the event, and it changed how we approached the years that followed. We learnt that a day where nobody has to miss anything is worth far more than a day where there is simply more to miss.
"Civo Navigate, just wow. However, despite having an amazing agenda... the best thing about Civo Navigate was the people. Attendees were some of the nicest people I've had the pleasure of spending time with. Speakers and sponsors were next-level smart and incredibly approachable."
Nigel Poulton, Kubernetes, Docker, and WASM trainer
Read the full wrap-up of Civo Navigate London 2023 here.
2024: Conversations that matter years on
For the second London event, we moved out of a hired venue and into Civo Tech Junction, our own event space in London. On paper, that decision makes a certain kind of sense. In practice, it was a genuine risk. We were going from a two-day conference to a single focused day in a smaller space, with a fraction of the speaker count from the year before, and we had no real proof that this would feel like a step forward rather than a step back. It did, for the record.
Fifteen speakers, a single focused day, and the kind of setup that meant you couldn't avoid actually talking to people. Lucy Rigby MP brought a policy angle that most cloud events genuinely don't have room for. Hannah Foxwell, founder of AI for the rest of us, talked about AI adoption in ways that connected with people who weren't engineers, which is harder to do than it sounds. Stuart Harris from Red Badger asked whether WebAssembly had been completely buried by the AI hype cycle (it hadn't, but the question was worth asking out loud). And Dinesh, our CTO, gave a session on where Civo was heading that managed to be both honest and specific about what that actually requires.
What 2024 proved is that making an event smaller doesn't mean making it less. It just means you have to be much more deliberate about what you include, and much more honest about what you leave out.
Read the full wrap-up of Civo Navigate London 2024 here.
2025: The year that felt like a turning point
If there is one Civo Navigate London that I think people will look back on as the moment things shifted, it is 2025.
We came into that event in the middle of a full rebrand. Not just a logo refresh... a full rebrand. The kind that requires every person at the company to understand what you are trying to say and why, and then trust that it lands when you say it publicly for the first time. We chose Civo Navigate London as the moment to share it, which, looking back, was either a very confident decision or a slightly reckless one. Probably both.
Kelsey Hightower had joined the Civo board earlier that year, and having him on stage in that different capacity changed the conversation in a way that was difficult to put into words but easy to feel in the room. The fireside chat between him and Mark on data sovereignty, and what GDPR and the CLOUD Act actually mean for real businesses making real infrastructure decisions, was one of those sessions you could tell people were paying proper attention to.
Then the Digital Sovereignty Panel happened. Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, Dr. Ben Spencer MP, a researcher from Queen Mary University, and a moderator who kept the conversation honest. That is not something you see at many tech events. I think it caught people off guard in the best possible way, because most of the room had never been to a conference where sitting politicians and cloud engineers were being asked the same question and expected to have an informed answer.
Read the full wrap-up of Civo Navigate London 2025 here.
2026: Our biggest event yet
Over eight hundred people registered for Civo Navigate London 2026.
Four years earlier, we were at The Brewery figuring out whether the format was going to work at all. Three years earlier, we were in our own space proving that a smaller event could still be a serious one. And then 2026 happened, and we had eight hundred people at Liverpool Street talking about sovereign cloud, agentic AI, and what UK infrastructure actually needs to look like if it is going to deliver on the ambitions that keep getting announced at policy level.
The keynote is where most people's attention went, and for good reason. Mark Boost used the main stage to reveal the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform alongside plans for forty liquid-cooled UK edge data centres, starting with one site in Hertfordshire. As announcements go, it was the kind that takes a while to fully land. Mark put it pretty directly on stage...
"Britain has the talent. What it needs is infrastructure to match it. Policy alone will not deliver that. Compute, cooling and density have to exist physically, in this country, close to the organizations using them."
Civo unveils first of 40 UK edge data centres built to power sovereign AI compute, read more here -->
Beyond the announcement, the conversations across the day pushed further than any previous Navigate London. Lord Drayson brought a perspective that is genuinely rare at technology events, someone who understands defense procurement and sovereign AI from an actual position of authority rather than a consulting brief.
The Digital Sovereignty Panel pushed hard on practical implementation in a way that moved the conversation on from where it had been even in 2025. And the agentic AI thread that ran through almost every session in some form raised a question that nobody had a clean answer to, which is who is actually accountable when an autonomous system makes a consequential decision.
Read the full wrap-up of Civo Navigate London 2026 here.
2027: Our fifth event, September 27th, 2027
Civo Navigate London 2027 will take place on September 27th, 2027, at Convene, 155 Bishopsgate, Liverpool Street, London, EC2M 3TQ.
So, here is where we are. Four events in, with a fairly clear idea of what the fifth one needs to be. The conversations around sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure have not quieted down since 2023. If anything, the gap between where the industry says it is heading and where actual infrastructure decisions are being made has become more interesting, and more consequential. We want to put the right people in a room to talk about that honestly, which is really all Civo Navigate London has ever been.
More on the full speaker lineup and schedule to follow. Super early bird tickets are available now, and if you have been to Navigate London before, you already know it is worth registering early.
If this is your first time hearing about the event, the wrap-up pieces for 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026 are the best place to understand what the day actually looks and feels like. And then come and see for yourself.
Digital Marketing Executive at Civo
Emma De Guzman is a Digital Marketing Executive at Civo, responsible for managing the company’s day-to-day digital marketing and content strategy. Her work includes overseeing blog content, thought leadership, product launch materials, and email campaigns, as well as managing social media across LinkedIn and X.
She also works closely with partners on co-marketing initiatives such as webinars, joint content, and customer case studies. In addition, Emma manages the Civo Write-For-Us program, working with external contributors and independent writers to review, edit, and publish technical tutorials and guides.
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