TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Agenda
Stages
Three jam-packed days featuring 200+ sessions across six stages, led by 250+ tech leaders shaping the industry today, only at Disrupt 2026.
On the Disrupt Stage, hear the big-picture conversations shaping what’s next in AI, venture, and global tech. Plus, watch as top investors judge the breakout startups competing live onstage in Startup Battlefield 200.
The Builders Stage delivers tactical advice for founders navigating fundraising, hiring, product-market fit, and scaling.
On the AI Stage, presented by Google Cloud, explore how AI agents and generative AI are rewriting SaaS, enterprise workflows, software pricing, and security.
The Smart Money Stage explores the future of fintech through discussions on payments infrastructure, embedded finance, stablecoins, and fraud prevention.
On the Smart Systems Stage, infrastructure takes center stage as experts discuss the AI data center boom, energy scalability, automation, robotics, and climate systems.
The Real World AI Stage examines how AI moves from demos to deployment across robotics, manufacturing, defense, and industrial operations.
Agenda Lineup
New sessions are added regularly. Check back in to explore more sessions.
October 12th
October 13th
Day 1 networking hours
Schedule 1:1 networking meetings in the TechCrunch Events app and make a new connection in the Networking Lounge.
Equity Live
The Future of Money Movement: Stablecoins, Instant Payments & What's Next
Stablecoins and instant payments are changing how money moves around the world. This session looks at how these new payment systems compare to traditional banking infrastructure, where FedNow and private networks fit in, and what regulatory and market changes could shape the future of payments. Hear where these new systems are gaining traction, and where challenges remain.
What Happens When OpenAI Ships Your Roadmap
Nearly all AI founders have the same worry these days: What if OpenAI or Anthropic launch a product that competes with mine? Even strong products are at risk of becoming features of the larger players. This session explores where defensibility exists, and what founders can do if they face competition from rapidly evolving AI giants.
Arm Wrestling Your Data: The Physical AI Challenge
As AI moves into robotics and autonomous systems at the edge, success depends less on model scale and more on data quality. Physical AI must interpret noisy multimodal inputs, reason in real time, and act safely in unpredictable environments. Radha Basu, CEO at iMerit, will extrapolate years of learning with leading AV companies to discuss best practices in expert-driven data pipelines, edge case management, and data triage.
Attendees will learn how to build and scale a trustworthy data strategy for the 99% and also for the last 1%.
Is SaaS Dead? AI Is Exposing What Enterprise Software Got Wrong
AI agents are making enterprise software feel interchangeable and raising a bigger question: Is SaaS becoming obsolete? Raj Singh, CEO of Smartsheet, argues the opposite. AI isn’t killing SaaS. It’s exposing the fragmentation underneath today’s enterprise stack. As copilots and agents automate tasks inside individual tools, the real challenge is orchestration across systems, workflows, and teams. Singh will explain why the next generation of winners won’t just build AI features — they’ll build systems that accumulate organizational context and compound intelligence over time.
The Rise of Agentic AI: Lessons for Hardware Founders
The way we access AI is changing fast. Instead of opening apps and waiting for responses, agentic AI is becoming the interface itself, built into wearables like glasses, watches, earbuds, rings, and pins, alongside smartphones and PCs. Ziad Asghar, Senior Vice President and General Manager of XR, Wearables, and Personal AI at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., discusses how next-generation platforms are enabling this ecosystem of new device categories, and what founders need to know to build trusted, AI-native hardware at scale.
Winning the Modern Financial Consumer
The way people pay, invest, and manage money is changing fast. Robinhood, now worth nearly $100 billion, has evolved from a trading app into a financial platform spanning investing, banking, credit, crypto, and prediction markets. Head of Product Abhishek Fatehpuria discusses how technology and changing consumer expectations are reshaping financial services, and what it takes to build trusted products at massive scale.
Competing for AI Talent: Pay, Equity, and Retention
The growth of AI startups has made hiring and retention more difficult for every tech company. From competing for AI talent to navigating secondary sales, founders are rethinking the human infrastructure of their startups. As incentives and employee expectations rapidly evolve, this session explores how companies are adapting compensation, culture, and team-building strategies to attract and retain top talent in a fundamentally changed market.
Can AI Take You Public? The New Playbook for IPO-Ready Finance
IPO prep used to mean a late-stage scramble. In the AI age, winning companies are building public-company muscle much earlier so that finance teams can answer “what changed, and why?” in real time. Pigment CEO Eléonore Crespo sits down with Sofia Fatakhova, the VP of Finance at Chime fresh off one of the most watched fintech IPOs in recent years, to give founders and finance leaders a practical playbook for building AI-enabled, IPO-ready finance. Attendees will learn what to build, automate, document, and lock down 12–18 months before filing to make sure every number can be defended to executives, auditors, bankers, and investors.
The Science of Powerful Introductions: How to be remembered in an AI world
People decide within the first 60 seconds of meeting someone whether they are worth their time or not.
This background process is constantly running with investors, founders, and executives as they filter people into two buckets: ‘pay attention to’ or ‘don’t pay attention to’. And the reality is, a vast majority of introductions fail this test.
This roundtable breaks down the science of introductions, what earns consideration, and why this moment is the most undervalued leverage point in fundraising, hiring, and dealmaking.
Expect a candid conversation on what actually works, common mistakes, and how to stand out without pitching.
Walk away with tools you can use the same day.
Specialty Post-Training Data: Powering the Next Wave of AI
As AI models continue to improve, access to high-quality, specialized post-training data is becoming increasingly important to model performance and unlocking new AI applications. This roundtable will explore how companies are sourcing, building, and leveraging specialty datasets to train models for increasingly complex and domain-specific tasks. Attendees will hear how leading founders and investors are thinking about the data layer—from identifying valuable sources of specialty data to evaluating the businesses emerging around its creation and delivery. The conversation will also examine where demand for specialized post-training data is growing fastest and the opportunities this creates for a new generation of AI companies.
AI, Trust & Verification in Financial Services
As AI moves beyond generating content and begins taking action, financial companies are rethinking trust, oversight, and security. Panelists explore how AI agents are changing financial workflows, why transparency and human judgment still matter, and how companies are approaching privacy, fraud prevention, and identity verification in an AI-powered world.
Building the Impossible
Building a breakthrough software company is hard. Building one that also designs, manufactures, and delivers world-class hardware is even harder. Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe joins us to discuss what it takes to build an enduring company at the intersection of AI, software, robotics, manufacturing, and transportation.
AI’s Next Frontier: Modernizing Legacy Industries
AI is creating a new wave of opportunities across industries that have historically been slow to adopt technology. This roundtable will explore where AI is driving meaningful change beyond the tech sector, from transforming outdated workflows to unlocking entirely new business models. Rob Biederman will share his perspective on which legacy industries are most ripe for disruption, where founders can find overlooked opportunities, and what investors should look for as AI reshapes established markets. Attendees will leave with a clearer view of where AI-driven transformation is already underway—and where the next generation of category-defining companies may emerge.
Building the Infrastructure for Global Commerce
Traditional financial systems weren’t built for today’s global businesses. Airwallex, now valued at $11 billion, is building an AI native financial operating system, helping companies move money across borders, manage global finances, and embed financial products into their own platforms. Founder and CEO Jack Zhang shares how AI is reshaping payments, and what it takes to build the regulated, global backbone powering commerce at scale.
Atoms vs. bits: physical AI for the physical world
AI’s next frontier may not be another digital workflow—it may be the physical world. This roundtable will explore how AI, robotics, sensors, and real-world data are coming together to transform industries like construction, real estate, energy and infrastructure. Attendees will learn where physical AI is creating meaningful opportunities, what makes these businesses fundamentally different from traditional software companies, and the challenges founders face when deploying AI in complex physical environments. The discussion will also examine where investors see the strongest opportunities and what it will take for physical AI companies to move from impressive technology to scalable, enduring businesses.
PMF Red Flags: How to Tell If You Really Have It
In an AI hype cycle, product-market fit signals are easier to fake and harder to trust. Founders are mistaking early excitement, usage spikes, and pilot wins for durable traction. This session breaks down what false PMF actually looks like, how investors and operators separate real retention from hype-driven adoption, and the signals that indicate whether a company has true pull or just temporary momentum.
Where the AI Infrastructure Boom Is Creating Winners
The race to build AI infrastructure is creating new markets across power, data centers, and the systems that support them, but the benefits will not be distributed equally. Leaders across energy, infrastructure, and market intelligence examine which constraints are creating durable business opportunities, where new categories are beginning to emerge, and what founders can build as the AI economy moves from software into the physical world.
Outnumbered Either Way: How an Engineer and an Architect Run Their Jobs on Agents
Sachin Malhotra is an engineer at Anthropic who runs continuous-integration infrastructure by handing most of the daily work to a fleet of Claude agents. Steve Androulakis is an architect at Anthropic who works with enterprise customers, helping their teams put agents to work, and runs his own job on them the same way. They’ll walk through the toolkit as they actually use it: running multiple Claude Code agents in parallel, building skills agents reuse across tasks, and Claude Tag, the piece that lets people who don’t write code delegate real engineering work by tagging Claude where their team works – in Slack!. You’ll leave with practical patterns for delegating, reviewing agent output, recovering when agents get it wrong, and putting agents to work in your own jobs and scenarios.
From MVP to Billions of Users: How Product Decisions Must Change at Scale
The instincts that win when building your first minimum viable product can break you at a billion-user scale. In this fireside, Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google, shares how product decision-making changes when every update impacts billions of users. Hear how teams balance speed with trust, and innovation with reliability, at one of the world’s largest product organizations.
Beyond Inventory: The Commerce AI Playbook for the Intent Era
Retail has spent a decade getting better at surfacing the right product at the right time. But the next trillion in commerce won’t just come from better ranking, It’ll come from models that interpret shopper intent. “Something for a beach trip under $50” is not a search query. It’s intent. And most commerce AI still can’t handle it.
This roundtable digs into what it actually takes — from the technical decisions that matter to the questions that don’t get asked enough: whether LLMs belong in transactional commerce, what “personalization” means for agentic AI, and who owns the customer relationship when an agent is doing the shopping.
When the Energy Gets Smart: What Vertical AI Actually Delivers at Scale
Generic AI tools are not built for energy. The organizations moving fastest are deploying AI purpose-built for the industry, trained on specific data and designed for real operational constraints. Deepak Garg, founder and CEO of SEW.AI, and Brandy Bolden, chief customer officer at SMUD, bring the builder and operator perspective to talk about what vertical AI actually delivers beyond the pilot phase. Walk away knowing what enterprise adoption really requires, where the gaps between promise and production still exist, and why energy and AI may be the most consequential infrastructure story of the next decade.
How Twilio’s Founder Is Tackling the Power Problem
Inertia Enterprises CEO Jeff Lawson joins us for a candid fireside chat about his journey from founding Twilio to leading one of the world’s best-funded fusion power startups. Hear how his experience scaling Twilio is informing Inertia’s approach to talent, timelines, fundraising, and the hard engineering questions ahead, and what changes when a software founder takes on a capital-intensive deep tech company.
Hiring When AI Is a Co-Founder
Early-stage companies are no longer just building with AI, they’re hiring it. As AI agents take on engineering, support, and operations, the definition of an early team is being rewritten. This session explores how founders decide what humans should own versus what gets delegated to AI, and how high-growth startups are building hybrid teams without losing speed, accountability, or culture.
Bringing Fusion to the Grid
For decades, fusion has been the energy technology of the future. Now, advances in science, engineering, and private investment are bringing commercial fusion closer to reality. In this session, leaders from Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Helion discuss the breakthroughs driving the industry forward, the challenges that remain, and what it will take to bring fusion power to the grid at scale.
Rebuilding Consumer Products for the AI Era
AI isn’t just adding features, it’s forcing product teams to rethink how people search, discover, communicate, travel, and make decisions. Leaders from Reddit, Square and Uber discuss how they’re redesigning products used by millions, what users actually want from AI, and where product leaders should resist the temptation to automate everything.
Beyond Screens
For decades, humans have adapted to computers. Max Hodak believes the next era of technology will adapt to us. From brain-computer interfaces to entirely new ways of interacting with machines, join one of Silicon Valley’s most ambitious founders for a look at the future of computing — and humanity’s place within it.
From Pilot to Production at Scale: Provable, Trusted Agentic AI for the Enterprise
Agentic AI represents an unprecedented opportunity to transform enterprises globally, and yet deployments have been slow and the pilot-to-production yield has been low. In this panel, we will explore what changes — technologically, economically, competitively, societally — we need to make to benefit from AI’s tremendous potential. We will discuss how the transition from “probably right” to “formal verification” will enable us to fully realize these benefits.
The Inference Economy: Why AI's Next Trillion Dollars Won't Look Like Its First
As frontier models commoditize, the core of AI value is shifting from training to inference, and most founders are still building for the wrong era. Rudina Seseri, founder and managing partner of Glasswing Ventures, and Hagay Lupesko, SVP of AI Cloud & Inference at Cerebras, unpack what this shift means for early-stage AI companies: where moats actually form when models are a commodity, why latency is becoming a product, and how the unit economics of inference will reshape who wins. Founders will leave with a sharper lens on their roadmap, their infra choices, and what investors will actually want to see in 2027.
Rewiring the Grid for the Electric Age
The demand for electricity is growing faster than the infrastructure needed to support it. From electric vehicles and new manufacturing facilities to renewable energy projects, the grid is facing new pressures and new opportunities. This session explores what’s needed to modernize the power system, where investment is flowing, and how utilities, startups, and technology providers are working to create a more resilient and flexible energy future.
AI Builders Happy Hour
This is an invite-only reception hosted by Google for Startups. Connect with top startup founders, visionary leaders, and the Google for Startups team to explore the future of AI. Whether you’re just starting or ready for global expansion, come celebrate the journey and discover how to unlock your startup’s full potential.
Industry Meet Up- Smart Money & Smart Systems
Wrap up the day with great conversations, new connections, and drinks alongside fellow Smart Money, Smart Systems attendees at this exclusive Disrupt happy hour. Find the location in the TechCrunch Events app. Open to registered Disrupt attendees ages 21 and older. Valid ID and Disrupt badge required for entry.
October 14th
Day 2 Networking Hours
Schedule 1:1 networking meetings in the TechCrunch Events app and make a new connection in the Networking Lounge.
Building AI Systems When Failure Is Not an Option
When AI enters the physical world, the consequences of failure change. A mistake could lead to a grounded aircraft, a vehicle crash, or a compromised mission. In this session, leaders who are building autonomous vehicles, defense technologies, and industrial systems will talk about one of the toughest questions that every hard tech founder must face: How do you know when your system is ready to be safely deployed?
We’ll dig into how founders can create a safety culture, test and validate AI, navigate regulatory hurdles, and build companies that can earn trust when the stakes are high.
The Series A in 2027
Series A is getting harder, with VCs growing more demanding. For founders planning to raise in the next one to two years, this session breaks down what “fundable” will actually mean in 2027. Hear how top investors are redefining the metrics, teams, and traction that matter now, what outdated fundraising playbooks no longer work, and how companies can separate from the pack in the next funding cycle.
Building Then vs Now
Building a company has always required vision, resilience, and the ability to adapt. But the tools available to founders today are changing how businesses are built, scaled, and operated. Join AI expert Cassie Kozyrkov, data scientist Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, and ClassPass founder Payal Kadakia for a candid conversation about how the founder journey has evolved and what it means to build a business now. From making smarter decisions with AI to understanding the ways technology can introduce hidden bias, the conversation will explore the opportunities and challenges facing today’s entrepreneurs. Together, they’ll look at what has changed, what remains timeless, and what founders should be thinking about as they build what comes next.
Operating at the Edge: How AI Works When the Cloud Doesn’t
The most valuable AI deployments in the world operate where the cloud can’t reach. And building for them requires a different technological playbook.
This session brings together leaders from defense, space, and industrial AI who will share how they have tackled the challenge of making AI work at the edge — where latency matters, connectivity is limited, and failure isn’t an option. Expect practical lessons on architectural principles, design decisions, and trade-offs that make AI-centric systems work in the real world.
What Comes After ChatGPT? AI for the Physical World
Most AI conversations today focus on copilots, productivity, and content generation. But what happens when AI starts discovering drugs, designing new materials, modeling financial risk, or solving energy infrastructure problems?
This interactive roundtable explores the rise of a new class of AI systems grounded in physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics rather than internet text alone. From healthcare and battery chemistry to navigation and industrial systems, the discussion examines where the next decade of AI value may emerge and what founders, investors, and industry leaders may be underestimating right now.
FDE: The Best Commercial Motion in Enterprise Software You've Never Heard Of
Enterprise software has a dirty secret: Most of it doesn’t work the way customers actually work. That gap — between what a platform promises and what a customer needs — is where deals die, renewals stall, and churns happen.
Forward deployed engineering (FDE) is the answer. An FDE is part consultant, part product manager, part software engineer — one person who owns the problem from discovery through delivery.
You’ll leave knowing what an FDE actually does, how the function fits into your commercial org, when to hire one, and why this motion drives outsized retention and expansion in enterprise accounts.
Revealing AI Disruptors 60: What Can AI Do Next?
The AI conversation is shifting from what models can say to what they can actually do. Agents are navigating the open web and completing work, AI systems are taking on increasingly ambitious research, intelligent machines are beginning to operate beyond the screen, and a new infrastructure layer is emerging to make all of this possible at scale. Greenfield Partners’ Shay Grinfeld sits down with founders building across these emerging areas to separate what’s real today from what’s coming next, and explore where the biggest new opportunities are taking shape. The conversation will culminate in the reveal of Greenfield Partners’ 2026 AI Disruptors 60, spotlighting the companies Greenfield and TechCrunch believe are pushing AI into new territory.
The Real Tokenmaxxing: How the Best AI Companies Navigate a Multi-Model World
The frontier is moving faster than any single model can keep up with, and the teams building the most successful AI products are increasingly orchestrating across many models rather than betting on just one. This panel brings together founders and operators at the center of that shift to discuss how they evaluate new models, manage cost and reliability at scale, and architect products that can evolve as quickly as the underlying technology.
The Founder Playbook
Join Cassie Kozyrkov for an interactive conversation on how founders can use AI to make better business decisions. Bring a real challenge you are facing and explore practical ways to think through it, where AI can help, and where human judgment matters most.
“My Company Is a Rocket Ship.” What Comes After the Landing?
Building a rocket ship is hard, but managing the aftermath of an IPO, tender offer, or major exit brings an entirely new set of problems. This roundtable moves past the hype to address the structural realities of massive liquidity. We will discuss tax strategy, concentration risk, and navigating lockup windows. Join us to map out how to protect what you built while figuring out what your numbers actually mean.
Robots Are Waiting for Their ChatGPT Moment. Here Is What Is Standing in the Way
Large language models had the internet. Self-driving cars have millions of hours of road data. Robots have neither. That data gap is the single biggest reason most experts believe general-purpose robotic intelligence is still years away, despite the breakthroughs happening everywhere else in AI. A new wave of startups is racing to close it, building the data pipelines, simulation environments, and foundation models that could trigger the same capability explosion we saw with LLMs. This session asks the hard question: what does the ChatGPT moment for physical AI actually require, and how close are we really?
Stripe Founders Hub
Stripe is hosting a pop-up for founders at TechCrunch Disrupt. Connect with Stripe product experts on-site for one-on-one conversations on the challenges that matter most at your stage. Enjoy food and drinks, exclusive startup swag, and request $500 USD in Stripe credits.
Open to registered Disrupt attendee only. RSVP here.
Building the Next Generation of AI Giants
AI startups are scaling faster, and demanding more capital, than any generation before them. Jas Khaira, Global Head of Blackstone N1, shares what separates enduring companies from early momentum, how founders should think about capital as they scale, and what Blackstone looks for when backing the next generation of category-defining businesses.
AI, Surveillance, and the Future of Public Safety
As AI moves from the cloud into the real world, few companies sit at the center of the debate quite like Flock Safety. Join founder and CEO Garrett Langley for a conversation about privacy, security, public safety, and the difficult trade-offs that emerge when AI becomes part of the infrastructure of everyday life.
When Frontier Models Are Not Enough: How to Make AI Capable of Breakthrough Scientific Discoveries
For centuries, scarce and expensive experiments forced scientists to test only a handful of ideas at a time. Drawing on Molecule.one’s near-autonomous OAI-M1-03 discovery in organic chemistry with OpenAI, this roundtable will explore what changes when human-supervised, high-autonomy AI systems tackle open-ended questions, and automated labs test ideas by the thousands: from engineering serendipity to reshaping how, and how fast, science can move.
How to Land Your First Institutional Check (From the Person Who Writes Them)
This session demystifies what actually moves a GP from a first meeting to a term sheet. Aditi Maliwal leads first institutional rounds for first-time founders, and she will share insights into the real decision-making process behind early institutional bets. Using frameworks like the “cockroach plus killer” lens, founders will learn what resilience and edge VCs are actually underwriting before there’s any traction to point to. Attendees will walk away knowing how to position their story, what signals to lead with, and what kills deals before they start. (*Preference for roundtable)
From Founder to Investor: The Next Act – What Happens After You Win?
Mitesh Agrawal, CEO, Positron AI (exited founder of Lambda) speaks with Bruce Lee, founder of Keebeck, about why planning for what’s next as an investor starts well before your first exit, as he learned with Lambda, and ahead of any potential future exits. Bruce to share guidance on how to transition from being a founder raising capital and building businesses, to being an investor vetting investments in peers and next-gen founders. Come learn about what happens when entrepreneurs exit and transition from operating companies to being an allocator of capital. Find out why some entrepreneurs struggle to manage wealth after successfully building a business. Whether the thrill of innovation and creation, or supporting entrepreneurs and riding the returns of investing, what’s really motivating founders to continue to grow.
From Prototype to Production: Can It Scale in Reality
A prototype that works is not a product. A product that ships is not a scaled business. The gap between each of those stages is where most deep tech startups die. Founders might have the right team and tech, but they fail to understand what it takes to bring a prototype into production and eventually scale to higher, profitable volumes.
This session brings together founders who have crossed that gap in space hardware, humanoid robotics, and autonomous systems. They’ll share what they got wrong, what they’d do earlier, and what the prototype-to-production journey looks like when supply chains and manufacturing realities replace lab conditions.
The Zero-to-1K Playbook: How to Get Your First 1,000 Customers Without a Marketing Budget
Early customer acquisition is not about marketing spend, it’s about founder-led distribution and relentless execution. Most startups at zero to one do not have budget, brand, or scale, only urgency and creativity. This session breaks down how founders are landing their first customers through community building, product-led growth, founder-led sales, strategic outbound, and word-of-mouth momentum.
How to Win When You're Not Building AI
AI may dominate the world of venture, but many enduring companies won’t be those that sell AI models or agents. This session is for founders competing for attention in an AI-obsessed market. Panelists break down what actually matters now: efficient growth, retention, revenue quality, and disciplined execution, and why fundamentals, not hype, still build breakout businesses.
Agentic AI in the Enterprise: Separating Signal from Noise for GTM and Ops Leaders
Every enterprise wants agentic AI. Few are deploying it well. This roundtable cuts through the noise with an honest conversation about what’s working and what’s not. We’ll get into which agentic workflows are producing measurable ROI right now, why most internal AI tools stall after the pilot phase, how to drive adoption with teams that never asked for automation, and what infrastructure decisions matter before a single agent goes live. You’ll leave with a practical framework for evaluating where agents create value vs. friction, and a checklist for avoiding the most common deployment failures. Come with questions. Come with war stories.
Open-Weight Models and the New AI Stack
As increasingly capable, low-cost open-weight models offer another option for AI builders, companies need to evaluate the trade-offs around cost, security, control, and performance. Mercedes and Vanessa will break down how the rise of open-weight models is changing the economics of AI, where they are gaining an edge over closed models, and what this shift means for startups building the next generation of AI products.
Can We Engineer Nature's Comeback?
Ben Lamm has built one of the most controversial companies in tech by turning de-extinction from science fiction into a billion-dollar business. In this fireside chat, the Colossal Biosciences CEO will discuss the technologies used to revive extinct species, the role AI plays in modern biology, and the growing debate over whether engineering nature is a conservation breakthrough or a distraction from protecting what’s already here.
So You’ve Got a Hit Product. How Does Your Company Do It Again?
Most startups stall out because they build a single great product instead of a repeatable multi-product engine. Join a venture capitalist and two founders as they reveal the precise operational playbook for capital allocation, systemizing internal innovation, and engineering a compounding “Second Act” before the core product’s growth curve flattens.
The $100 Billion Entry Fee: Can Anyone Still Compete in AI?
Private AI companies command over $2 trillion in combined valuation on $300B+ in capital raised. Five companies alone are spending tens of billions on infrastructure. The question everyone is asking: Is the frontier AI market already locked up? This roundtable works through three questions together: Where do the real moats sit — models, data, or distribution? What does the capital concentration mean for startups building outside the frontier race? And how should investors think about entry points when the cheapest company per unit of business quality is not the one they expect? This conversation will be grounded in data, not hype.
What We Believe Now
Benchmark has backed some of the most iconic technology companies of the last three decades. For the first time on the Disrupt Stage in San Francisco, all five Benchmark partners come together to debate where the next generation of startups will come from, what founders are getting wrong, and the opportunities they believe are still hiding in plain sight.
When AI Starts Designing Its Own Hardware
AI’s progress depends on better chips, but what happens when AI begins designing the hardware that powers it? Ricursive Intelligence co-founders Dr. Anna Goldie and Dr. Azalia Mirhoseini discuss closing the loop between AI and chip development, building self-improving systems, and tackling one of the most consequential bottlenecks in the race toward more powerful intelligence.
Doing More with Less: Raising Venture Capital in an AI-first World "Helping entrepreneurs avoid the pitfalls of overcapitalization"
In today’s venture landscape, entrepreneurs are bombarded with headlines about billion-dollar fundraises at moonshot valuations. Rarely do they hear about the downside of overfunding, dilution, liquidation preferences, loss of control, and, perhaps most importantly, inflated and unaligned expectations. Raising too much capital, too fast, can quietly reshape a company’s incentives long before the consequences become visible.
In this session, we help entrepreneurs cut through the hype and think critically about what “good” capital actually looks like. We’ll explore red flags to watch for when negotiating a raise, how funding structure shapes long-term decision-making, and how to attract capital that’s not just generous, but genuinely aligned with your company’s goals, timeline, and vision for growth.
The New Rules of Going Public
The IPO window is reopening, but the playbook has changed. Founders and investors face a tougher path to the public markets, with higher expectations around growth, governance, and credibility. Join ICR’s Ryan Flanagan for a candid conversation on what makes a company IPO-ready today, the decisions that matter years before a listing, and how to position a business for a successful exit in a more disciplined market.
The New Power Players: How Family Offices Are Reshaping Venture Investing
Family offices have become one of the fastest-growing sources of startup capital, often moving faster and investing with greater flexibility than traditional institutions. Join prominent family office investors as they discuss how they’re approaching venture today, where they’re placing long-term bets, how they work alongside VCs, and why founders increasingly see them as strategic partners. **Investor Pass Only**
What Limited Partners Want Now
Venture firms are competing harder than ever for institutional capital, while limited partners are rethinking everything from manager selection to AI exposure and liquidity expectations. Hear from leading LPs as they discuss what they’re looking for in today’s market, how they’re evaluating emerging managers versus established firms, and where they believe the next generation of venture returns will come from. **Investor Pass Only**
Industry Meet Up – AI
Wrap up day 2 with great conversations, new connections, and drinks alongside fellow AI attendees at this exclusive Disrupt happy hour. Find the location in the TechCrunch Events app. Open to registered Disrupt attendees ages 21 and older. Valid ID and Disrupt badge required for entry
Women in Tech(Crunch)
This is an invitation only event with an evening celebrating the women driving innovation, creating opportunity and redefining what’s possible. Featuring open remarks from Payal Kadakia, founder of ClassPass and the Sa Dance Company, the evening honors and remarkable builders gathered here at Disrupt. Please check your inbox for the invitation and venue details.
October 15th
Day 3 Networking Hours
Schedule 1:1 networking meetings with the TechCrunch Events app and make a new connection in the Networking Lounge.
The Video Intelligence Race: Real-Time, Reasoning, and What Comes Next
Visual AI isn’t just about attention-getting videos anymore. The race has moved to real-time inference, physical reasoning, and AI models that genuinely understand the world they’re rendering. This session brings together the founders building at the frontier to talk about what happens when the technology crosses from generation into intelligence.
Yes, It’s Hard to Be a Founder: An Honest Conversation
Company building is as psychologically demanding as it is strategic, and most founder narratives understate that reality. In this candid conversation, founders and experts unpack the hidden costs of high-growth environments, from burnout and decision fatigue to the identity strain of sustained pressure, and share the systems, habits, and mental frameworks that help leaders endure and perform at a high level.
The Agent Security Problem Nobody Is Talking About
Agentic AI is powerful, but it was never built to be secure. Now, enterprises trying to harness that are learning to rebuild the basic elements of cybersecurity from scratch. This session is a candid technical conversation about what agent security actually requires at the infrastructure level, why application-level permission models are fundamentally flawed, and the architectural decisions that really matter when deploying agentic AI.
I Built Before the Internet. AI Is Different.
From writing production code before the internet to building through multiple tech cycles, this isn’t the first platform shift. But AI is fundamentally different. It’s accelerating breakthroughs across energy, biology, and the physical world at a pace that challenges how we build and predict the future. This session breaks down what’s changed, where AI is already delivering real-world impact, and how to operate when the pace of innovation outstrips traditional timelines.
Autonomous Intelligence: Investing in the Companies Redefining Work
The next wave of AI does not just make workers more productive. It fundamentally changes what a company needs people to do. Autonomous agents are increasingly capable of executing complex workflows, from writing and deploying code to running core business operations. This roundtable will explore where autonomous intelligence is creating the biggest opportunities, which tools and categories are emerging, and what founders are doubling down on as AI moves from software that assists people to systems that can operate independently.
What Comes After the Smartphone?
For nearly two decades, the smartphone has been the center of our digital lives. But as AI transforms how we interact with technology, the next generation of products may look — and behave — very differently. Join Amazon’s Panos Panay for a conversation about AI, ambient computing, and the future of the devices we’ll use every day.
Rewriting SaaS: Why AI Breaks the Old Business Model
Is the SaaS playbook dead, or is it just evolving? This session brings together founders and platform leaders who are grappling with that question in real time — and coming away with real answers. Walk away with a sharper understanding of how to price AI products sustainably, how to build defensible moats when models are commoditizing, and how to make SaaS work in the AI era.
M&A Is Now an Early-Stage Strategy
The smartest founders today aren’t just building for IPOs, they’re also building for possible acquisitions in mind from day one. As exits shift and capital tightens, understanding M&A early has become a competitive advantage. This session breaks down how founders can create the possibility of such an option through product strategy and partnerships. It delves into how big-dollar startup outcomes actually happen, even for small companies.
Can Social Start Over?
Social media is entering a new era. With a new leadership team at the helm, Bluesky is betting that openness, user choice, and new technology can reshape how online communities are built. Join CEO Toni Schneider and COO Rose Wang for a conversation about the future of social media, competing with established platforms, and what it takes to build the next generation of consumer technology.
AI-Native’ Won't Work for the Enterprise
Fortune 500 companies are eager to adopt AI, but few are willing to replace the systems that run their businesses. Join Pruven Capital Partner Travis Skelly and Balerion founder Naren Krishna for a discussion on why the biggest near-term opportunity in enterprise AI is not rebuilding systems of record, but creating intelligent agent layers that automate the work performed inside them. Drawing on Balerion’s experience deploying AI agents on top of Encompass for mortgage processing, they’ll explore why rip-and-replace strategies struggle, what enterprises actually want from AI vendors, and how founders can build products that deliver immediate value without costly implementations, extensive customization, or disruptive change management.
How to Create Viral Growth and Capitalize On It
Startups can go from zero to viral overnight, but sustaining that momentum is a completely different challenge. In this fireside, Zach Yadegari shares how Cal AI navigated rapid growth, product pressure, and the realities of building in a distribution-driven market. Hear the lessons behind turning breakout attention into durable retention and long-term company building.
What Building AI Native Actually Means. A Conversation with OpenAI’s Head of Productivity
Two years ago, GTM engineering did not exist. Today, it is one of the fastest growing roles in the industry, with independent practitioners building million-dollar businesses. This session traces how AI collapsed the traditional go-to-market stack and created an entirely new discipline in its place. Walk away knowing what AI-native GTM looks like in practice and how it’s changing the way companies grow.
Startup Battlefield Alumni Update
Physical AI Isn't a Model Problem. It's an Execution Problem.
More than half of industrial downtime still traces to manual handoffs, not compute. Most “physical AI” today describes the world. The systems that will matter execute in it: closing the loop from perception to decision to action to verification, without waiting on a human.
Builders running execution-layer systems join investors backing the category to diagnose what separates intelligence that absorbs real-world variability from intelligence that narrates it. And why the next generation of durable industrial companies will be decided in that gap.
Startup Battlefield Final
The grand finale of TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition. Watch the final 5 teams from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Battlefield Cup and $100,000.
The GTM Engineer: How AI Created Tech's Next Big Job Category
Two years ago, GTM engineering did not exist. Today, it is one of the fastest growing roles in the industry, with independent practitioners building million-dollar businesses. This session traces how AI collapsed the traditional go-to-market stack and created an entirely new discipline in its place. Walk away knowing what AI-native GTM looks like in practice and how it’s changing the way companies grow.
Talent as the Operating System: How High-Performance Teams Scale in the AI Era
As AI transforms how work gets done, many organizations are discovering that outdated people systems are slowing performance and weakening execution. This session explores how trust, talent strategy, and cross-functional alignment directly impact organizational outcomes in fast-changing environments. Attendees will learn practical frameworks to strengthen collaboration between leadership, product, and people teams, identify execution breakdowns before they impact morale, and build scalable systems that support accountability, psychological safety, and sustainable performance across distributed and hybrid teams.
The First 90 Days: How Startups Build Toward $10M ARR
The definition of traction has changed. What once took years is now expected in months, and $0–$10M ARR is increasingly becoming the new early-stage baseline. This session breaks down how AI enabled execution, faster distribution, and shifting investor expectations are compressing GTM timelines, and the tactical levers founders need in the first 90 days to accelerate revenue and stand out fast.
What Anthropic Sees When Enterprises Actually Deploy Claude
Most enterprise AI conversations happen before deployment. This one starts after. As Head of Applied AI at Anthropic, Cat de Jong works directly with the enterprises putting Claude to work across their most critical workflows — and sees patterns that never make it into press releases. Where deployments succeed immediately. Where they stall. What separates the organizations extracting real value from the ones still running pilots eighteen months in. This session pulls back the curtain on what applied AI actually looks like inside the world’s most closely watched AI company — and what it reveals about where enterprise AI is really headed.
Winning Pre-Seed Without a Product
Founders are increasingly expected to compete for capital before they even have a product. At the pre-seed stage, investors are betting on story, conviction, and founder-market fit. This session breaks down how to build credibility before revenue exists so investors will cut that first check.
Securing the AI Enterprise: Why the Cloud Just Got a Lot More Complicated
AI is running inside the most sensitive enterprise systems in the world, making autonomous decisions at a speed and scale that traditional security frameworks were never designed to handle. This session delivers the infrastructure-level view of what enterprise AI security actually requires in 2026, from observability and governance to the architectural principles that separate deployments enterprises can trust from ones they cannot afford to touch.
The Open vs. Closed AI Debate Is Just Getting Started
Open models are closing the performance gap, while proprietary frontier models continue to push the limits of what AI can do. For founders, choosing a side or deciding not to is one of the most consequential decisions they’ll make. NVIDIA’s Nader Khalil, Director of Developer Tech, and Sydney Sykes, Global Head of VC Partnerships, debate the tradeoffs between open and closed AI, including cost, control, infrastructure, differentiation, and whether either path offers a lasting competitive advantage.
The Enterprise Isn't Broken. Your Assumptions About It Are.
AI is running inside the most sensitive enterprise systems in the world, making autonomous decisions at a speed and scale that traditional security frameworks were never designed to handle. This session delivers the infrastructure-level view of what enterprise AI security actually requires in 2026, from observability and governance to the architectural principles that separate deployments enterprises can trust from ones they cannot afford to touch.
Ask the Investors
What makes an investor say yes? In this audience-led Q&A, the Startup Battlefield finals judges take your toughest questions on what separates a fundable startup from the rest: team, traction, market opportunity, pitch delivery, red flags, and more. Come ready to ask and get candid answers straight from the investors making the decisions.
Everyone Can Build Software Now. What Happens Next?
AI is making it possible for millions of people to create software for the first time. Replit sits at the center of that shift. Join founder and CEO Amjad Masad for a conversation about the future of programming, entrepreneurship, and what happens when anyone can turn an idea into a product.
Announcing the Winner of the Startup Battlefield 2026
Startup Battlefield 200 Reception
The pitches have been made, the judges have deliberated, and the future of tech has never looked brighter. The Startup Battlefield 200 cohort is invited to celebrate the incredible founders and teams who took the Startup Battlefield stage and the winners who claimed the crown. This event is open to only the Startup Battlefield 200 cohort.
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