TechCrunch Disrupt 2026: Day 2

Day 2 of TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 is present astatine San Francisco’s Moscone West. Explore innovative startups and solution providers successful the Expo Hall, observe emerging technologies done live startup pitches, and usage AI-powered matchmaking to link with a assemblage of 10,000+ founders, investors, startup teams, and exertion leaders.

Whether you’re looking for your adjacent investment, discovering solutions for your business, oregon gathering ideas to instrumentality backmost to your team, there’s plentifulness to research today.

Today’s absorption spans AI, with speakers including leaders from Nvidia, Waabi, Flock Safety, and Ricursive Intelligence, alongside Benchmark’s afloat partnership. Conversations volition screen robotics, AI hardware, nationalist safety, and task investment.

Still deciding whether to come? Get your pass and articulation america astatine 50% disconnected the archetypal walk-up rate. Make find and networking your absorption with an Expo+ Pass, oregon take an eligible league pass to adhd signifier sessions, interactive roundtables, and Q&A breakouts.

Image Credits:Slava Blazer Photography

Day 2 highlights

Registration: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Badge pick-up and in-person registration successful the Level 1 lobby. All times beneath are Pacific Time.

Expo Hall

Open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. connected Level 2. Explore 300+ startups alongside tech partners and solution providers crossed the Expo Hall. See products successful action, observe tools that could assistance your concern grow, and talk straight with the teams down them.

Meet imaginable customers and partners, scout concern opportunities, oregon comparison solutions to the challenges your squad is facing. Give yourself clip to research companies beyond your accustomed country of interest.

Image Credits:Eric Slomonson, The Photo Group

Pitch Showcase Stage

Catch today’s enterprise accelerated pitches to observe emerging startups and spot however founders marque their case. Whether you’re gathering a company, scouting investments oregon moving successful a startup team, find inspiration successful however others explicate their products, show value, and seizure attention.

Note the companies and approaches that basal out, instrumentality caller ideas backmost to your team, and conscionable the founders afterward to research imaginable opportunities.

Stage sessions

With an eligible league pass, research the ideas, concern strategies, and technologies shaping the startup ecosystem. Check the afloat agenda for league times and the implicit Day 2 lineup.

Disrupt Stage

Hear perspectives that could pass your adjacent concern decision, concern thesis, oregon merchandise strategy. Today’s highlights include:

AI, Surveillance, and the Future of Public Safety: Garrett Langley, Flock Safety

What We Believe Now: Benchmark’s Jack Altman, Peter Fenton, Chetan Puttagunta, Everett Randle and Eric Vishria

When AI Starts Designing Its Own Hardware: Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, Ricursive Intelligence

Startup Battlefield 200

Startup Battlefield continues with healthtech and beingness sciences, positive endeavor and security, arsenic contenders prosecute a spot successful the last and $100,000 successful equity-free funding.

Discover companies to follow, spot however teams respond to capitalist scrutiny, and stitchery ideas for presenting your ain products oregon evaluating caller opportunities.

Image Credits:Kimberly White / Getty Images

Builders Stage

Explore what it takes to money and turn a startup. Founders tin sharpen their plans, investors tin comparison perspectives connected what makes a concern fundable, and startup teams tin amended recognize the priorities shaping their adjacent signifier of growth.

Consider what the treatment means for your business, portfolio, oregon team, and comparison perspectives with different attendees afterward.

The Series A successful 2027: Jahanvi Sardana, Index Ventures; Shailendra Singh, Peak XV; and Janelle Teng Wade, Bessemer Venture Partners

How to Win When You’re Not Building AI: Yuri Sagalov, General Catalyst; Shan Shan, Baillie Gifford; and Chris Yu, ALSO

Build Mode Live: Building From Zero to One: Juliana Di Simone, Forela; Arul Nigam, Circuit Breaker Labs; and Courtney Young, MyoGene Bio

Revealing AI Disruptors 60: What Can AI Do Next?: Parag Agrawal, Parallel Web Systems; Shay Grinfeld, Greenfield Partners; Anand Kannappan, Patronus; Alberto Taiuti, Reactor

The Real Tokenmaxxing: How the Best AI Companies Navigate a Multi-Model World: Mo Jomaa, Capital G; Vipul Ved Prakash, Together AI; and Zuzanna Stamirowska, Pathway

Image Credits:Slava Blazer Photography / Flickr (opens successful a caller window)

Building the Next Generation of AI Giants: Jas Khaira, Blackstone N1

The Zero-to-1K Playbook: How to Get Your First 1,000 Customers Without a Marketing Budget: Crystal Huang, GV (Google Ventures); Grant Lee, Gamma; and Elia Wallen, Engine

So You’ve Got a Hit Product. How Does Your Company Do It Again?: Maddi Holman, Daring Ventures; Filip Kaliszan, Verkada

Tamar Yehoshua, Chief Product and AI Officer, Atlassian: Maddi Holman, Daring Ventures; Filip Kaliszan, Verkada; and Tamar Yehoshua, Atlassian

Real World AI Stage

Discover however AI is moving into carnal products and environments, with opportunities to research applicable applications, emerging markets, and the challenges of deployment. Plus, witnesser a unrecorded robot demonstration.

Building AI Systems When Failure Is Not an Option: Nathan Michael, Shield AI; Mikell Taylor, General Motors; and Raquel Urtasun, Waabi

Come, Meet Stretch. The Robot Built for Real Life, Not a Demo Reel: Aaron Edsinger, Hello Robot

Robots Are Waiting for Their ChatGPT Moment. Here Is What Is Standing successful the Way: Les Karpas, NVIDIA

Operating astatine the Edge: How AI Works When the Cloud Doesn’t: Ali Agha, FieldAI; Michelle Lee, Medra; and Aidan Madigan-Curtis, Eclipse Ventures

Launching AI’s Orbital Infrastructure: Devin Coldewey and Blake Bullock, The Aerospace Corporation, Jeff Thornburg, Portal Space Systems; and Jonny Dyer, Muon Space

Humanoid Robots Have Arrived: Live and On Stage: Jonathan Hurst, Agility Robotics; and Digit, Humanoid Robot

From Prototype to Production: Can it Scale successful Reality?: Kevin Peterson, Bedrock Robotics and Adrian Macneil, Foxglove

The Race to General-Purpose Robots with Skild AI: When AI Meets the Physical World: Varun Jain, SE Ventures; Deepak Pathak, Skild AI

Can We Engineer Nature’s Comeback?: Ben Lamm, Colossal Biosciences.

Why and How Every Company Will Build Its Own AI: Manos Koukoumidis, Oumi (Open Universal Machine Intelligence); Matt Burns, Insight Media Group

AI Stage

The Agent Security Problem Nobody Is Talking About: Gavriel Cohen, NanoCo; and Ric Smith, Okta

Rewriting SaaS: Why AI Breaks the Old Business Model: Cathy Gao, Sapphire Ventures; Aaron Jacobson, NEA; and Barr Moses, Monte Carlo

Before You Let AI Do the Job, How Do You Know It Actually Can: Irene Solaiman, Hugging Face

The $63 Billion Case for Storagemaxxing Your AI Stack: Pinaki Mukherjee, Wasabi Technologies; Stephanie Walter, HyperFRAME Research; Kevin Cochrane, Vultr; and Jake Lee, L2 Point Management

What Comes After the Chatbot: Alexander Embiricos, OpenAI

The GTM Engineer: How AI Created Tech’s Next Big Job Category: Kareem Amin, Clay

Model Behavior: How Top Startups Get Real Value From AI Adoption: Cat de Jong, Anthropic; Grant Lee, Gamma; and Kareem Amin, Clay

Proxy, Host, Operator: Who Can Read Your Agent’s Prompts?: Richard Rizk, BLACKBOX AI

Securing the AI Enterprise: Why the Cloud Just Got a Lot More Complicated: Katie Moussouris, Luta Security; Wendy Nather, Cybersecurity Veteran; and Rudy Mitra, AWS

The Enterprise Isn’t Broken. Your Assumptions About It Are: Arsalan Tavakoli, Databricks

Breakout sessions

Use the assemblage Q&A to research a determination you’re facing, inquire however an thought could use to your business, oregon amended recognize the implications for companies you’re evaluating.

Building Then vs Now: Payal Kadakia, ClassPass; Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, Humane Intelligence; Cassie Kozyrkov, Kozyr; and Holly Ransom, Emergent

Infrastructure astatine the Speed of Demand: Power and Freight Without the Wait: Kofi Asante (Bluecore Energy), Kevin Damoa (Glīd)

Best Practices for Running a Successful Fundraise: From Preparation to Investor Engagement: Maggie Sin (Fidelity Private Shares), Bill Tai (HUT 8 Corp), Robin Uata (Fidelity Private Shares)

Image Credits:TechCrunch

From Founder to Investor: The Next Act – What Happens After You Win?: Bruce Lee (Keebeck Wealth Management), Abhi Tiwari (Blank Ventures)

Breaking Into Space: The AI Builder’s Opportunity: Dr. Brian Cameron (The Aerospace Corporation), Timothy Graves (The Aerospace Corporation), Bosco Lai (Little Place Labs), Col. Aaron Stevenson (United States Space Force)

Sovereign AI: Who Will Build the Infrastructure and Intelligence of the Next AI Economy?: Özgür Altun (Turkcell), Suresh Babu (Hewlett Packard Enterprise), Bekir Polat (Office of the Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye)

Fundraising Mistakes That Will Kill Your Round, and How to Avoid Them: Dr. Irena King (Surgicure Technologies), Dr. Richard Munassi (Tampa Bay Wave), Ashley Paston (General Catalyst), Emily Zhen (HealthQuest Capital)

Roundtables

Take portion successful these fashionable small-group discussions. Bring a concern challenge, an concern question, oregon a position from your ain work. Hear however others attack akin issues and permission with ideas to research further.

What Comes After ChatGPT? AI for the Physical World: Jack Hidary (SandboxAQ), Stacie Calad-Thomson (NVIDIA)

How Does Agentic AI Change Decision-Making?: Cassie Kozyrkov (Kozyr)

When Frontier Models Are Not Enough: How to Make AI Capable of Breakthrough Scientific Discoveries: Piotr Byrski (Molecule.one), Shane Lewin (Clockwork Bio)

Grow Like a Founder, Think Like a CFO: Balancing Growth and the P&L: Marshall Egger (Spacemilk)

Agentic AI successful the Enterprise: Separating Signal from Noise for GTM and Ops Leaders: Ankita Mehta (Databricks)

The $100 Billion Entry Fee: Can Anyone Still Compete successful AI?: Harrison Rolfes (PitchBook)

FDE: The Best Commercial Motion successful Enterprise Software You’ve Never Heard Of: Kevin Bai (Anthropic)

The Rise of SoCal Hard Tech: Why VCs and Founders Are Gravitating to Gundo: Drew Boyles (City of El Segundo), Kevin Hawkins (New York Stock Exchange)

“My Company Is a Rocket Ship.” What Comes After the Landing?: Vishal Kumar (Twin Peaks Wealth Advisors), Tushar Kumar (Twin Peaks Wealth Advisors)

How to Land Your First Institutional Check (From the Person Who Writes Them): Aditi Maliwal (Upfront Ventures)

Relationship-Led GTM: Founder + Operator Perspective: Connie Koh (Vectors Capital), George Mitri (2DaLoop)

Open-Weight Models and the New AI Stack: Mercedes Bent (Premise), Vanessa Larco (Premise)

VC Insights for Founders: How to Raise Your First VC Round: Itamar Novick (Recursive Ventures), Brian Sparkes (Silicon Valley Venture, Corp.)

Doing More with Less: Raising Venture Capital successful an AI-first World “Helping Entrepreneurs Avoid the Pitfalls of Overcapitalization”: Neil Sequeira (Defy.vc)

Networking opportunities

The Networking Lounge powered by Signify Business Cash World Elite Mastercard® by Wells Fargo is unfastened 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Use the TechCrunch Events app and its AI-powered matchmaking to docket meetings.

Connect with radical applicable to your goals, from imaginable customers and solution providers to investors, collaborators, and manufacture peers. Follow up connected an introduction, proceed a speech implicit coffee, and hold connected a adjacent measurement earlier you portion ways.

Founder / Investor-only networking meetings

The Deal Flow Cafe is disposable lone to Founder Pass and Investor Pass holders for dedicated networking. Explore walk entree here.

Image Credits:Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch

Investor-only session: StrictlyVC

For Investor Pass holders only, StrictlyVC offers conversations connected IPOs, household offices, and constricted spouse priorities.

Use the day to comparison concern perspectives and physique relationships with chap investors. Check the docket for the latest programme times.

The New Rules of Going Public: Ryan Flanagan, ICR

The New Power Players: How Family Offices Are Reshaping Venture Investing: Bruce K Lee, Keebeck Capital Management and Dave Sachse, Family VC

What Limited Partners Want Now: Amit Bhatti, Truebridge Capital and Beezer Clarkson, LGT Capital Partners

Disrupt 2026 Side Events

Keep the conversations going aft you permission Moscone West. Some of tonight’s Side Events include:

Ecosystem Mixer, hosted by Peak XV

Liquid Assets, hosted by Augment and Mintz

The Afterburn, hosted by Backblaze and Flamethrower

Explore opportunities to conscionable radical beyond your existing web successful a much informal setting. Check the idiosyncratic listings for introduction requirements and RSVP earlier heading over.

Still clip to articulation Disrupt 2026

Discover a institution worthy watching, a solution worthy exploring oregon a transportation worthy pursuing up. Whether you’re building, investing, oregon helping a startup grow, marque Day 2 enactment for your goals.

Get your Disrupt pass astatine 50% disconnected the Walk-Up complaint and articulation 10,000+ tech leaders for the adjacent 2 days of our yearly flagship conference.