Day two of TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 takes place at Moscone West in San Francisco. Attendees can explore innovative startups and solution providers in the Expo Hall, discover emerging technologies through live startup pitches, and connect with over 10,000 founders, investors, entrepreneurs, and tech industry leaders using AI-powered matching features.
Whether you're looking for your next investment, seeking solutions for your business, or wanting to bring back new ideas for your team, there's plenty to explore today.
Today’s focus is on AI, featuring executives from Nvidia, Waabi, Flock Safety, and Recursive Intelligence, along with all partners from Benchmark. Discussions will cover robotics, AI hardware, public safety, and venture capital.
If you're still deciding whether to attend, tickets are currently available at 50% off the original on-site price. You can choose the Expo+ Pass to focus on discovery and networking, or opt for an eligible conference pass to add sessions from the main stage, interactive roundtables, and Q&A breakout rooms.
Next Day Highlights
Registration is available from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM; you can pick up your badge and register on-site in the lobby on the first floor. All times are Pacific Time.
Expo Hall
The Layer 2 exhibition is open from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM. It features over 300 startups, along with technology partners and solution providers. Attendees can view live product demos, discover tools to help grow their businesses, and connect directly with the teams behind them.
You can engage with potential clients and partners, explore investment opportunities, or compare different solutions to the challenges your team is currently facing. It’s also recommended to set aside time to explore companies outside your usual areas of focus.
Pitch Showcase Stage
Today’s fast-paced corporate pitch session will showcase emerging startups and reveal how founders present their projects. Whether you’re starting a business, seeking investment opportunities, or working within a startup team, you can gain inspiration from how others explain their products, demonstrate value, and capture attention.
Take note of the standout companies and approaches, bring new ideas back to your team, and connect with founders after the event to explore potential opportunities.
Main Stage Sessions
Holding a qualifying conference pass grants you access to insights on ideas, business strategies, and technologies shaping the startup ecosystem. For the full agenda and all day-two sessions, please visit the official schedule.
Disrupt Stage
Here are some perspectives that may influence your next business decision, investment judgment, or product strategy. Today’s focus includes:
- The Future of AI, Surveillance, and Public Safety: Garrett Langley of Flock Safety
- What we currently believe: Jack Altman, Peter Fenton, Chetan Puttagunta, Everett Randle, and Eric Vishria of Benchmark
- When AI Begins Designing Its Own Hardware: Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini of Recursive Intelligence
Startup Battlefield 200
Startup Battlefield will continue, featuring themes in health tech and life sciences, as well as enterprise and security, with competitors vying for a spot in the finals and a $100,000 non-dilutive funding award.
Attendees can follow companies worth tracking, observe how teams respond to investor questions, and gather ideas for showcasing their own products or evaluating new opportunities.
Builders Stage
This stage focuses on how to fund and drive growth for startups. Founders can refine their plans, investors can evaluate which factors determine whether a company is worth funding, and entrepreneurial teams can better understand the key priorities for their next stage of growth.
You can also consider what these discussions mean for your business, portfolio, or team, and exchange different perspectives with other attendees after the event.
- Series A funding in 2027: Jahanvi Sardana of Index Ventures, Shailendra Singh of Peak XV, and Janelle Teng Wade of Bessemer Venture Partners
- How to Win the Competition When You’re Not Doing AI: Yuri Sagalov of General Catalyst, Shan Shan of Baillie Gifford, and Chris Yu of ALSO
- Build Mode Live: Building from Scratch: Juliana Di Simone of Forela, Arul Nigam of Circuit Breaker Labs, and Courtney Young of MyoGene Bio
- Revealing AI Disruptor 60: What’s Next for AI?: Parag Agrawal of Parallel Web Systems, Shay Grinfeld of Greenfield Partners, Anand Kannappan of Patronus, Alberto Taiuti of Reactor
- Building the Next AI Giant: Jas Khaira of Blackstone N1
- From Zero to 1,000: How to Acquire Your First 1,000 Customers Without a Marketing Budget: Crystal Huang (GV), Grant Lee (Gamma), Elia Wallen (Engine)
- You already have a breakout product—how do you do it again?: Maddi Holman of Daring Ventures and Filip Kaliszan of Verkada
- Atlassian’s Chief Product and AI Officer, Tamar Yehoshua: Maddi Holman of Daring Ventures, Filip Kaliszan of Verkada, and Tamar Yehoshua of Atlassian
Real-World AI Stage
This stage showcases how AI is entering physical products and real-world environments, allowing attendees to learn about practical applications, emerging markets, and deployment challenges. Additionally, there will be a live robot demonstration.
- How to Build AI Systems When Failure Is Not an Option: Nathan Michael of Shield AI, Mikell Taylor of General Motors, Raquel Urtasun of Waabi
- Meet Stretch: A robot built for real life, not just demo videos—Aaron Edsinger of Hello Robot
- The bot is waiting for its ChatGPT moment—what’s holding it back? NVIDIA’s Les Karpas.
- How AI Runs on the Edge When the Cloud Is Away: Ali Agha of FieldAI, Michelle Lee of Medra, and Aidan Madigan-Curtis of Eclipse Ventures
- Launching AI’s orbital infrastructure: Devin Coldewey and Blake Bullock from The Aerospace Corporation, Jeff Thornburg from Portal Space Systems, and Jonny Dyer from Muon Space
- Humanoid robots have arrived: Live demonstration: Jonathan Hurst from Agility Robotics and the humanoid robot Digit
- From Prototype to Production: Can It Scale in the Real World?: Kevin Peterson of Bedrock Robotics and Adrian Macneil of Foxglove
- General Robotics Competition and Skild AI: When AI Meets the Physical World: Varun Jain of SE Ventures and Deepak Pathak of Skild AI
- Can We Bring Nature Back?: Ben Lamm of Colossal Biosciences
- Why and how every company will build its own AI: Manos Koukoumidis of Oumi (Open Universal Machine Intelligence) and Matt Burns of Insight Media Group
AI Stage
- The Agent Security Issue No One Is Talking About: Gavriel Cohen of NanoCo and Ric Smith of Okta
- Rewriting SaaS: How AI Is Disrupting Old Business Models: Cathy Gao of Sapphire Ventures, Aaron Jacobson of NEA, and Barr Moses of Monte Carlo
- How to verify that an AI can truly accomplish a task before assigning it: Hugging Face’s Irene Solaiman
- The $63 billion case for the AI tech stack’s “storage stack”: Pinaki Mukherjee of Wasabi Technologies, Stephanie Walter of HyperFRAME Research, Kevin Cochrane of Vultr, and Jake Lee of L2 Point Management
- What comes after the chatbot: OpenAI's Alexander Embir token issuance
- GTM Engineer: How AI Is Creating the Next Hot Job in Tech: Clay’s Kareem Amin
- Model Behavior: How Top Startups Are Realizing Real Value from AI Adoption: Anthropic’s Cat de Jong, Gamma’s Grant Lee, Clay’s Kareem Amin
- Agent, Host, Operator: Who Can Read Your Agent Prompts? — Richard Rizk of BLACKBOX AI
- Protecting AI Companies: Why Cloud Environments Are Becoming More Complex: Katie Moussouris of Luta Security, Cybersecurity Veteran Wendy Nather, and Rudy Mitra of AWS
- The company isn't broken. What's broken are your assumptions about it: Arsalan Tavakoli of Databricks
Side venue
You can use live Q&A to explore decisions you're facing, ask how a particular idea can be applied to your business, or gain a better understanding of the impacts affecting the company you're evaluating.
- Past and present builders: Payal Kadakia of ClassPass, Dr. Rumman Chowdhury of Humane Intelligence, Cassie Kozyrkov of Kozyr, and Holly Ransom of Emergent
- Build infrastructure at the speed of demand: Power and freight without waiting—Kofi Asante of Bluecore Energy, Kevin Damoa of Glīd
- From Founder to Investor: What Comes After Winning—What Happens After Success?: Bruce Lee of Keebeck Wealth Management and Abhi Tiwari of Blank Ventures
- Entering Space: Opportunities for AI Builders: Dr. Brian Cameron and Timothy Graves from The Aerospace Corporation, Bosco Lai from Little Place Labs, and Col. Aaron Stevenson from the U.S. Space Force
- Sovereign AI: Who Will Build the Infrastructure and Intelligence of the Next-Generation AI Economy?: Özgür Altun of Turkcell, Suresh Babu of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Bekir Polat of the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey
- Mistakes that can ruin your funding round—and how to avoid them: Dr. Irena King of Surgicure Technologies, Dr. Richard Munassi of Tampa Bay Wave, Ashley Paston of General Catalyst, and Emily Zhen of HealthQuest Capital
Roundtable discussion
- What comes after ChatGPT? AI for the physical world: Jack Hidary of SandboxAQ and Stacie Calad-Thomson of NVIDIA
- How Agentic AI Is Changing Decision-Making: Kozyr’s Cassie Kozyrkov
- When cutting-edge models aren’t enough: How to give AI the capability for breakthrough scientific discoveries: Piotr Byrski of Molecule.one and Shane Lewin of Clockwork Bio
- Grow like a founder, think like a CFO: Balancing growth and the income statement: Marshall Egger of Spacemilk
- Agentic AI in Enterprise: Helping GTM and Operations Leaders Separate Signal from Noise: Ankita Mehta of Databricks
- $100 billion entry fee: Can anyone still compete in AI? — Harrison Rolfes of PitchBook
- FDE: The best business model for enterprise software you've never heard of: Kevin Bai of Anthropic
- The Rise of Southern California’s Hard Tech: Why VCs and Founders Are Flocking to Gundo: Drew Boyles of El Segundo and Kevin Hawkins of the New York Stock Exchange
- “My company is soaring like a rocket.” What happens after landing?: Vishal Kumar and Tushar Kumar, Twin Peaks Wealth Advisors
- How to Get Your First Institutional Check (from the Check Writer): Aditi Maliwal of Upfront Ventures
- Relationship-Driven GTM: Perspectives from Founders and Operators: Connie Koh of Vectors Capital and George Mitri of 2DaLoop
- Open-source weight models and the new AI tech stack: Mercedes Bent and Vanessa Larco from Premise
- Founders' VC Insights: How to Raise Your First VC Round: Itamar Novick of Recursive Ventures and Brian Sparkes of Silicon Valley Venture, Corp.
- Spend Less, Do More: Raising Venture Capital in an AI-First Era — “Helping Entrepreneurs Avoid the Trap of Overfunding”: Neil Sequeira of Defy.vc
Social opportunities
The Networking Lounge, sponsored by the Signify Business Cash World Elite Mastercard® by Wells Fargo, is open from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. You can schedule meetings using the TechCrunch Events app and its AI-powered matching feature.
Connect with potential clients, solution providers, investors, partners, and industry peers. Follow up on introductions, continue conversations over coffee, and agree on next steps before parting.
Founder / Investor Exclusive Social Event
Deal Flow Cafe is open exclusively to Founder Pass and Investor Pass holders for dedicated networking. View pass permissions here.
Investor-only session: StrictlyVC
StrictlyVC is exclusively available to Investor Pass holders and features discussions on IPOs, family offices, and limited partner priorities.
- New Listing Rules: Ryan Flanagan, ICR
- New Power Players: How Family Offices Are Reshaping Venture Capital: Bruce K. Lee of Keebeck Capital Management and Dave Sachse of Family VC
- What limited partners want now: Amit Bhatti of Truebridge Capital, Beezer Clarkson of LGT Capital Partners
Disrupt 2026 Side Events
After leaving Moscone West, the conversation can continue. 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
You can meet people outside your usual circle in more relaxed settings. Please check the entry requirements for each event and complete your RSVP beforehand.
You can still join Disrupt 2026.
Discover a company worth noting, a solution worth exploring, or a connection worth following up on. Whether you're founding a startup, investing, or helping startups grow, make your next day’s schedule align with your goals.
Disrupt Passes are currently available at 50% off the on-site price—join 10,000+ tech industry leaders for the next two days of this flagship annual event.