TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Marks Its Second Day

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 continues at Moscone West in San Francisco for its second day, bringing together more than 10,000 founders, investors, startup teams, and technology leaders. The Expo Hall opens at 8 a.m. Pacific Time with over 300 startups showcasing products, while AI-powered matchmaking helps attendees connect with relevant contacts. Day 2 programming spans AI, robotics, public safety, and venture investment, with speakers from Nvidia, Waabi, Flock Safety, Ricursive Intelligence, and Benchmark's full partnership.

Background: What Disrupt 2026 Offers

Disrupt 2026 is structured around multiple stages and networking formats. The Expo Hall on Level 2 runs from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., hosting 300+ startups alongside tech partners and solution providers. Registration and badge pick-up operate from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Level 1 lobby. Attendees can choose an Expo+ Pass for discovery and networking, or an eligible conference pass that adds stage sessions, interactive roundtables, and Q&A breakouts. A 50% discount on the original walk-up rate is available for those still deciding whether to attend.

Development: Day 2 Stage Programming

The Disrupt Stage features sessions including "AI, Surveillance, and the Future of Public Safety" with Garrett Langley of Flock Safety; "What We Believe Now" with Benchmark's Jack Altman, Peter Fenton, Chetan Puttagunta, Everett Randle, and Eric Vishria; and "When AI Starts Designing Its Own Hardware" with Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini of Ricursive Intelligence. Startup Battlefield continues with healthtech, life sciences, enterprise, and security contenders competing for a place in the final and $100,000 in equity-free funding.

The Builders Stage covers fundraising and growth topics. Sessions include "The Series A in 2027" with Jahanvi Sardana of Index Ventures, Shailendra Singh of Peak XV, and Janelle Teng Wade of Bessemer Venture Partners; "How to Win When You're Not Building AI" with Yuri Sagalov of General Catalyst, Shan Shan of Baillie Gifford, and Chris Yu of ALSO; "Build Mode Live: Building From Zero to One" with Juliana Di Simone of Forela, Arul Nigam of Circuit Breaker Labs, and Courtney Young of MyoGene Bio; "Revealing AI Disruptors 60: What Can AI Do Next?" with Parag Agrawal of Parallel Web Systems, Shay Grinfeld of Greenfield Partners, Anand Kannappan of Patronus, and Alberto Taiuti of Reactor; "The Real Tokenmaxxing: How the Best AI Companies Navigate a Multi-Model World" with Mo Jomaa of Capital G, Vipul Ved Prakash of Together AI, and Zuzanna Stamirowska of Pathway; "Building the Next Generation of AI Giants" with Jas Khaira of Blackstone N1; "The Zero-to-1K Playbook: How to Get Your First 1,000 Customers Without a Marketing Budget" with Crystal Huang of GV (Google Ventures), Grant Lee of Gamma, and Elia Wallen of Engine; and "So You've Got a Hit Product. How Does Your Company Do It Again?" with Maddi Holman of Daring Ventures and Filip Kaliszan of Verkada, plus a session with Tamar Yehoshua, Chief Product and AI Officer at Atlassian.

The Real World AI Stage explores AI in physical products and environments, including a live robot demonstration. Sessions include "Building AI Systems When Failure Is Not an Option" with Nathan Michael of Shield AI, Mikell Taylor of General Motors, and Raquel Urtasun of Waabi; "Come, Meet Stretch. The Robot Built for Real Life, Not a Demo Reel" with Aaron Edsinger of Hello Robot; "Robots Are Waiting for Their ChatGPT Moment. Here Is What Is Standing in the Way" with Les Karpas of NVIDIA; "Operating at the Edge: How AI Works When the Cloud Doesn't" with Ali Agha of FieldAI, Michelle Lee of Medra, and Aidan Madigan-Curtis of Eclipse Ventures; "Launching AI's Orbital Infrastructure" with Devin Coldewey and Blake Bullock of The Aerospace Corporation, Jeff Thornburg of Portal Space Systems, and Jonny Dyer of Muon Space; "Humanoid Robots Have Arrived: Live and On Stage" with Jonathan Hurst of Agility Robotics and Digit the Humanoid Robot; "From Prototype to Production: Can it Scale in Reality?" with Kevin Peterson of Bedrock Robotics and Adrian Macneil of Foxglove; "The Race to General-Purpose Robots with Skild AI: When AI Meets the Physical World" with Varun Jain of SE Ventures and Deepak Pathak of Skild AI; "Can We Engineer Nature's Comeback?" with Ben Lamm of Colossal Biosciences; and "Why and How Every Company Will Build Its Own AI" with Manos Koukoumidis of Oumi (Open Universal Machine Intelligence) and Matt Burns of Insight Media Group.

The AI Stage addresses enterprise and security topics. Sessions include "The Agent Security Problem Nobody Is Talking About" with Gavriel Cohen of NanoCo and Ric Smith of Okta; "Rewriting SaaS: Why AI Breaks the Old Business Model" with Cathy Gao of Sapphire Ventures, Aaron Jacobson of NEA, and Barr Moses of Monte Carlo; "Before You Let AI Do the Job, How Do You Know It Actually Can" with Irene Solaiman of Hugging Face; "The $63 Billion Case for Storagemaxxing Your AI Stack" with 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" with Alexander Embiricos of OpenAI; "The GTM Engineer: How AI Created Tech's Next Big Job Category" with Kareem Amin of Clay; "Model Behavior: How Top Startups Get Real Value From AI Adoption" with Cat de Jong of Anthropic, Grant Lee of Gamma, and Kareem Amin of Clay; "Proxy, Host, Operator: Who Can Read Your Agent's Prompts?" with Richard Rizk of BLACKBOX AI; "Securing the AI Enterprise: Why the Cloud Just Got a Lot More Complicated" with Katie Moussouris of Luta Security, Wendy Nather, Cybersecurity Veteran, and Rudy Mitra of AWS; and "The Enterprise Isn't Broken. Your Assumptions About It Are" with Arsalan Tavakoli of Databricks.

Breakout Sessions and Roundtables

Breakout sessions with audience Q&A include "Building Then vs Now" with Payal Kadakia of ClassPass, Dr. Rumman Chowdhury of Humane Intelligence, Cassie Kozyrkov of Kozyr, and Holly Ransom of Emergent; "Infrastructure at the Speed of Demand: Power and Freight Without the Wait" with Kofi Asante of Bluecore Energy and Kevin Damoa of Glīd; "Best Practices for Running a Successful Fundraise: From Preparation to Investor Engagement" with Maggie Sin of Fidelity Private Shares, Bill Tai of HUT 8 Corp, and Robin Uata of Fidelity Private Shares; "From Founder to Investor: The Next Act – What Happens After You Win?" with Bruce Lee of Keebeck Wealth Management and Abhi Tiwari of Blank Ventures; "Breaking Into Space: The AI Builder's Opportunity" with Dr. Brian Cameron and Timothy Graves of The Aerospace Corporation, Bosco Lai of Little Place Labs, and Col. Aaron Stevenson of United States Space Force; "Sovereign AI: Who Will Build the Infrastructure and Intelligence of the Next AI Economy?" with Özgür Altun of Turkcell, Suresh Babu of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Bekir Polat of Office of the Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye; and "Fundraising Mistakes That Will Kill Your Round, and How to Avoid Them" with Dr. Irena King of Surgicure Technologies, Dr. Richard Munassi of Tampa Bay Wave, Ashley Paston of General Catalyst, and Emily Zhen of HealthQuest Capital.

Roundtables cover topics including "What Comes After ChatGPT? AI for the Physical World" with Jack Hidary of SandboxAQ and Stacie Calad-Thomson of NVIDIA; "How Does Agentic AI Change Decision-Making?" with Cassie Kozyrkov of Kozyr; "When Frontier Models Are Not Enough: How to Make AI Capable of Breakthrough Scientific Discoveries" with Piotr Byrski of Molecule.one and Shane Lewin of Clockwork Bio; "Grow Like a Founder, Think Like a CFO: Balancing Growth and the P&L" with Marshall Egger of Spacemilk; "Agentic AI in the Enterprise: Separating Signal from Noise for GTM and Ops Leaders" with Ankita Mehta of Databricks; "The $100 Billion Entry Fee: Can Anyone Still Compete in AI?" with Harrison Rolfes of PitchBook; "FDE: The Best Commercial Motion in Enterprise Software You've Never Heard Of" with Kevin Bai of Anthropic; "The Rise of SoCal Hard Tech: Why VCs and Founders Are Gravitating to Gundo" with Drew Boyles of City of El Segundo and Kevin Hawkins of New York Stock Exchange; "My Company Is a Rocket Ship. What Comes After the Landing?" with Vishal Kumar and Tushar Kumar of Twin Peaks Wealth Advisors; "How to Land Your First Institutional Check (From the Person Who Writes Them)" with Aditi Maliwal of Upfront Ventures; "Relationship-Led GTM: Founder + Operator Perspective" with Connie Koh of Vectors Capital and George Mitri of 2DaLoop; "Open-Weight Models and the New AI Stack" with Mercedes Bent and Vanessa Larco of Premise; "VC Insights for Founders: How to Raise Your First VC Round" with Itamar Novick of Recursive Ventures and Brian Sparkes of Silicon Valley Venture, Corp.; and "Doing More with Less: Raising Venture Capital in an AI-first World 'Helping Entrepreneurs Avoid the Pitfalls of Overcapitalization'" with Neil Sequeira of Defy.vc.

Networking and Investor Sessions

The Networking Lounge powered by Signify Business Cash World Elite Mastercard by Wells Fargo operates from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with the TechCrunch Events app providing AI-powered matchmaking for scheduling meetings. The Deal Flow Cafe is available exclusively to Founder Pass and Investor Pass holders. An investor-only session, StrictlyVC, covers IPOs, family offices, and limited partner priorities for Investor Pass holders.

What to Watch Next

Day 2 programming runs through 5 p.m. Pacific Time. Startup Battlefield finalists will advance toward the $100,000 equity-free funding prize. Sessions on the AI Stage, Real World AI Stage, and Builders Stage continue throughout the day, with breakout sessions and roundtables offering smaller-group discussion formats. The Expo Hall remains open until 5 p.m. for attendees to explore the 300+ participating startups.