Disrupt 2026: Day 2 | TechCrunch

Day 2 of TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 is right here at San Francisco’s Moscone West. Discover modern startups and resolution suppliers within the Expo Corridor, uncover rising applied sciences by way of reside startup pitches, and use AI-powered matchmaking to attach with a group of 10,000+ founders, traders, startup groups, and expertise leaders.

Whether or not you’re searching for your subsequent funding, discovering options for your small business, or gathering concepts to take again to your group, there’s loads to discover as we speak.

At present’s focus spans AI, with audio system from Nvidia, Waabi, Flock Security, and Ricursive Intelligence, alongside Benchmark’s full partnership. Conversations will cowl robotics, AI {hardware}, public security, and enterprise funding.

Nonetheless deciding whether or not to return? Get your pass and be part of us at 50% off the unique walk-up price. Make discovery and networking your focus with an Expo+ Move, or select an eligible convention move so as to add stage classes, interactive roundtables, and Q&A breakouts.

Day 2 highlights

Registration: 8 a.m. to five p.m. Badge pickup and in-person registration is within the Degree 1 foyer. All instances under are Pacific Time.

Expo Corridor

Open 8 a.m. to five p.m. on Degree 2. Discover 300+ startups alongside tech companions and resolution suppliers throughout the Expo Corridor. See merchandise in motion, uncover instruments that might assist your small business develop, and communicate straight with the groups behind them.

Meet potential prospects and companions, scout funding alternatives, or examine options to the challenges your group is going through. Give your self time to discover firms past your traditional space of curiosity.

Pitch Showcase Stage

Catch as we speak’s enterprise quick pitches to find rising startups and see how founders make their case. Whether or not you’re constructing an organization, scouting investments, or working in a startup group, discover inspiration in how others clarify their merchandise, reveal worth, and seize consideration.

Word the businesses and approaches that stand out, take recent concepts again to your group, and meet the founders afterward to discover potential alternatives.

Stage classes

With an eligible convention move, discover the concepts, enterprise methods, and applied sciences shaping the startup ecosystem. Check the full agenda for session instances and the entire Day 2 lineup.

Disrupt Stage

Hear views that might inform your subsequent enterprise choice, funding thesis, or product technique. At present’s highlights embody:

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

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 well being tech and life sciences, plus enterprise and safety, as contenders pursue a spot within the closing and $100,000 in equity-free funding.

Uncover firms to comply with, see how groups reply to investor scrutiny, and collect concepts for presenting your individual merchandise or evaluating new alternatives.

Builders Stage

Discover what it takes to fund and develop a startup. Founders can sharpen their plans, traders can examine views on what makes a enterprise fundable, and startup groups can higher perceive the priorities shaping their subsequent stage of progress.

Take into account what the dialogue means for your small business, portfolio, or group, and examine views with different attendees afterward.

The Series A in 2027: Jahanvi Sardana, Index Ventures; Shailendra Singh, Peak XV; and Janelle Teng Wade, Bessemer Enterprise Companions

How to Win When You’re Not Building AI: Mark Crane, Basic Catalyst; Shan Shan, Baillie Gifford; and Chris Yu, ALSO

Construct Mode Reside: Constructing From Zero to One: Juliana Di Simone, Forela; Arul Nigam, Circuit Breaker Labs; and Courtney Younger, MyoGene Bio

Revealing AI Disruptors 60: What Can AI Do Subsequent?: Parag Agrawal, Parallel Internet Programs; Shay Grinfeld, Greenfield Companions; Anand Kannappan, Patronus; Alberto Taiuti, Reactor

The Actual Tokenmaxxing: How the Finest AI Firms Navigate a Multi-Mannequin World: Mo Jomaa, Capital G; Vipul Ved Prakash, Collectively AI; and Zuzanna Stamirowska, Pathway

Constructing the Subsequent Era of AI Giants: Jas Khaira, Blackstone N1

The Zero-to-1K Playbook: The way to Get Your First 1,000 Clients With no Advertising Finances: Crystal Huang, GV (Google Ventures); Grant Lee, Gamma; and Elia Wallen, Engine

So You’ve Received a Hit Product. How Does Your Firm Do It Once more?: Maddi Holman, Daring Ventures; Filip Kaliszan, Verkada; Tamar Yehoshua, Atlassian

Actual World AI Stage

Uncover how AI is shifting into bodily merchandise and environments, with alternatives to discover sensible purposes, rising markets, and the challenges of deployment. Plus, witness a reside robotic demonstration.

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

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

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

Working on 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 Company; Jeff Thornburg, Portal House Programs; Jonny Dyer, Muon House

Humanoid Robots Have Arrived: Reside and On Stage: Jonathan Hurst, Agility Robotics, and Digit, Humanoid Robotic

From Prototype to Manufacturing: Can It Scale in Actuality: Kevin Peterson, Bedrock Robotics; Adrian Macneil, Foxglove

The Race to Basic-Objective Robots with Skild AI: When AI Meets the Bodily World: Varun Jain, SE Ventures; Deepak Pathak, Skild AI

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

Why and How Each Firm Will Construct Its Personal AI: Manos Koukoumidis, Oumi; Matt Burns, Perception Media Group

AI Stage

The Agent Safety Downside No one Is Speaking About: Gavriel Cohen, NanoCo; and Ric Smith, Okta

Rewriting SaaS: Why AI Breaks the Previous Enterprise Mannequin: Cathy Gao, Sapphire Ventures; Aaron Jacobson, NEA; and Barr Moses, Monte Carlo

Earlier than You Let AI Do the Job, How Do You Know It Really Can: Irene Solaiman, Hugging Face

The $63 Billion Case for Storagemaxxing Your AI Stack: Pinaki Mukherjee, Wasabi Applied sciences; Stephanie Walter, HyperFRAME Analysis; Kevin Cochrane, Vultr; and Jake Lee, L2 Level Administration

What Comes After the Chatbot: Alexander Embiricos, OpenAI

The GTM Engineer: How AI Created Tech’s Subsequent Large Job Class: Kareem Amin, Clay

Mannequin Conduct: How Prime Startups Get Actual Worth From AI Adoption: Cat de Jong, Anthropic; Grant Lee, Gamma; and Kareem Amin, Clay

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

Securing the AI Enterprise: Why the Cloud Simply Received a Lot Extra Sophisticated: Katie Moussouris, Luta Safety; Wendy Nather, Cybersecurity Veteran; and Rudy Mitra, AWS

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

Breakout classes

Use the viewers Q&A to discover a choice you’re going through, ask how an concept may apply to your small business, or higher perceive the implications for firms you’re evaluating.

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

Infrastructure on the Pace of Demand: Energy and Freight With out the Wait: Kofi Asante (Bluecore Power), Kevin Damoa (Glīd)

Finest Practices for Operating a Profitable Fundraise: From Preparation to Investor Engagement: Maggie Sin (Constancy Personal Shares), Invoice Tai (HUT 8 Corp), Robin Uata (Constancy Personal Shares)

From Founder to Investor: The Subsequent Act – What Occurs After You Win?: Bruce Lee (Keebeck Wealth Administration), Abhi Tiwari (Clean Ventures)

Breaking Into House: The AI Builder’s Alternative: Dr. Brian Cameron (The Aerospace Company), Timothy Graves (The Aerospace Company), Bosco Lai (Little Place Labs), Col. Aaron Stevenson (United States House Power)

Sovereign AI: Who Will Construct the Infrastructure and Intelligence of the Subsequent AI Financial system?: Özgür Altun (Turkcell), Suresh Babu (Hewlett Packard Enterprise), Bekir Polat (Workplace of the Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye)

Fundraising Errors That Will Kill Your Spherical, and The way to Keep away from Them: Dr. Irena King (Surgicure Applied sciences), Dr. Richard Munassi (Tampa Bay Wave), Ashley Paston (Basic Catalyst), Emily Zhen (HealthQuest Capital)

Roundtables

Participate in these fashionable small-group discussions. Deliver a enterprise problem, an funding query, or a perspective from your individual work. Hear how others method comparable points and depart with concepts to discover additional.

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

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

When Frontier Fashions Are Not Sufficient: The way to Make AI Able to Breakthrough Scientific Discoveries: Piotr Byrski (Molecule.one), Shane Lewin (Clockwork Bio)

Develop Like a Founder, Suppose Like a CFO: Balancing Progress and the P&L: Marshall Egger (Spacemilk)

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

The $100 Billion Entry Price: Can Anybody Nonetheless Compete in AI?: Harrison Rolfes (PitchBook)

FDE: The Finest Industrial Movement in Enterprise Software program You’ve By no means Heard Of: Kevin Bai (Anthropic)

The Rise of SoCal Onerous Tech: Why VCs and Founders Are Gravitating to Gundo: Drew Boyles (Metropolis of El Segundo), Kevin Hawkins (New York Inventory Alternate)

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

The way to Land Your First Institutional Test (From the Individual Who Writes Them): Aditi Maliwal (Upfront Ventures)

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

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

VC Insights for Founders: The way to Elevate Your First VC Spherical: Itamar Novick (Recursive Ventures), Brian Sparkes (Silicon Valley Enterprise, Corp.)

Doing Extra with Much less: Elevating Enterprise Capital in an AI-first World “Serving to Entrepreneurs Keep away from the Pitfalls of Overcapitalization”: Neil Sequeira (Defy.vc)

Networking alternatives

The Networking Lounge powered by Signify Enterprise Money World Elite Mastercard® by Wells Fargo is open 9 a.m. to five p.m. Use the TechCrunch Occasions app and its AI-powered matchmaking to schedule conferences.

Join with folks related to your objectives, from potential prospects and resolution suppliers to traders, collaborators, and business friends. Comply with up on an introduction, proceed a dialog over espresso, and agree on a subsequent step earlier than you half methods.

Founder / Investor-only networking conferences

The Deal Circulate Cafe is on the market solely to Founder Move and Investor Move holders for devoted networking. Explore pass access here.

Investor-only session: StrictlyVC

For Investor Move holders solely, StrictlyVC provides conversations on IPOs, household places of work, and restricted companion priorities.

Use the afternoon to match funding views and construct relationships with fellow traders. Test the agenda for the newest program instances.

The New Guidelines of Going Public: Ryan Flanagan, ICR

The New Energy Gamers: How Household Places of work Are Reshaping Enterprise Investing: Bruce Ok Lee, Keebeck Capital Administration and Dave Sachse, Household VC

What Restricted Companions Need Now: Amit Bhatti, Truebridge Capital and Beezer Clarkson, LGT Capital Companions

Disrupt 2026 Aspect Occasions

Hold the conversations going after you allow Moscone West. A few of tonight’s Side Events embody:

Ecosystem Mixer, hosted by Peak XV

Liquid Belongings, hosted by Increase and Mintz

The Afterburn, hosted by Backblaze and Flamethrower

Discover alternatives to fulfill folks past your present community in a extra casual setting. Test the person listings for entry necessities and RSVP earlier than heading over.

Nonetheless time to hitch Disrupt 2026

Uncover an organization price watching, an answer price exploring or a connection price following up. Whether or not you’re constructing, investing, or serving to a startup develop, make Day 2 work to your objectives.

Get your Disrupt pass at 50% off the Stroll-Up price and be part of 10,000+ tech leaders for the subsequent two days of our annual flagship convention.