TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Enters Day 2 at Moscone West With AI Focus and 10,000 Attendees

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 continues today at San Francisco's Moscone West, drawing more than 10,000 founders, investors, startup teams, and technology leaders. The conference offers attendees access to the Expo Hall with 300+ startups, live pitch demonstrations, and an AI-powered matchmaking system to facilitate connections across the technology community.

Whether participants are seeking investment opportunities, evaluating business solutions, or gathering insights for their teams, the day provides multiple avenues for discovery and networking. Attendees can still purchase passes at 50% off the standard walk-up rate, with options ranging from Expo+ passes focused on networking to full conference passes that include stage sessions, roundtables, and Q&A breakouts.

Day 2 highlights

Registration runs from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., with badge pickup and in-person registration available in the Level 1 lobby. All times listed are Pacific Time.

Expo Hall

The Expo Hall operates from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Level 2, featuring 300+ startups alongside technology partners and solution providers. Attendees can observe products in action, identify tools relevant to business growth, and engage directly with founding teams. The space serves multiple purposes: prospecting for potential customers and partners, scouting investment targets, or comparing solutions to specific business challenges. Participants are encouraged to explore companies outside their typical focus areas.

Pitch Showcase Stage

Today's enterprise fast pitches showcase emerging startups and demonstrate how founders present their cases. The sessions provide learning opportunities for company builders, investment scouts, and startup team members to observe how founders articulate their products, communicate value, and capture attention. Attendees can identify standout companies and approaches, bring fresh perspectives back to their organizations, and meet founders afterward to explore potential partnerships.

Stage sessions

Conference pass holders gain access to sessions exploring ideas, business strategies, and technologies shaping the startup ecosystem. The full agenda details session times and the complete Day 2 lineup.

Disrupt Stage

The Disrupt Stage features perspectives intended to inform business decisions, investment theses, and product strategies. Today's sessions include:

• AI, Surveillance, and the Future of Public Safety, featuring Garrett Langley from Flock Safety
• What We Believe Now, with Benchmark partners Jack Altman, Peter Fenton, Chetan Puttagunta, Everett Randle, and Eric Vishria
• When AI Starts Designing Its Own Hardware, with Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini from Ricursive Intelligence

Startup Battlefield 200

Startup Battlefield continues with healthtech and life sciences, plus enterprise and security tracks, as competitors vie for spots in the final round and $100,000 in equity-free funding. The sessions allow attendees to discover companies worth following, observe how teams respond to investor questioning, and gather insights for presenting their own products or evaluating new opportunities.

Builders Stage

The Builders Stage explores what it takes to fund and grow a startup. Founders can refine their strategies, investors can evaluate perspectives on what makes a business fundable, and startup teams can better understand the factors influencing their next growth phase. Attendees are encouraged to consider how discussions apply to their business, portfolio, or team, and to compare perspectives with other participants.

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

Real World AI Stage

This stage explores how AI is integrating into physical products and environments, offering opportunities to examine practical applications, emerging markets, and deployment challenges. A live robot demonstration is scheduled.

• Building AI Systems When Failure Is Not an Option, with Nathan Michael from Shield AI, Mikell Taylor from General Motors, and Raquel Urtasun from Waabi
• Come, Meet Stretch. The Robot Built for Real Life, Not a Demo Reel, featuring Aaron Edsinger from Hello Robot
• Operating at the Edge: How AI Works When the Cloud Doesn't, with Ali Agha from FieldAI, Michelle Lee from Medra, and Aidan Madigan-Curtis from Eclipse Ventures
• Launching AI's Orbital Infrastructure, featuring 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 and On Stage, with Jonathan Hurst from Agility Robotics and Digit, a humanoid robot
• From Prototype to Production: Can it Scale in Reality?, featuring Kevin Peterson from Bedrock Robotics and Adrian Macneil from Foxglove
• The Race to General-Purpose Robots with Skild AI: When AI Meets the Physical World, with Varun Jain from SE Ventures and Deepak Pathak from Skild AI
• Can We Engineer Nature's Comeback?, featuring Ben Lamm from Colossal Biosciences
• Why and How Every Company Will Build Its Own AI, with Manos Koukoumidis from Oumi (Open Universal Machine Intelligence) and Matt Burns from Insight Media Group

AI Stage

• The Agent Security Problem Nobody Is Talking About, with Gavriel Cohen from NanoCo and Ric Smith from Okta
• Rewriting SaaS: Why AI Breaks the Old Business Model, featuring Cathy Gao from Sapphire Ventures, Aaron Jacobson from NEA, and Barr Moses from Monte Carlo
• Before You Let AI Do the Job, How Do You Know It Actually Can, with Irene Solaiman from Hugging Face
• The $63 Billion Case for Storagemaxxing Your AI Stack, featuring Pinaki Mukherjee from Wasabi Technologies, Stephanie Walter from HyperFRAME Research, Kevin Cochrane from Vultr, and Jake Lee from L2 Point Management
• What Comes After the Chatbot, with Alexander Embiricos from OpenAI
• The GTM Engineer: How AI Created Tech's Next Big Job Category, featuring Kareem Amin from Clay
• Model Behavior: How Top Startups Get Real Value From AI Adoption, with Cat de Jong from Anthropic, Grant Lee from Gamma, and Kareem Amin from Clay
• Proxy, Host, Operator: Who Can Read Your Agent's Prompts?, with Richard Rizk from BLACKBOX AI
• Securing the AI Enterprise: Why the Cloud Just Got a Lot More Complicated, featuring Katie Moussouris from Luta Security, Wendy Nather, and Rudy Mitra from AWS
• The Enterprise Isn't Broken. Your Assumptions About It Are, with Arsalan Tavakoli from Databricks

Breakout sessions

Breakout sessions use audience Q&A to explore business decisions, apply ideas to specific contexts, or understand implications for companies under evaluation.

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

Roundtables

Small-group roundtable discussions invite participants to bring business challenges, investment questions, or perspectives from their work. These sessions allow attendees to learn how others approach similar issues and leave with ideas to explore further.

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

Networking opportunities

The Networking Lounge, powered by Signify Business Cash World Elite Mastercard® by Wells Fargo, operates from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The TechCrunch Events app and its AI-powered matchmaking system enable attendees to schedule meetings with people relevant to their goals, including potential customers, solution providers, investors, collaborators, and industry peers. Participants can follow up on introductions, continue conversations, and agree on next steps before departing.

Founder / Investor-only networking meetings

The Deal Flow Cafe is reserved for Founder Pass and Investor Pass holders seeking dedicated networking opportunities. Pass access details are available on the conference website.

Investor-only session: StrictlyVC

Investor Pass holders have access to StrictlyVC, which offers conversations on IPOs, family offices, and limited partner priorities. The afternoon provides opportunities to compare investment perspectives and build relationships with fellow investors. The agenda lists the latest program times.

• The New Rules of Going Public, with Ryan Flanagan from ICR
• The New Power Players: How Family Offices Are Reshaping Venture Investing, featuring Bruce K Lee from Keebeck Capital Management and Dave Sachse from Family VC
• What Limited Partners Want Now, with Amit Bhatti from Truebridge Capital and Beezer Clarkson from LGT Capital Partners

Disrupt 2026 Side Events

Evening side events extend the conference conversations beyond Moscone West. Tonight's events include Liquid Assets, hosted by Augment and Mintz, and The Afterburn, hosted by Backblaze and Flamethrower. These informal settings provide opportunities to meet people outside existing networks. Individual event listings detail entry requirements and RSVP information.

Still time to join Disrupt 2026

Attendees can discover companies worth following, solutions worth exploring, or connections worth developing. Passes are available at 50% off the walk-up rate, allowing builders, investors, and startup supporters to join 10,000+ technology leaders for the remaining days of the annual flagship conference.