TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 will be held at Moscone West in San Francisco from October 13th to 15th, bringing together over 10,000 founders, investors, operators, and technology leaders for three days to exchange ideas, connections, and conversations about what’s next. Register now to save up to $100 on a pass and get a second pass at 50% off.
Some of the most practical conversations don’t happen at any stage in the industry. Disrupt’s breakout sessions are built to dig deeper and give leaders a microphone to ask burning questions. Each 50-minute session combines expert insights with audience Q&A, giving you more room to shed light on problems, question assumptions, and gain actionable ideas. Room capacity is limited and participation is on a first-come, first-served basis.
This year’s lineup cuts into the questions founders and operators are grappling with right now: How do we build with AI agents? As AI moves from training to inference, where does the value come from? What does physical AI actually mean? How can we fundraise better? And how will AI change the way companies and teams grow?
Get in the room, have your questions answered, and make connections that will spark your next move in the ecosystem. Save up to $100 on one pass and 50% off on a second pass. You can save more and gain more insight by bringing groups of 4 or more. If you were recently laid off, get your $75 Expo+ pass before it expires.
Complete agenda for Disrupt 2026 breakout sessions
Learn about the sessions and technology leaders shaping the conversation around Disrupt’s agenda.
What exactly is physical AI?
Susan Schofer, SOSV HAX Partner and Chief Scientific Officer. Duncan Turner, General Partner and Managing Director, SOSV HAX
Sponsored by SOSV
AI is moving beyond software to machines that need to perceive, reason, and act in unpredictable environments. Chauffeur and Turner break down what actually qualifies as physical AI, why building it requires a different strategy, and what investors are looking for in companies looking to define this category.
Outnumbered either way: How engineers and architects perform their work on agents
Steve Androulakis and Sachin Malhotra, members of the Anthropic technical staff
Using an AI Agent Workflow What would that workflow look like if people were building AI for a living? Anthropic’s Androulakis and Malhotra show how to run multiple Claude agents in parallel, delegate the actual engineering work, review the output, recover if an agent goes wrong, and make the agent part of your daily work.
How to build trustworthy AI
Robbie Goldfarb, Forum AI Co-Founder
As AI takes on more important tasks, accuracy alone will no longer be enough. Drawing on his experience spanning misinformation, online safety, and collaboration with the Basic Model Institute, Goldfarb explores how human expert judgment can become scalable assessments, and what it takes to build AI systems that people can actually trust.
The Inferential Economy: Why the next $1 trillion in AI won’t be the first.
Hagay Lupesko, Senior Vice President, AI Cloud, Cerebras Systems, and Rudina Seseri, Founder and Managing Partner, Glasswing Ventures
As frontier models become increasingly commoditized, the economics of AI are shifting from training to inference. In this session, we’ll explore where defenses come from when the model itself isn’t a moat, why latency is becoming part of products, and how those changes will impact infrastructure decisions, startup economics, and what investors will want next.
Construction then and now
Dr. Ruman Chaudhry, CEO and Co-Founder of Humane Intelligence. Payal Kadakia, founder of ClassPass. Kathy Kozyrkov, founder of Kozyr. and Holly Ransom, CEO of Emergent.
Sponsored by Signify Business Cash World Elite Mastercard (Wells Fargo)
The basics of starting a company may not have changed, but the tools certainly have. Leaders across AI, data, entrepreneurship, and strategy examine how founders can leverage AI to make better decisions and move faster, while understanding that bias, judgment, and the human side of building companies remain important.
Best practices for successful fundraising: from preparation to investor engagement
Speakers to be announced
Sponsored by Fidelity Private Shares
Successful fundraising starts long before the pitch. In this interactive session, founders walk you through the process from both sides of the table, covering investor targeting, relationship building, outreach, maintaining momentum, cap tables, data rooms, due diligence, and more. Let’s consider some practical ways to make your raises more organized and effective.
From founder to investor: What’s next – what happens after you win?
Bruce K. Lee, CEO and Founder of Kiebeck Wealth Management. and Abhi Tiwari, co-founder and general partner of Blank Ventures.
Starting and financing a company requires one mindset. Becoming an investor requires something else. Lee and Tiwari explore what happens when entrepreneurs move from raising capital to allocating capital, and why founders want to start thinking about post-exit strategy long before they actually exit.
Going into space: Opportunities for AI builders
Dr. Brian Cameron, Interim Chief Technology Officer, Aerospace Corporation. Bosco Lai, CEO, Little Place Labs, Sean Sloan, Corporate Fellow, Artificial Intelligence, Aerospace Corporation
Sponsored by: Aerospace
Space may seem like a specialized market, but many of its problems are familiar to AI builders: huge data streams, autonomous decision-making, real-time processing, and complex agent systems. This session will map these capabilities to real-space applications and show founders where new commercial and government opportunities are opening up.
Fundraising mistakes that cost your round and how to avoid them
Dr. Irena King, Founder and CEO of Surgicure Technologies. Dr. Richard Munassi, Accelerator Managing Director and Chief Strategy Officer, Tampa Bay Wave; Ashley Paston, Partner, General Catalyst; and Emily Zhen, Principal, HealthQuest Capital.
Sponsored by Tampa Bay Wave
Even great companies can have poor financing processes. This session covers mistakes that derail rounds, from positioning and preparation to investor strategy and execution. From the first pitch to the closing, expect practical lessons, real-world examples, and a clearer framework for taking your next raise.
Building a growth engine for the AI era: Lessons from bootstrapped unicorns
Patrick Burke, Hostinger Managing Director
Sponsored by Hostinger
AI is shortening the distance between discovering opportunities and acting on them. Using the example of Hostinger, Burke examines how startups can put agent marketing workflows to work to identify lower-cost distribution channels, shorten the loop between market signals and product launches, experiment faster, and drive growth.
Physical AI is not a question of models. It’s a matter of execution.
Ethan Batrasky, Partner at Venrock. Ivan Poupyrev, Founder and CEO of Archetype AI. and Ian Rountrey, Cantos General Partner.
The real opportunity for physical AI is not just to understand the world, but to act in it. Builders and investors explore the execution layer between perception, decision-making, action, and validation, and find out why companies that can reliably close the loop will be the most durable businesses in industrial AI.
Talent as an operating system: How high-performance teams scale in the age of AI
Nomi Kedawala, Reddit Senior Technical Program Manager
AI may change the way work is done, but businesses still rely on people, trust, and execution. Kedawala explores how leaders can build stronger alignment across teams, catch breakdowns before they become major problems, and create systems that support accountability and sustainable high performance as organizations scale.
Dig deeper at Disrupt 2026
Industry stage indicates where the technology and startup market is heading. Breakout rooms give you the opportunity to get closer to the problems and the people who are solving them.
Capacity is limited and access is first-come, first-served, so these sessions are worth adding to your Disrupt schedule early.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 will be held at Moscone West in San Francisco from October 13th to 15th. Register now to save up to $100 before doors open, plus 50% off a second ticket for co-founders, colleagues, partners, and colleagues. Save even more for groups of 4 or more. Have you been fired? Get your $75 Expo+ Pass before it expires.
If you make a purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect editorial independence.
