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TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Agenda
Stages
Three jam-packed days featuring 200+ sessions across six stages, led by 250+ tech leaders shaping the industry today, only at Disrupt 2026.
On the Disrupt Stage, hear the big-picture conversations shaping what’s next in AI, venture, and global tech. Plus, watch Startup Battlefield 200 reveal the breakout startups as top investors judge the breakout startups competing live onstage.
Builders Stage delivers tactical advice for founders navigating fundraising, hiring, product-market fit, and scaling.
On the AI Stage, presented by Google Cloud, explore how AI agents and generative AI are rewriting SaaS, enterprise workflows, software pricing, and security.
The Smart Money Stage explores the future of fintech through discussions on payments infrastructure, embedded finance, stablecoins, and fraud prevention.
On the Smart Systems Stage, infrastructure takes center stage as experts discuss the AI datacenter boom, energy scalability, automation, robotics, and climate systems.
The AI in the Real World Stage examines how AI moves from demos to deployment across robotics, manufacturing, defense, and industrial operations.
Agenda Lineup
New sessions are added regularly. Check back in to explore more sessions.
October 13th
The New Rails: Stablecoins, Real-Time Payments & Settlement
Stablecoins and real time payments are reshaping the global movement of money. This session explores how new settlement rails are competing with traditional infrastructure, where FedNow and private systems fit into the future of payments, and which regulatory and liquidity shifts will matter most over the next 18 months. Hear where the new financial rails are proving resilient, and where the cracks are starting to show.
How to Win When You're Not Building AI
AI may dominate the headlines, but most enduring companies won’t be AI companies. This session is for founders competing for attention in an AI obsessed market. Panelists break down what actually matters now: efficient growth, retention, revenue quality, and disciplined execution, and why fundamentals, not hype, still build breakout businesses.
The New Financial Stack and the Future of Money Movement
Payments, investing, and financial infrastructure are being rebuilt in real time. In this fireside, Abhishek Fatehpuria, Head of Product at Robinhood, explores how new technologies, changing consumer behavior, and evolving financial rails are reshaping the way money moves, and what it takes to build trusted financial products at massive scale.
Trust, AI Agents & Verification in Financial Infrastructure
Payments, investing, and financial infrastructure are being rebuilt in real time. In this fireside, Abhishek Fatehpuria, Head of Product at Robinhood, explores how new technologies, changing consumer behavior, and evolving financial rails are reshaping the way money moves, and what it takes to build trusted financial products at massive scale.
Winning Pre-Seed Without a Product
Founders are increasingly expected to compete for capital before they even have a product. At the pre seed stage, investors are betting on story, conviction, and founder market fit. This session breaks down what actually creates signal early: narrative clarity, urgency, insight, and the ability to build credibility before revenue exists. Learn how founders stand out and get funded at the idea stage.
Rebuilding Global Finance for the Internet Economy
Global payments and financial infrastructure were not built for the speed of modern internet businesses. In this fireside, Jack Zhang, cofounder and CEO of Airwallex, shares how companies are rethinking cross border finance, global money movement, and embedded financial services, and what it takes to build financial infrastructure at worldwide scale.
M&A Is Now an Early-Stage Strategy
The smartest founders today aren’t just building for IPOs, they’re building with acquisition in mind from day one. As exits shift and capital tightens, understanding M&A early has become a competitive advantage. This session breaks down how founders can create leverage through product strategy, partnerships, and positioning, and why understanding how startup outcomes actually happen today can unlock faster growth and bigger opportunities.
The AI Power Crisis: Who's Solving the Datacenter Energy Problem
AI is scaling faster than the grid that powers it. As datacenters push toward gigawatt level demand, hyperscalers are racing to secure energy and rethink compute infrastructure. This session breaks down what’s real versus hype, where startups can still win across cooling, power management, and energy procurement, and how grid constraints, permitting, and policy will shape the next wave of AI infrastructure.
From MVP to Billions: When Product Decisions Change at Scale
The product instincts that win at MVP can break at billion user scale. In this fireside, Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google, shares how product decision making changes when every update impacts billions of users. Hear how teams balance speed with trust, and innovation with reliability, at one of the world’s largest product organizations.
Building the Next Era of Software Infrastructure
AI is reshaping how software gets built, scaled, and deployed, creating new opportunities across infrastructure and developer tools. In this fireside, Jeff Lawson of Inertia shares lessons from building at scale, what founders are underestimating about the next computing shift, and where the biggest infrastructure opportunities are emerging as AI transforms the software stack.
Hiring When AI Is a Co-Founder
Early stage companies are no longer just building with AI, they’re staffing alongside it. As AI agents take on engineering, support, and operations, the definition of an early team is being rewritten. This session explores how founders decide what humans should own versus what gets delegated to AI, and how high growth startups are building hybrid teams without losing speed, accountability, or culture.
Grid Math: Why Clean Energy Projects Keep Failing to Connect
There’s no shortage of clean energy projects, only a shortage of ways to connect them. As grid bottlenecks delay deployments across the country, this session explores why projects stall, where utilities and developers remain misaligned, and whether reforms are actually improving timelines. Hear how startups, investors, and infrastructure operators are navigating the hidden costs, delays, and workarounds shaping what “connectable” means in 2026.
October 14th
Building AI Systems When Failure Is Not an Option
When AI leaves the cloud and enters the physical world, failure is no longer a bug; it’s a casualty, a grounded aircraft, or a compromised mission. This session brings together builders operating at the highest stakes in autonomous vehicles, defense, and industrial systems to answer the question every serious hard tech founder eventually faces: how do you actually know your system is ready? Expect candid frameworks on safety cases, regulatory navigation, and the organizational discipline required to build AI that earns trust.
Building and Keeping Your Team When the Rules Have Changed
From AI driven hiring decisions to secondary sales, founders are rethinking the human infrastructure of their startups. As hiring, incentives, and employee expectations rapidly evolve, this session explores how companies are adapting compensation, culture, and team building strategies to attract and retain top talent in a fundamentally changed startup environment.
Operating at the Edge: How AI Works When the Cloud Doesn’t
GPS-denied battlefields. Orbital systems with no uplink. Factory floors where WiFi drops and the robot has to keep working. The most valuable AI deployments in the world operate where the cloud can’t reach, and building for those environments requires a fundamentally different approach. This session brings together operators from defense, space, and industrial AI who have each solved the edge computing problem in a different domain. Walk away with the architectural principles, design decisions, and hard-won lessons that make AI work when perfect conditions aren’t an option.
The Series A in 2027
Series A is getting harder, slower, and far more selective. For founders planning to raise in the next 1–2 years, this session breaks down what “fundable” will actually mean in 2027. Hear how top investors are redefining the metrics, teams, and traction that matter now, what outdated fundraising playbooks no longer work, and how companies can separate from the pack in the next funding cycle.
From Prototype to Production: Can it scale in reality
A prototype that works is not a product. A product that ships is not a scaled business. The gap between each of those stages is where most deep tech companies quietly die. Not from bad science, but from underestimating what physical scale actually demands. This session brings together founders who have crossed that gap in space hardware, humanoid robotics, and autonomous systems to share what they got wrong, what they’d do earlier, and what the prototype-to-production journey actually looks like when atoms, supply chains, and manufacturing realities replace lab conditions.
The 90-Day GTM: Why $0–$10M ARR Is the New Baseline (And How to Actually Get There)
The definition of traction has changed. What once took years is now expected in months, and $0–$10M ARR is increasingly becoming the new early stage baseline. This session breaks down how AI enabled execution, faster distribution, and shifting investor expectations are compressing GTM timelines, and the tactical levers founders need in the first 90 days to accelerate revenue and stand out fast.
AI Meets the Real World: Systems That Take Years, Not Weeks
The most transformative physical AI systems in the world do not ship in a sprint. Autonomous vehicles, orbital infrastructure, biological manufacturing, and defense platforms take years of regulatory navigation, government procurement cycles, hardware iteration, and market timing that no pitch deck fully anticipates. Walk away with the frameworks, funding strategies, and organizational disciplines that make it possible to build AI systems on a timescale that most startups are never designed to survive.
Building on Shifting Ground: How the Best AI Companies Navigate a Multi-Model World
The frontier is moving faster than any single model can keep up with, and the teams building the most successful AI products are increasingly orchestrating across many models rather than betting on just one. This panel brings together founders and operators at the center of that shift to discuss how they evaluate new models, manage cost and reliability at scale, and architect products that can evolve as quickly as the underlying technology.
October 15th
Rewriting SaaS: Why AI Breaks the Old Business Model
The SaaS playbook that built a generation of unicorns is evolving in real time. This session brings together operators and platform leaders actively navigating the transition to debate what the new rules actually are. Walk away with a sharper understanding of how to price AI products sustainably, how to build defensible moats when models are commoditizing, and what enterprise AI businesses actually look like when they work.
PMF Red Flags: How to Tell If You Really Have It
In an AI hype cycle, product market fit signals are easier to fake and harder to trust. Founders are mistaking early excitement, usage spikes, and pilot wins for durable traction. This session breaks down what false PMF actually looks like, how investors and operators separate real retention from hype driven adoption, and the signals that indicate whether a company has true pull or just temporary momentum.
The Agent Security Problem Nobody Is Talking About
Every enterprise deploying AI agents is building on infrastructure that was never designed to be secure. Most teams won’t discover that until something goes badly wrong. This session is a candid technical conversation about what agent security actually requires at the infrastructure level, why application-level permission models are fundamentally flawed, and what the architectural decisions separating trustworthy enterprise agents from a security nightmare actually look like.
The Zero-to-One Distribution Playbook: How to Get Your First 1,000 Customers Without a Marketing Budget
Early customer acquisition is not about marketing spend, it’s about founder led distribution and relentless execution. Most startups at zero to one do not have budget, brand, or scale, only urgency and creativity. This session breaks down how founders are landing their first customers through community building, product led growth, founder led sales, strategic outbound, and word of mouth momentum.
The Video Intelligence Race: Real-Time, Reasoning, and What Comes Next
Generating convincing video is no longer the hard part. The race has moved to real-time inference, physical reasoning, and AI that genuinely understands the world it is rendering rather than just predicting the next pixel. This session brings together the founders building at that frontier to debate where the real breakthroughs are happening, and what becomes possible when the technology crosses from generation into intelligence. Walk away with a clearer view of where this market is going and what it will make possible for every founder building on top of it.
The GTM Engineer: How AI Created Tech's Next Big Job Category
Two years ago, GTM engineering did not exist. Today it is one of the fastest growing roles in technology, with independent practitioners building million-dollar businesses around it. This session traces how AI collapsed the traditional go-to-market stack and created an entirely new discipline in its place. Walk away knowing what AI-native GTM looks like in practice and why the companies that build it earliest will have a compounding advantage that is very hard to close.
Honest Conversation About Company Building
Company building is as psychologically demanding as it is strategic, and most founder narratives understate that reality. In this candid conversation, founders and experts unpack the hidden costs of high growth environments, from burnout and decision fatigue to the identity strain of sustained pressure, and share the systems, habits, and mental frameworks that help leaders endure and perform at a high level.
The 45% Problem: Why Most Enterprise AI Products Are Built to Fail
Frontier AI models perform at roughly 45% accuracy on real enterprise data tasks straight out of the box. Most enterprise AI products are being built as if that gap does not exist. This session is a direct confrontation with why enterprise AI deployments are failing at the systems level, not the model level, and what it actually takes to close that gap. Walk away with a clearer understanding of what enterprise data readiness really requires, why systems design determines outcomes more than model selection, and what the founders who are actually winning in enterprise AI are doing differently.
What Happens When OpenAI Ships Your Roadmap
In frontier markets, startup roadmaps can be disrupted overnight by a single foundation model release. As platform shifts accelerate, even strong products risk becoming features of larger players. This session explores where defensibility still exists, and how founders can win through distribution, workflows, domain expertise, proprietary data, and customer trust while building alongside rapidly evolving AI platforms.
The Enterprise Isn't Broken. Your Assumptions About It Are.
Enterprise organizations are not the obstacle. Founders who do not understand them are. The gap between enterprise AI promise and enterprise AI adoption is almost never a technology problem; it is a misalignment between what founders build, how they sell, and what large organizations actually need to move from pilot to deployment at scale. This session delivers the insider view from operators who have seen enterprise AI succeed and fail across thousands of organizations. Walk away knowing what enterprise buyers are really evaluating, what kills deals after the pilot, and what actually drives adoption when the honeymoon is over.
From Viral Growth to Staying Power
Startups can go from zero to viral overnight, but sustaining that momentum is a completely different challenge. In this fireside, Zach Yadegari shares how Cal AI navigated rapid growth, product pressure, and the realities of building in a distribution driven market. Hear the lessons behind turning breakout attention into durable retention and long term company building.
Securing the AI Enterprise: Why the Cloud Just Got a Lot More Complicated
AI is running inside the most sensitive enterprise systems in the world, making autonomous decisions at a speed and scale that traditional security frameworks were never designed to handle. This session delivers the infrastructure-level view of what enterprise AI security actually requires in 2026, from observability and governance to the architectural principles that separate deployments enterprises can trust from ones they cannot afford to touch.
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