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TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
October 13 – 15, 2026 — San Francisco
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Speakers
Mark Wahlberg
Co-founder MUNICIPAL
RJ Scaringe
Founder and CEO Rivian
Alexa von Tobel
Founder and Managing Partner Inspired Capital
Andrew Feldman
CEO and Co-founder Cerebras Systems
Cat de Jong
Head of Applied AI Anthropic
Les Karpas
Inception Global Head of Physical AI NVIDIA
Garrett Langley
CEO and Co-founder Flock
Amjad Masad
CEO and Co-founder Replit
Panos Panay
SVP, Devices, Alexa & Leo Amazon
Anna Goldie
Founder & CEO Ricursive Intelligence
Toni Schneider
CEO Bluesky Social
Tara Seshan
Lead Product Manager, for ChatGPT OpenAI
Dr. Maha Achour
Co-founder and CEO Kodamai
Puneet Agarwal
Managing Partner at True Ventures True Ventures
Dr. Ali Agha
CEO and Founder FieldAI
Dr. V Agrawal
Founder and GP ODDBIRD VC
Karl Alomar
Managing Partner M13
Jack Altman
General Partner Benchmark
Kareem Amin
Co-founder and CEO Clay
Cal Amir
Keynote Speaker & Founder Introduction Lab
Steve Androulakis
Member of Technical Staff Anthropic
Caleb Appleton
Partner Bison Ventures
Ziad Asghar
SVP & GM of XR, Wearables and Personal AI Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.
Azalia Mirhoseini
Founder & CTO Ricursive Intelligence
Kevin Bai
Member of Technical Staff Anthropic
Radha Basu
Founder and CEO iMerit
Ethan Batraski
Partner Venrock
Brian Baumann
Global Head of Technology Ecosystems New York Stock Exchange
Mercedes Bent
Co-founder and Managing Partner Premise
Anu Bharadwaj
Partner ICONIQ
Apoorv Bhargava
CEO & Co-founder Weave Grid, Inc.
Rob Biederman
Managing Partner Asymmetric Capital Partners
Matt Birnbaum
Founder Wylder.co
Stephan Bitton
Global Head, Founder Advocacy Google Cloud
Brandy Bolden
Chief Customer Officer SMUD
Hannah Bozian
VP, Agentic Partnerships & Strategy, American Express American Express
Andrew Brackin
Partner Gradient
Ben Broca
Founder Polsia
Stacy Brown-Philpot
Founder & Managing Partner Cherryrock Capital
Blake Bullock
Executive Vice President The Aerospace Corporation
Patrick Burke
Country Manager, US Hostinger
Piotr Byrski
CEO and Co-founder Molecule.one
Dr. Brian Cameron
Interim Chief Technology Officer The Aerospace Corporation
Nikhil Chandhok
Chief Product and Technology Officer Circle
Srishti Chaudhary
Senior Manager, Product Walmart eCommerce
Chi-Hua Chien
Co-founder & Managing Partner Goodwater Capital
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury
CEO & Co-founder, Humane Intelligence; Responsible AI Fellow at Harvard University & Former Director of AI Ethics at Twitter Humane Intelligence
Beezer Clarkson
Managing Director LGT Capital Partners
Austin Clements
Managing Partner Slauson & Co.
Gavriel Cohen
Co-founder and CEO NanoCo
Eléonore Crespo
Co-founder and Co-CEO Pigment
Nell Daly
Co-founder & Managing Partner Revenge Capital
Kevin Damoa
Founder & CEO Glīd
Sara Deshpande
General Partner Maven Ventures
Rajeev Dham
Partner Sapphire Ventures
Kristin Eberhard
VP of Policy Rewiring America
Marshall Egger
Founder & COO Spacemilk
Sofia Fatakhova
Senior Vice President Finance and Capital Markets Chime
Abhishek Fatehpuria
Vice President, Product Management Robinhood
Jackson Feder
VP, Investment MetaProp
Peter Fenton
General Partner Benchmark
Ryan Flanagan
Managing Director ICR
Cathy Gao
Partner Sapphire Ventures
Deepak Garg
Chairman, Founder and Group-CEO SEW.AI
Grace Ge
Partner Amplify Partners
Dayna Grayson
Co-founder & Managing Partner Construct Capital
Shay Grinfeld
Managing Partner Greenfield Partners
Tim Heidel
Chief Executive Officer VEIR
Jack Hidary
CEO SandboxAQ
Sho Sho Leigha Ho
General Partner General Catalyst
Max Hodak
Co-founder and CEO Science Corporation
Maddi Holman
General Partner Daring Ventures
Ioana Hreninciuc
Co-founder Runware
Biwei Huang
Founder & CEO Aether AI
Crystal Huang
General Partner GV (Google Ventures)
Aaron Jacobson
Partner NEA
Amit Jain
CEO & Co-founder Luma
James Joaquin
Co-founder and Managing Director Obvious Ventures
Michelle Johnson
Senior Vice President Insight Partners
Mo Jomaa
Partner CapitalG
Payal Kadakia
Founder of ClassPass; Startup Leadership Expert; Founder & Artistic Director of Sa Dance Company ClassPass
Filip Kaliszan
CEO and Co-founder Verkada
Pankaj Kedia
Founder and Managing Partner 2468 Ventures
Jas Khaira
Global Head of Blackstone N1 Blackstone
Nader Khalil
Director of Developer Tech NVIDIA
Nomi Khedawala
Senior Technical Program Manager Reddit
David Kirtley
CEO Helion
John Koelliker
CEO & Co-founder Leland
Cassie Kozyrkov
Founder of Kozyr; Former Chief Decision Scientist at Google Kozyr
Naren Krishna
CEO & Co-founder Balerion
Vishal Kumar
Private Wealth Advisor & Co-founder Twin Peaks Wealth Advisors
Tushar Kumar
Private Wealth Advisor & Co-founder Twin Peaks Wealth Advisors
Apeksha Kumavat
Co-founder and Chief Engineer Gatik
Bosco Lai
CEO Little Place Labs
Ben Lamm
CEO and Founder Colossal Biosciences
Vanessa Larco
Co-founder and Managing Partner Premise
Jeff Lawson
Co-founder Twilio
Michelle Lee
Founder and CEO Medra
Bruce Lee
CEO and Founder Keebeck Wealth Management
Grant Lee
CEO and Co-founder Gamma
Dean Leitersdorf
CEO and Co-founder Decart
Alex Li
Partner MVP Ventures
Dani London
Investor Base10 Partners
Ben Longmier
CEO Ambrosia Energy
Luke Arno
GTM Leader Lovable
Hagay Lupesko
SVP, AI Cloud Cerebras Systems
Adrian Macneil
Co-founder and CEO Foxglove
Miloni Madan Presler
Partner IVP
Aidan Madigan-Curtis
Partner Eclipse
Sachin Malhotra
Member of Technical Staff Anthropic
Aditi Maliwal
General Partner Upfront Ventures
Demetri Maxim
Co-founder & CEO Nephrogen
Ankita Mehta
Senior Product Manager Databricks
Samir Menon
Chief Executive Officer Dexterity AI
Nathan Michael
Chief Technology Officer Shield AI
Lindsey Mignano
Founder Mignano Law Group
Rudy Mitra
VP, Security Services Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Barr Moses
CEO and Co-founder Monte Carlo
Katie Moussouris
CEO Luta Security
Dr. Richard Munassi
Managing Director Tampa Bay Wave
Benjamin Narasin
Founder & General Partner Tenacity Venture Capital
Wendy Nather
Cybersecurity Veteran
Aatish Nayak
Partner Kleiner Perkins
Itamar Novick
Founder & General Partner Recursive Ventures
Michael Palank
General Partner MaC Venture Capital
Ashley Paston
Partner General Catalyst
Sankaet Pathak
CEO and Founder Foundation Future Industries, Inc.
Ivan Poupyrev
Founder and CEO Archetype AI
Vipul Ved Prakash
Co-founder and CEO Together AI
Chetan Puttagunta
General Partner Benchmark
Everett Randle
General Partner Benchmark
Josh Reeves
CEO and Co-founder Gusto
Carter Reum
Co-founder and Managing Partner M13
Jason Risch
Partner Greylock
Rodney Robinson
Co-founder and CEO TabaPay, Inc.
Harrison Rolfes
Senior Research Analyst, Private Company Coverage PitchBook
David H. Rosmarin
Associate Professor Harvard Medical School
Ian Rountree
General Partner Cantos
Dave Sachse
Founder Family VC
Yuri Sagalov
Managing Director General Catalyst
Dr. Nabiha Saklayen
CEO and Co-founder Cellino
Pedro Sanzovo
Head of Fraud and Identity Plaid
Jahanvi Sardana
Partner Index Ventures
Neil Sequeira
Founder & Partner Defy.vc
Rudina Seseri
Founder and Managing Partner Glasswing Ventures
Shan Shan
Investment Manager Baillie Gifford
Rajeev Singh
CEO Smartsheet
Shailendra Singh
Managing Director Peak XV
Parul Singh
Investment Partner 645 Ventures
Carlotta (Lotti) Siniscalco
Partner Emergence Capital
Travis Skelly
Partner Pruven Capital
Shawn Sloan
Corporate Fellow for Artificial Intelligence The Aerospace Corporation
Ric Smith
President of Products and Technology Okta
Boris Sofman
Co-founder and CEO Bedrock Robotics
Leah Solivan
Founder and General Partner Precedent.vc
Brandon Sorbom
Co-founder and Chief Science Officer Commonwealth Fusion Systems
Brian Sparkes
CEO Silicon Valley Venture, Corp.
Zuzanna Stamirowska
CEO and Co-founder Pathway
Robby Stein
Vice President of Product, Google Search Google
Sydney Sykes
Global Head of VC Partnerships NVIDIA
Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji
Co-founder and SVP of Field Engineering Databricks
Mikell Taylor
Director, Robotics Strategy General Motors
Janelle Teng Wade
Partner Bessemer Venture Partners
Bill Thayer
SVP, Head of Datacenter Solutions Bloom Energy
Atli Thorkelsson
VP, Talent Network Redpoint Ventures
Rob Toews
Partner Radical Ventures
Linda Tong
CEO Webflow
Michel Tricot
CEO and Co-founder Airbyte
Tomasz Tunguz
General Partner and Founder Theory Ventures
Raquel Urtasun
Founder & CEO Waabi
Sandhya Venkatachalam
Founder, Managing Partner Axiom Partners
Eric Vishria
General Partner Benchmark
Rahul Vohra
Founder & Head of Superhuman Mail Superhuman
Elia Wallen
Founder and CEO Engine
Rose Wang
COO Bluesky Social
Stephen Ward
Founder & Managing Partner Brightmind Partners
Jack Withinshaw
Chief Commercial Officer Airspeeder
Mark Xu
Partner Index Ventures
Zach Yadegari
Founder Cal AI
Tamar Yehoshua
Chief Product and AI Officer Atlassian
Ryan Yi
Founder Onchain Group
Chris Yu
Founder and President ALSO
Kim Zou
CEO and Co-founder Currence
Victoria Zuo
Partner QED Investors
Mark Wahlberg is a globally recognized actor, producer, entrepreneur, and philanthropist whose career spans more than three decades. Renowned for his versatility and excellence in entertainment, he has earned two Academy Award nominations and built an enduring legacy both on-screen and behind the scenes. Beyond entertainment, Wahlberg is a Co-Founder of MUNICIPAL, a performance apparel and lifestyle brand, and an active entrepreneur and investor. His business ventures reflect his commitment to innovation, identifying opportunities, and building enduring brands. Committed to giving back, Wahlberg founded the Mark Wahlberg Youth Foundation in 2001 to support inner-city children and teens. Through his entrepreneurial and philanthropic efforts, he continues to pursue meaningful opportunities that create lasting impact.
Mark's Sessions
Beyond the Check: The Power of Access
Mark Wahlberg built his career by spotting opportunities before others did. Now, alongside Bruce Lee, Senior advisor to the Wahlberg family office and business affairs, he’s applying those same instincts to venture investing while learning the discipline required to compete at an institutional level. Join them for a conversation about what influence can and can’t buy, how intuition complements data in investment decisions, and why they’re betting on health technology as the next chapter of their investing journey.
RJ Scaringe founded Rivian in 2009 to redefine the future of transportation through high-performance electric vehicles designed to enhance grid stability and long-term energy efficiency. He has led the company to establish vertically integrated technology platforms, build multi-program manufacturing capabilities, and set forth a strategic vision that will drive profound change in the transportation industry. Today, Rivian’s consumer products include the software-defined R1S, R1T, R2, and Rivian Commercial Van. In the commercial space, Rivian is fulfilling Amazon’s historic order for 100,000 electric delivery vans and recently partnered with Uber to deploy up to 50,000 autonomous robotaxis. In 2025, RJ expanded this vision beyond traditional automotive by founding Mind Robotics, an AI-enabled industrial robotics company building a world model and robot platform capable of performing complex industrial and manufacturing tasks at scale. Earlier in 2025, he co-founded ALSO, an electric mobility company spun out of Rivian to build right-sized vehicles for the autonomous delivery era. Across these organizations, RJ operates from the belief that the only way to build the kind of world our kids’ kids deserve is by building teams obsessed with tackling hard problems and fostering collaboration across industries and society.
RJ's Sessions
Building the Impossible
Building a breakthrough software company is hard. Building one that also designs, manufactures, and delivers world-class hardware is even harder. Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe joins us to discuss what it takes to build an enduring company at the intersection of AI, software, robotics, manufacturing, and transportation.
Alexa founded Inspired Capital because she deeply understood the unique challenges of the founder journey. Before Inspired, she dropped out of Harvard Business School to launch LearnVest, one of the first fintech companies aimed at making a financial planning software accessible to millions. Discouraged by the capital partners available in NYC at the time, Alexa promised herself she would one day become the kind of investor she wished had existed. In 2015, LearnVest was acquired for nearly $400 million, marking one of the decade’s largest fintech acquisitions. Alexa went on to establish herself as an industry authority and New York Times bestselling author, with three books on financial planning. Born in Kentucky and raised in Florida, Alexa attended Harvard College, where she earned an AB in Psychology with Honors. Her career began on Morgan Stanley’s Proprietary Trading Desk, before helping to build Drop.io, an early-stage startup that was later acquired by Facebook. After LearnVest’s acquisition, Alexa became Northwestern Mutual’s first-ever Chief Digital Officer, leading product and technology strategy as the company achieved $30 billion in annual revenue. She later became Chief Innovation Officer, overseeing Northwestern Mutual’s venture arm. Alexa is a 2016 Henry Crown Fellow and an inaugural member of President Obama’s Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship, where she first met her co-founder, Penny Pritzker. Her achievements have earned her numerous accolades, including a Forbes cover, Fortune’s 40 Under 40, Most Powerful Women, Inc. Magazine’s 30 Under 30, and the title of World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. She is also the New York Times bestselling author of Financially Fearless, Financially Forward, and Money Matters. Alexa lives in New York City with her husband, Cliff Ryan, who leads Galvanize Climate Solutions’ venture and growth strategy, one of the world’s leading climate tech funds. Together, they are raising three children.
Alexa's Sessions
Startup Battlefield Final
The grand finale of TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition. Watch the final 5 teams from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Battlefield Cup and $100,000.
Ask the Investors
What makes an investor say yes? In this audience-led Q&A, the Startup Battlefield finals judges take your toughest questions on what separates a fundable startup from the rest: team, traction, market opportunity, pitch delivery, red flags, and more. Come ready to ask and get candid answers straight from the investors making the decisions.
Andrew is co-founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems. He is an entrepreneur dedicated to pushing boundaries in the compute space. Prior to Cerebras, he co-founded and was CEO of SeaMicro, a pioneer of energy-efficient, high-bandwidth microservers. SeaMicro was acquired by AMD in 2012 for $357M. Before SeaMicro, Andrew was the Vice President of Product Management, Marketing and BD at Force10 Networks which was later sold to Dell Computing for $800M. Prior to Force10 Networks, Andrew was the Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Development at RiverStone Networks from the company’s inception through IPO in 2001. Andrew holds a BA and an MBA from Stanford University.
Andrew's Sessions
Can AI Keep Scaling?
The AI boom has created an unprecedented demand for compute, energy, and infrastructure. Cerebras is challenging conventional assumptions about how AI systems should be built and what comes next if today’s hardware reaches its limits. Join founder and CEO Andrew Feldman for a conversation about the future of AI at scale.
Cat leads Anthropic’s Applied AI organization, translating frontier AI research into production-ready capabilities for enterprise customers. Her team focuses on building practical applications of Claude across industries, ensuring the models deliver measurable business value while maintaining safety and interpretability. Cat’s work bridges research and product, developing frameworks that enable enterprises to leverage Claude’s capabilities for mission-critical workflows including analysis, automation, and decision support systems requiring high accuracy and auditability. Prior to Anthropic, Cat’s previous experience includes leading data product development for Fortune 500 companies – including Snowflake and GoodData – giving her practical insight into the data quality, governance, and integration challenges enterprises face when deploying AI at scale.
Cat's Sessions
What Anthropic Sees When Enterprises Actually Deploy Claude
Most enterprise AI conversations happen before deployment. This one starts after. As Head of Applied AI at Anthropic, Cat de Jong works directly with the enterprises putting Claude to work across their most critical workflows — and sees patterns that never make it into press releases. Where deployments succeed immediately. Where they stall. What separates the organizations extracting real value from the ones still running pilots eighteen months in. This session pulls back the curtain on what applied AI actually looks like inside the world’s most closely watched AI company — and what it reveals about where enterprise AI is really headed.
Les Karpas is NVIDIA Inception’s Global Head of Physical AI, coordinating NVIDIA’s relationship within the greater startup ecosystem of robotics, automotive, manufacturing, mobility, smart cities, and smart spaces. He has a deep background in computer vision, digital manufacturing, and robotics. His past roles include being an architect, manufacturing engineer, startup CEO, venture studio executive, and corporate venture capitalist. He has expertise in driving solutions from inception to market, having worked for and collaborated with such entities as Stanley Black & Decker (DeWalt), Intellectual Ventures, Herman Miller, iRobot, Cirque du Soleil, and the artist Anish Kapoor. He has also been the lead inventor on 5 issued patents.
Les's Sessions
Robots Are Waiting for Their ChatGPT Moment. Here Is What Is Standing in the Way
Large language models had the internet. Self-driving cars have millions of hours of road data. Robots have neither. That data gap is the single biggest reason most experts believe general-purpose robotic intelligence is still years away, despite the breakthroughs happening everywhere else in AI. A new wave of startups is racing to close it, building the data pipelines, simulation environments, and foundation models that could trigger the same capability explosion we saw with LLMs. This session asks the hard question: what does the ChatGPT moment for physical AI actually require, and how close are we really?
Garrett Langley is a technology entrepreneur who has dedicated the last decade of his career to the bold mission of eliminating crime and building thriving communities. Garrett founded and leads Flock Safety, the first all-in-one technology platform pioneering a new way for communities to think about public safety — with efficacy, affordability, transparency, and accountability in mind. Flock Safety was founded following Garrett’s own experience with crime in his neighborhood. Upon approaching law enforcement to provide evidence and secure justice, he learned how existing neighborhood security solutions were simply not effective in providing actionable evidence that solves crime. An electrical engineer and serial technology entrepreneur, Garrett, along with co-founders Matt Feury and Paige Todd, founded Flock Safety in 2017 to transform the nascent public safety technology space with the most advanced technology, unwavering ethical commitments, and an inclusive community-forward approach. Flock Safety’s transformative mission follows from Garrett’s experience growing successful companies that reimagined traditional sectors: Clutch, a monthly car subscription service that allowed consumers to swap their vehicle for any occasion, and Experience, a mobile-first fan experience platform that allowed users to upgrade live events. Overseeing the engineering, design, product, data science, and customer support groups at Experience, Garrett led the sale of the company to Cox Enterprises for $200 million in 2014. Outside of work, Garrett dedicates his time to inspire future engineers to build technology that serves as a force for good. Garrett sits on several boards through his alma mater, the Georgia Institute of Technology, including the Advisory Board for the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Georgia Tech Athletic Association Alexander Tharpe Board, and the Board of Directors of Georgia Advanced Technology Ventures (GATV), which supports Georgia Tech’s economic development and innovation initiatives. He also serves on the Metro Atlanta Chamber 2023 Board of Directors, the Board of the High Museum, and the Board of the Atlanta History Center. Garrett lives in Atlanta with his wife, Megan, his children, and his dog.
Garrett's Sessions
AI, Surveillance, and the Future of Public Safety
As AI moves from the cloud into the real world, few companies sit at the center of the debate quite like Flock Safety. Join founder and CEO Garrett Langley for a conversation about privacy, security, public safety, and the difficult trade-offs that emerge when AI becomes part of the infrastructure of everyday life.
Amjad Masad is CEO and co-founder of Replit, a company that makes coding accessible to billions on the planet, from children creating school projects to enterprises running their business. Prior to Replit, Amjad worked at Meta, where he led the JavaScript infrastructure team and contributed to popular open source developer tools. In addition, he played a key role as a founding engineer at Codecademy, a prominent online coding school.
Amjad's Sessions
Everyone Can Build Software Now. What Happens Next?
AI is making it possible for millions of people to create software for the first time. Replit sits at the center of that shift. Join founder and CEO Amjad Masad for a conversation about the future of programming, entrepreneurship, and what happens when anyone can turn an idea into a product.
Panos Panay joined Amazon in October 2023 as Senior Vice President, Devices, Alexa & Leo. He leads Amazon’s consumer electronics devices and the services behind them—including Alexa+, Echo, Kindle, Fire TV, tablets, Ring, eero, Blink, Bee, Amazon Photos, and more—as well as other initiatives such as Amazon Leo and Zoox. Previously, Panos served as Executive Vice President & Chief Product Officer at Microsoft, where he led the Windows + Devices businesses. Panos holds an MBA from Pepperdine University and a Bachelor of Science from California State University, Northridge.
Panos's Sessions
What Comes After the Smartphone?
For nearly two decades, the smartphone has been the center of our digital lives. But as AI transforms how we interact with technology, the next generation of products may look — and behave — very differently. Join Amazon’s Panos Panay for a conversation about AI, ambient computing, and the future of the devices we’ll use every day.
Anna Goldie is Founder and CEO of Ricursive Intelligence. She previously co-led the AlphaChip project, and co-founded the ML for Systems team at Google. She was an early employee at Anthropic and a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, where she developed frontier models such as Claude and Gemini. At MIT, she double majored in EECS and Linguistics and earned a Masters in EECS. She also holds a CS PhD from Stanford. She was named one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35, and her research has been widely covered in major media outlets and published in Nature, NeurIPS, ICLR, EMNLP, COLM, ISPD, ICLAD, MLCAD, MLSys, and ASPLOS.
Anna's Sessions
When AI Starts Designing Its Own Hardware
AI’s progress depends on better chips, but what happens when AI begins designing the hardware that powers it? Ricursive Intelligence co-founders Dr. Anna Goldie and Dr. Azalia Mirhoseini discuss closing the loop between AI and chip development, building self-improving systems, and tackling one of the most consequential bottlenecks in the race toward more powerful intelligence.
Toni Schneider is Chief Executive Officer of Bluesky, the company building the future of the open social web. He was previously the founding CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, and has been a partner at True Ventures since 2005.
Toni's Sessions
Can Social Start Over?
Social media is entering a new era. With a new leadership team at the helm, Bluesky is betting that openness, user choice, and new technology can reshape how online communities are built. Join CEO Toni Schneider and COO Rose Wang for a conversation about the future of social media, competing with established platforms, and what it takes to build the next generation of consumer technology.
Tara Seshan works on productivity products at OpenAI, where she most recently launch ChatGPT Work and enterprise agents. Over the past decade, she has built software for hard problems across healthcare, finance, and climate. She was one of Stripe’s first product managers, was Head of Product at Watershed, and as the founder of a healthcare company through the Thiel Fellowship.
Tara's Sessions
What Building AI Native Actually Means. A Conversation with OpenAI’s Head of Productivity
Two years ago, GTM engineering did not exist. Today, it is one of the fastest growing roles in the industry, with independent practitioners building million-dollar businesses. 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 how it’s changing the way companies grow.
Dr. Maha Achour is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kodamai, building the formally verified governance layer that lets enterprises deploy autonomous AI agents with provable correctness. She is recognized on Forbes’ 50/50 Vision list for her expertise in deep technology, with over 30 years building and scaling deep-tech startups across sustainability, autonomous mobility, and AI. Before Kodamai, Maha founded and led Metawave, commercializing advanced sensor and metamaterial technologies for autonomous mobility and wireless communications. Her research legacy runs deep: a theoretical physics paper she published in 1989 was referenced in a 2026 Nature feature on cracking the brain’s physical neural network — underscoring the lasting relevance of her scientific contributions decades later. Her rare combination of deep mathematical and scientific modeling expertise with commercial instinct has repeatedly turned frontier deep-tech research into products enterprises actually buy. Maha also serves on the board of TASARU Mobility Investment (a PIF company), and is active as a board member, advisor, and investment committee member across the mobility and energy sectors. She holds a Ph.D. in Physics from MIT and has authored 35+ publications and holds 150+ patents in advanced technology fields.
Maha's Sessions
From Pilot to Production at Scale: Provable, Trusted Agentic AI for the Enterprise
Agentic AI represents an unprecedented opportunity to transform enterprises globally, and yet deployments have been slow and the pilot-to-production yield has been low. In this panel, we will explore what changes — technologically, economically, competitively, societally — we need to make to benefit from AI’s tremendous potential. We will discuss how the transition from “probably right” to “formal verification” will enable us to fully realize these benefits.
Puneet Agarwal is a managing partner at True Ventures, a leading early-stage venture capital firm founded in 2005. With a foundational mission to empower entrepreneurs at the initial stages of company creation, True has partnered with over 1,050 Founders across more than 500 companies. The firm’s 12 funds have been a part of seven IPOs and over 60 acquisitions. While he’s interested in all aspects of technology, Puneet focuses on enterprise infrastructure and applications, particularly as they are being reinvented by AI. Puneet began his career as a product manager at CrossWorlds Software, a startup focused on software integration, which IBM acquired in 2001. Puneet later worked in technology investment banking at J.P. Morgan and in venture capital at the Mayfield Fund, where he invested in early stage technology companies. At BEA Systems, Puneet held various product management and marketing roles over four years, where he formed and ran BEA’s RFID initiative. Following BEA, Puneet joined Geodesic Systems, a mobile messaging company, as VP of Product Management. His Geodesic role later took him to India, before he joined True in 2008. Puneet holds a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in industrial engineering with honors from Stanford University, where he was a Mayfield Fellow. When he’s not partnering with Founders, he’s navigating life with his wife and three children.
Puneet's Sessions
The Startup Battlefield — Enterprise & Security
Meet the startups building the next generation of enterprise technology and cybersecurity, as founders pitch expert judges for a place in the Startup Battlefield Finals and a shot at $100,000.
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 how to build credibility before revenue exists so investors will cut that first check.
With nearly two decades of expertise in pioneering AI and autonomy algorithms across diverse robotic platforms, Dr. Ali Agha is leading FieldAI’s strategic vision and product development. Prior to FieldAI, during his distinguished 7-year tenure at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Dr. Agha was Principal Investigator for some of the nation’s most high-profile and cutting-edge projects in autonomy, including the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, DARPA RACER (Self-driving off-road cars), NASA’s Autonomous Mars Cave Exploration, and Coordinated Autonomy for Prototype Mars Helicopter-Rover. Dr. Agha led the CoSTAR team (JPL-MIT-Caltech-KAIST-LTU), which won the Urban phase of 2020 DARPA Challenge focused on exploring unknown complex urban environments. Prior to JPL, Dr. Agha was a researcher at MIT and Qualcomm.
Ali's Sessions
Operating at the Edge: How AI Works When the Cloud Doesn’t
The most valuable AI deployments in the world operate where the cloud can’t reach. And building for them requires a different technological playbook.
This session brings together leaders from defense, space, and industrial AI who will share how they have tackled the challenge of making AI work at the edge — where latency matters, connectivity is limited, and failure isn’t an option. Expect practical lessons on architectural principles, design decisions, and trade-offs that make AI-centric systems work in the real world.
GP, ODDBIRD VC. Former founder, ER physician, Lightspeed GP. Backing top global engineers solving tough problems across health/bio, critical supply chains and industrial operations.
Vaibhav's Sessions
The Startup Battlefield — Healthtech & Life Sciences
From new approaches to healthcare to breakthroughs in biology, healthtech and life sciences startups pitch expert judges for a place in the Startup Battlefield Finals and a shot at $100,000
Karl Alomar is an investor and serial entrepreneur with more than two decades of experience scaling venture-backed businesses, and is the Managing Partner of M13, an early-stage firm backing visionary software founders at seed and Series A. At M13, he focuses on infrastructure technology across fintech, developer productivity, and the future of work, with a particular emphasis on how AI and web3 are reshaping these categories. Karl spends his time across all aspects of the firm, from leading investing to overseeing M13’s Propulsion platform team and running the underlying organization. He is best known for building DigitalOcean, one of the fastest-growing cloud infrastructure companies, where he served as COO and helped scale the business from first product to roughly $250 million in ARR and an eventual IPO on the NYSE (DOCN), at which point the company’s valuation peaked around $15 billion. Before M13 and DigitalOcean, Karl co-founded and served as CEO of China Export Finance, growing the business to approximately $140 million in revenue before its acquisition in 2010, and co-founded and led Clearview Networks, which was acquired in 2000. He holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BEng in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Imperial College London.
Karl's Sessions
M&A Is Now an Early-Stage Strategy
The smartest founders today aren’t just building for IPOs, they’re also building for possible acquisitions 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 the possibility of such an option through product strategy and partnerships. It delves into how big-dollar startup outcomes actually happen, even for small companies.
Jack Altman is a General Partner at Benchmark. Previously, he’d spent two years building his own venture fund Alt Capital, and raised $425M for early stage investing. Before Alt, he was the founder and CEO of Lattice.
Jack's Sessions
What We Believe Now
Benchmark has backed some of the most iconic technology companies of the last three decades. For the first time on the Disrupt Stage in San Francisco, all five Benchmark partners come together to debate where the next generation of startups will come from, what founders are getting wrong, and the opportunities they believe are still hiding in plain sight.
Kareem Amin is co-founder and CEO of Clay, the AI-powered platform helping go-to-market teams personalize outbound at scale. Before founding Clay in 2017, Kareem was VP of Product at The Wall Street Journal and co-founded Frame, a collaboration startup acquired by Sailthru in 2012. He set out to put the power of programming into more people’s hands — an idea that, years later, found its match in AI. Today, Clay’s OpenAI-powered agent, Claygent, automates research and outreach for sales, marketing, and recruiting teams, turning GTM workflows into scalable systems. Under Kareem’s leadership, Clay grew from $1M to over $100M in annual recurring revenue in just two years, and hit a $5B valuation in early 2026.
Kareem's Sessions
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 the industry, with independent practitioners building million-dollar businesses. 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 how it’s changing the way companies grow.
Cal Amir is a keynote speaker and workshop facilitator who trains professionals how to master the art and science of a powerful introduction. Most people decide within the first 60 seconds whether someone is worth their time or not. Now theres a science-based framework that gets you noticed and creates connection. He has taught this framework at UCLA and is co-authoring academic research alongside a PhD UCLA researcher in the subjects of communication, human connection, social neuroscience, and first impressions. Cal began his career as a Wall Street investment banker and has spent 20+ years advising executives and founders.
Cal's Sessions
The Science of Powerful Introductions: How to be remembered in an AI world
People decide within the first 60 seconds of meeting someone whether they are worth their time or not.
This background process is constantly running with investors, founders, and executives as they filter people into two buckets: ‘pay attention to’ or ‘don’t pay attention to’. And the reality is, a vast majority of introductions fail this test.
This roundtable breaks down the science of introductions, what earns consideration, and why this moment is the most undervalued leverage point in fundraising, hiring, and dealmaking.
Expect a candid conversation on what actually works, common mistakes, and how to stand out without pitching.
Walk away with tools you can use the same day.
Steve works as a Member of Technical Staff in the Applied AI team at Anthropic. His job is to help users get the most out of Claude and its family of products. He spends a lot of time thinking about and helping architect the future of work. As a software dev background, Steve’s work life was transformed by Claude Code. He believes that all knowledge work is about to be revolutionized by AI: enabled by apps such as Claude Tag, Cowork, plus increases in model capabilities. Prior to Anthropic, Steve worked in customer facing tech roles at startups (Temporal), and Amazon/AWS across Sydney and Seattle.
Steve's Sessions
Outnumbered Either Way: How an Engineer and an Architect Run Their Jobs on Agents
Sachin Malhotra is an engineer at Anthropic who runs continuous-integration infrastructure by handing most of the daily work to a fleet of Claude agents. Steve Androulakis is an architect at Anthropic who works with enterprise customers, helping their teams put agents to work, and runs his own job on them the same way. They’ll walk through the toolkit as they actually use it: running multiple Claude Code agents in parallel, building skills agents reuse across tasks, and Claude Tag, the piece that lets people who don’t write code delegate real engineering work by tagging Claude where their team works – in Slack!. You’ll leave with practical patterns for delegating, reviewing agent output, recovering when agents get it wrong, and putting agents to work in your own jobs and scenarios.
Caleb Appleton is a Partner at Bison Ventures, where he invests in Physical AI. A biomedical engineer by training, Caleb’s career spans early science work in the field of engineered gene and cell therapies, frontier tech investing and most recently operating a scaled technology business. His investments at Bison include techbio, robotics, and real world intelligence companies – including Cobot, Vivodyne, Passkey, Sleuth, Inner Logic, Cosmon, and Grid Aero. Prior, Caleb was an investor at Innovation Endeavors, where he focused on frontier technology investments across surgical robotics ($RBOT), drug discovery (Eikon Therapeutics, Dewpoint Therapeutics), next generation hardware (Skylo), and applied AI (Cosmos Innovation, Citrine Informatics). Caleb also spent several years as an SVP and GM at TuneIn, a prior portfolio company, leading their global subscription product. Caleb began his career at Bain & Company. Caleb has a B.S. degree in Biomedical Engineering from Georgia Tech and currently serves on the External Advisory Board of the same department.
Caleb's Sessions
The Startup Battlefield — Space and Physical AI
TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as founders building the next generation of space, robotics and physical AI technologies pitch expert judges for a place in the Startup Battlefield Finals and a shot at $100,000.
Ziad Asghar serves as a Senior Vice President & General Manager at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., where he spearheads the company’s global XR, Wearables and Personal AI business unit. Ziad’s responsibilities include product management, P&L, market entry strategies, technology & strategic planning, as well as mergers and acquisitions. Additionally, he handles ecosystem development, partnerships, and business development for XR products that span virtual, augmented, and mixed reality segments, as well as the broader spatial computing ecosystem. Over the last five years, Ziad has formulated and driven GenAI technology, strategy and roadmap to establish Qualcomm’s leadership in on-device AI. In addition, custom CPU, camera, graphics, audio, video, memory, peripherals, and security technologies were planned and advanced under his management, all of which have helped strengthen our industry leading VR, MR and AR system solutions. Ziad’s previous responsibilities also included overall Qualcomm chip roadmap planning & competitive analysis, collaborating with engineering, product management, and other teams across all business units, including mobile, automotive, computing, XR, edge cloud, and IoT, to maintain and enhance Qualcomm’s industry-leading roadmap. He has more than 25 years of experience in the wireless semiconductor industry where he has held a broad set of leadership positions from R&D to product management. Prior to joining Qualcomm, Ziad was at Texas Instruments where he worked on systems design of UMTS & LTE and OMAP Product Management. Ziad played a pivotal role in the design of the first UMTS chipset at Texas instruments.
Ziad's Sessions
The Rise of Agentic AI: Lessons for Hardware Founders
The way we access AI is changing fast. Instead of opening apps and waiting for responses, agentic AI is becoming the interface itself, built into wearables like glasses, watches, earbuds, rings, and pins, alongside smartphones and PCs. Ziad Asghar, Senior Vice President and General Manager of XR, Wearables, and Personal AI at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., discusses how next-generation platforms are enabling this ecosystem of new device categories, and what founders need to know to build trusted, AI-native hardware at scale.
Azalia Mirhoseini is Founder and CTO of Ricursive Intelligence. Previously, she co-led the AlphaChip project, and co-founded the ML for Systems team at Google. She is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and founder of the Scaling Intelligence Lab at Stanford University. Previously, she served as a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. Before that, she was an early employee at Anthropic, following several years at Google Brain. Her past work includes MoEs, now predominantly used in frontier LLMs such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek. She has also done pioneering research on inference-time scaling. Her contributions have been recognized through the MIT Technology Review’s 35 Under 35 Award, Okawa Research Grant, Gold Medal in the National Math Olympiad and publications in flagship AI & chip design venues.
Azalia Mirhoseini's Sessions
When AI Starts Designing Its Own Hardware
AI’s progress depends on better chips, but what happens when AI begins designing the hardware that powers it? Ricursive Intelligence co-founders Dr. Anna Goldie and Dr. Azalia Mirhoseini discuss closing the loop between AI and chip development, building self-improving systems, and tackling one of the most consequential bottlenecks in the race toward more powerful intelligence.
Kevin Bai is a Member of Technical Staff on the Applied AI team at Anthropic, where he helps companies build with and on top of Claude. His career has centered on forward deployed engineering: part consultant, part product manager, part software engineer. Before Anthropic, Kevin was the founding FDE hire at Rippling, growing the function from scratch to 20 FDEs in a year. Earlier, he spent multiple years at Palantir, leading teams and multi-million-dollar engagements for Fortune 500 organizations in industries including aviation, manufacturing, and consumer packaged goods. He writes and hosts FDE Pod (fdepod.com), a newsletter and podcast covering Forward Deployed Engineering, Applied AI, and startups. He has spoken at AI Engineer World’s Fair, Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, Propel, and the United Nations. Prior to tech, Kevin’s background was in international affairs, representing the UN’s nuclear test-ban organization and building enterprise partnerships at UNHCR to solve refugee problems the agency couldn’t solve alone. He studied at UC Berkeley and Oxford, speaks the six official languages of the United Nations, and lives in San Francisco.
Kevin's Sessions
FDE: The Best Commercial Motion in Enterprise Software You've Never Heard Of
Enterprise software has a dirty secret: Most of it doesn’t work the way customers actually work. That gap — between what a platform promises and what a customer needs — is where deals die, renewals stall, and churns happen.
Forward deployed engineering (FDE) is the answer. An FDE is part consultant, part product manager, part software engineer — one person who owns the problem from discovery through delivery.
You’ll leave knowing what an FDE actually does, how the function fits into your commercial org, when to hire one, and why this motion drives outsized retention and expansion in enterprise accounts.
Radha Basu is the founder and CEO of iMerit, a global data annotation company delivering high-quality data that powers machine learning and artificial intelligence applications for Fortune 500 companies. Under Radha’s leadership, iMerit employs an inclusive workforce of more than 5,500 people worldwide, with 80% from underserved communities and 54% being women. Radha led iMerit through two funding rounds, raising $23.5 million to date from investors and led the company to reach new revenue heights. Previously, Radha was the SupportSoft chairwoman and CEO. She spent 20 years at Hewlett Packard, where she grew HP’s electronic software division into a $1.2 billion business and launched HP in India. Radha has received accolades, including the Global Thinkers Forum Award, UN Women-ITU Gender-Equality Mainstreaming Technology Award, Silicon Valley Business Journal Women of Influence Award, Top 25 Women of the Web, and CEO of the Year. She serves on the boards of NetHope, Jhumki Basu Foundation, and the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship. Radha founded the SCU’s Frugal Innovation Hub and co-founded the Anudip Foundation.
Radha's Sessions
Arm Wrestling Your Data: The Physical AI Challenge
As AI moves into robotics and autonomous systems at the edge, success depends less on model scale and more on data quality. Physical AI must interpret noisy multimodal inputs, reason in real time, and act safely in unpredictable environments. Radha Basu, CEO at iMerit, will extrapolate years of learning with leading AV companies to discuss best practices in expert-driven data pipelines, edge case management, and data triage.
Attendees will learn how to build and scale a trustworthy data strategy for the 99% and also for the last 1%.
Ethan is a partner based in Palo Alto, partnering with early-stage entrepreneurs building breakthroughs across compute, AI, and the near frontier. Ethan leads our focus in the American Frontier, supporting technological superiority in the U.S. over the next 30 years, across AI superiority, semiconductor and compute advancements, energy abundance, and rapid deployment of advanced defense capabilities. Across the American Frontier, Ethan is involved with AI, compute, and defense companies, including Astranis, Astronomer, Atom Computing, Archetype AI, Euclid Power, Oumi, Phononic, Skyryse. Prior to joining Venrock, Ethan spent years as an active angel investor in frontier and deep tech companies while holding executive roles at Facebook, Box (IPO 2015), and Yahoo. Ethan is the lead or co-lead inventor on 12 patents.
Ethan's Sessions
Physical AI Isn't a Model Problem. It's an Execution Problem.
More than half of industrial downtime still traces to manual handoffs, not compute. Most “physical AI” today describes the world. The systems that will matter execute in it: closing the loop from perception to decision to action to verification, without waiting on a human.
Builders running execution-layer systems join investors backing the category to diagnose what separates intelligence that absorbs real-world variability from intelligence that narrates it. And why the next generation of durable industrial companies will be decided in that gap.
About Me Ambitious, approachable, and driven by genuine connection, I serve as Global Head of Technology Ecosystems at the New York Stock Exchange building the relationships, communities, and trust that make the NYSE a natural home for the next generation of technology companies. As the Founder of NYSE Wired, I believe the battle for technology IPOs is won years before anyone thinks about listing day. My style is simple: show up early, invest in people, and never stop building. No transactional playbook just authentic community, long before the opening bell. What I Do Ecosystem Architect: I’m building a grassroots technology ecosystem embedded inside the world’s most powerful financial institution, cultivating the founders, and elite leaders who will define the next decade of innovation Community Builder: Forge an exceptional but inclusive network where today’s most ambitious innovators connect, collaborate, and find their path to the public markets through trust, not transactions. Relationship-First Approach: I see tomorrow’s public companies not as pipeline, but as future partners and friends. Every conversation is authentic, unhurried, and anchored in what matters most to the people building the future. Adventurous, Future-Focused: Whether it’s a media series, a poolside gathering, or a hackathon activation, I create environments as bold and imaginative as the entrepreneurs I serve. My Ethos Relaxed Leadership: Forget the rehearsed pitch and the formal introduction. The best relationships come from human moments that happen long before anyone needs anything. Inclusive Excellence: This isn’t about exclusivity – it’s about building a community where exceptional minds support each other and shape the next era of innovation. Love for People: True impact starts with putting relationships first. Champion people, embrace fresh ideas, help others shine and the rest follows. 🔗 On why the next battle for technology IPOs begins years before companies go public: https://siliconangle.com/2026/07/20/next-battle-technology-ipos-begins-years-companies-go-public/
Brian's Sessions
When Machines Clock In (Hosted by NYSE Wired)
Robots are picking orders in warehouses, driving trucks with no one behind the wheel, and taking on jobs once considered too dangerous for people. In this session, the leaders behind three of robotics’ most ambitious deployments — Dexterity’s Samir Menon, Foundation’s Sankaet Pathak, and Gatik’s Apeksha Kumavat — join a candid conversation about what it takes to move autonomous systems from demo to daily operation. Expect a grounded look at scaling physical AI: the technical hurdles, the trust required from enterprise customers, and the hard questions about which jobs machines should — and shouldn’t — take over next.
Mercedes is the co-founder and Managing Partner at Premise Ventures, a $100M pre/seed VC firm. She previously led investments at Lightspeed and was named one of 9 rising stars in venture capital by the Wall Street Journal. Her investments include Exa, Cowboy Space Corp, Janitor AI, Moonlake, Hyperspell, Arcade.dev, and many more agent AI companies driving the most important conversations around AGI. She’s an expert in venture capital market construction, labor dynamics, and financial services, and has been featured by CNBC, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Wall Street Journal, and others. She holds two graduate degrees from Stanford, completed her undergraduate studies at Harvard, and lives in San Francisco with her family and dog.
Mercedes's Sessions
Open-Weight Models and the New AI Stack
As increasingly capable, low-cost open-weight models offer another option for AI builders, companies need to evaluate the trade-offs around cost, security, control, and performance. Mercedes and Vanessa will break down how the rise of open-weight models is changing the economics of AI, where they are gaining an edge over closed models, and what this shift means for startups building the next generation of AI products.
Anu Bharadwaj is a Partner at ICONIQ. She was most recently President of Atlassian, a leading collaboration software company serving millions of teams worldwide. Over her decade at Atlassian — spanning roles across product and operations, including COO — she helped scale revenue from $200M to $5B+ and grow the customer base 10x to over 300K. Prior to Atlassian, Anu held various leadership roles at Microsoft, where she was instrumental in building the developer tools business. She serves on the board of Toast Inc. and previously served on the board of OutSystems Technologies. Anu has deep expertise in product, distribution, operations, corporate development, and strategic partnerships. She is also a sought-after keynote speaker on software development, company building, and community creation, and has served as chairperson of the Atlassian Foundation, with ongoing involvement in nonprofits focused on education for underserved communities. Anu holds a B.Tech in Computer Science from RV College of Engineering.
Anu's Sessions
The Startup Battlefield — Space and Physical AI
TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as founders building the next generation of space, robotics and physical AI technologies pitch expert judges for a place in the Startup Battlefield Finals and a shot at $100,000.
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.
Apoorv Bhargava is CEO and Co-Founder of WeaveGrid, a grid orchestration software platform helping utilities integrate distributed energy resources (DERs) to improve grid reliability, affordability, and emissions. WeaveGrid’s DISCO platform is deployed across 27 states, partnering with OEMs and DER manufacturers – including Tesla, Toyota, SolarEdge, and Rivian – to unlock savings for their customers through smart grid optimization. Since founding WeaveGrid, Apoorv has grown the company to nearly 75 employees and secured venture backing from top-tier investors, driving rapid decarbonization at the intersection of energy and transportation. He has spent his entire career in energy and climate, with prior roles at Opower, NRG Energy, Capricorn Investment Group, and BCG. Apoorv holds an MBA and MS in Energy & Resources from Stanford, and a BS in Chemical Engineering and BA in Energy Economics from Rice University. He was named to the Forbes and GreenBiz 30 Under 30 lists.
Apoorv's Sessions
Rewiring the Grid for the Electric Age
The demand for electricity is growing faster than the infrastructure needed to support it. From electric vehicles and new manufacturing facilities to renewable energy projects, the grid is facing new pressures and new opportunities. This session explores what’s needed to modernize the power system, where investment is flowing, and how utilities, startups, and technology providers are working to create a more resilient and flexible energy future.
Rob Biederman is the Managing Partner of Asymmetric, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in transformative technology companies. Prior to founding Asymmetric, Rob co-founded and served as co-CEO of Catalant Technologies for eight years, building the company into a market leader connecting businesses with more than 70,000 independent consultants and 1,000 boutique firms. He currently serves as Chairman of Catalant. Before Catalant, Rob was a private equity investor at Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital, where he advised public and private companies across healthcare and high-tech on growth strategy, M&A, capital allocation and financing. He is also an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School, where he co-teaches the Scaling Technology Ventures course. Rob graduated cum laude from Princeton University with an A.B. in Economics and Finance and from Harvard Business School as a Baker Scholar.
Rob's Sessions
AI’s Next Frontier: Modernizing Legacy Industries
AI is creating a new wave of opportunities across industries that have historically been slow to adopt technology. This roundtable will explore where AI is driving meaningful change beyond the tech sector, from transforming outdated workflows to unlocking entirely new business models. Rob Biederman will share his perspective on which legacy industries are most ripe for disruption, where founders can find overlooked opportunities, and what investors should look for as AI reshapes established markets. Attendees will leave with a clearer view of where AI-driven transformation is already underway—and where the next generation of category-defining companies may emerge.
Matt Birnbaum is a talent leader based in San Francisco. He helps startups build and scale their teams through hypergrowth. He runs Wylder, an embedded talent leadership practice for venture-backed startups, and founded Tapped, a curated marketplace that places early-career engineers at Bay Area startups. He also advises founders on recruiting and how to build their teams. Matt spent four years at Pear VC as its first platform hire, helping portfolio companies build their founding teams. Before that, he led talent acquisition at Instacart and spent eight years running UpStart Talent, a bootstrapped recruiting consultancy. He began his career at Wildfire Interactive, acquired by Google. He named Wylder after his son, Dougie, and his wife’s Noe Valley store, Running Wylder.
Matt's Sessions
Competing for AI Talent: Pay, Equity, and Retention
The growth of AI startups has made hiring and retention more difficult for every tech company. From competing for AI talent to navigating secondary sales, founders are rethinking the human infrastructure of their startups. As 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 market.
As a former serial founder, Stephan brings over 20 years of venture-building experience across Media & Entertainment, HRTech, and RetailTech, alongside nearly seven years of executive leadership at Amazon and Google. After serving as Google Cloud’s Canadian Leader for Startups, he now leads a global team dedicated to founder success, empowering the most ambitious founders with the cloud resources and advocacy required to build tomorrow’s category-defining companies.
Stephan's Sessions
The Builder’s Playbook: What Founders Need to Win the Agentic Era
Taking AI agents from prototype to production requires a whole new playbook. Join Stephan Bitton, Global Head of Founder Advocacy at Google Cloud, for a practical, builder-first session on what it actually takes to scale and grow an AI startup today. You will walk away with a clear playbook to keep your unit economics in check, maintain architectural flexibility, and leverage cloud-native distribution to get your agents in front of paying enterprise customers. Get the actionable steps you need to build faster, avoid common pitfalls, and unlock your next major milestone.
Brandy Bolden’s career experience spans over 25 years of operational leadership in both the public and private sectors and across the financial, semiconductor, consumer goods and utility industries. She’s currently the Chief Customer Officer at SMUD, where she oversees meter to cash systems and processes for the nation’s sixth largest publicly owned utility. Brandy holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from University of California, Davis and a project management certification from UC Irvine.
Brandy's Sessions
When the Energy Gets Smart: What Vertical AI Actually Delivers at Scale
Generic AI tools are not built for energy. The organizations moving fastest are deploying AI purpose-built for the industry, trained on specific data and designed for real operational constraints. Deepak Garg, founder and CEO of SEW.AI, and Brandy Bolden, chief customer officer at SMUD, bring the builder and operator perspective to talk about what vertical AI actually delivers beyond the pilot phase. Walk away knowing what enterprise adoption really requires, where the gaps between promise and production still exist, and why energy and AI may be the most consequential infrastructure story of the next decade.
Hannah Bozian is Vice President of Agentic Partnerships and Strategy at American Express. Hannah is responsible for driving Amex’s presence in leading AI and agentic platforms, including embedding seamless and secure payments, and delivering unique membership experiences across Amex’s suite of assets (travel, dining, offers) in partner channels. She has previously held roles leading global digital payments partnerships and business development.
Hannah's Sessions
AI, Trust & Verification in Financial Services
As AI moves beyond generating content and begins taking action, financial companies are rethinking trust, oversight, and security. Panelists explore how AI agents are changing financial workflows, why transparency and human judgment still matter, and how companies are approaching privacy, fraud prevention, and identity verification in an AI-powered world.
Andrew is a Partner at Gradient, where he invests across vertical AI, healthcare, and the application layer. Prior to Gradient, he co-founded Vial, a tech-enabled clinical trial platform that has raised over $100M. He was the founding Head of Growth at Newfront, a commercial insurance brokerage acquired by WTW for $1.3B in 2025. He began his career at Jobr, a leading mobile job search app acquired by Monster in 2016.Andrew was a 2013 Thiel Fellow, one of 20 recipients worldwide selected to receive $100,000 to pursue entrepreneurship in lieu of college. Originally from London, he lives in San Francisco and loves politics and live music.
Andrew's Sessions
The Startup Battlefield — Healthtech & Life Sciences
From new approaches to healthcare to breakthroughs in biology, healthtech and life sciences startups pitch expert judges for a place in the Startup Battlefield Finals and a shot at $100,000
Ben Broca is the founder of Polsia, an AI platform that orchestrates agents to run companies end-to-end. In 2026 he raised $30M at a $250M valuation with zero employees, letting the AI manage the data room, brief investors, and close the deal. Polsia reached a $10M run rate in 5 months. Ben built Polsia on the belief that anyone with an idea and the drive to back it, now has the tools to build a real company. Ben will join the Builders stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 to talk about compressed GTM timelines and what it actually takes to go from $0 to $10M ARR in the AI era.
Ben's Sessions
The First 90 Days: How Startups Build Toward $10M ARR
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.
Stacy Brown-Philpot is the Founder and Managing Partner at Cherryrock Capital, an early-stage venture firm focused on helping the best emerging software startups scale from $1M to $100M+ through operational excellence. Stacy has over 20 years of experience in the technology industry, leading the growth and scale of large and small enterprises in the digital economy including Google and TaskRabbit. Stacy is the former CEO of TaskRabbit, the leading task management network. Before joining TaskRabbit, Stacy served as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Google Ventures, lending strategic expertise to the firm’s portfolio companies. Before that, she spent nearly a decade leading global operations for Google’s flagship products.
Stacy's Sessions
Startup Battlefield Final
The grand finale of TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition. Watch the final 5 teams from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Battlefield Cup and $100,000.
Ask the Investors
What makes an investor say yes? In this audience-led Q&A, the Startup Battlefield finals judges take your toughest questions on what separates a fundable startup from the rest: team, traction, market opportunity, pitch delivery, red flags, and more. Come ready to ask and get candid answers straight from the investors making the decisions.
Blake Bullock is executive vice president of The Aerospace Corporation. In this role, she harnesses her extensive experience working across national security, civil, and international space to lead Aerospace’s technical organizations in solving our customers’ hardest problems and delivering on national priorities. Bullock leads a team of more than 3,700 engineers and scientists, comprising Aerospace’s customer-facing organizations, engineering backplane, technology investment, and research and laboratory capabilities. She is responsible for overseeing Aerospace’s strategy to evolve and enhance our unparalleled technical depth, while developing new ways to engage with government, allies, and industry in support of their missions. Prior to joining Aerospace, Bullock was vice president at Northrop Grumman. There, she was at the forefront of shaping next-generation architectures critical to our nation’s continued security and leadership in space. She was also involved in flagship science missions, including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the LCROSS robotic lunar spacecraft.
Blake's Sessions
Launching AI’s Orbital Infrastructure
AI is rapidly reshaping how satellites work, shifting them from static sensors to smart systems that can understand their surroundings and act on them. As new high‑power platforms and agile, maneuverable spacecraft come online, capabilities like real‑time orbital awareness and dynamic repositioning are becoming commercially practical. This session breaks down how modern hardware and AI are coming together to create the next layer of space infrastructure – and why the companies building it are positioned to drive the industry’s next big leap.
Patrick Burke is Country Manager, US at Hostinger, where he leads growth and go-to-market strategy for one of the world’s leading web hosting and website-building platforms. Previously at Shopify, Mediacom, and MullenLowe, Patrick has spent his career scaling consumer technology brands across performance marketing, content, brand, and international expansion. He is also a startup mentor, helping founders build smarter acquisition and growth strategies. Based in Spain, Patrick is passionate about building durable growth engines for modern tech businesses and creators worldwide.
Patrick's Sessions
Building a Growth Engine in the AI Era: Lessons from a Bootstrapped Unicorn
AI is changing how startups build, market, and grow, from first idea to global scale. This session explores how to spot underpriced distribution channels, collapse the cycle from market signal to product launch, and use AI to accelerate growth. We analyze real examples from Hostinger to show how AI is reshaping modern growth tactics. Founders at every stage will walk away with concrete frameworks to experiment faster, leverage agentic marketing workflows, and turn emerging opportunities into traction.
Piotr Byrski is the CEO and co-founder of Molecule.one, where AI, lab, and data power near-autonomous chemistry research for drug discovery and chemical manufacturing. A physician by training, he holds an MD from the Medical University of Warsaw and a BSc from University of Warsaw with a double major in Chemistry & Math.
Piotr's Sessions
When Frontier Models Are Not Enough: How to Make AI Capable of Breakthrough Scientific Discoveries
For centuries, scarce and expensive experiments forced scientists to test only a handful of ideas at a time. Drawing on Molecule.one’s near-autonomous OAI-M1-03 discovery in organic chemistry with OpenAI, this roundtable will explore what changes when human-supervised, high-autonomy AI systems tackle open-ended questions, and automated labs test ideas by the thousands: from engineering serendipity to reshaping how, and how fast, science can move.
After Startup Battlefield: What Happens Next?
Winning over a room at Startup Battlefield is one thing. Building the company afterward is much harder. Three Battlefield alumni return to the Disrupt Stage to talk candidly about what happened after their moment in the spotlight: the bets that paid off, the plans that changed, the mistakes they’d avoid, and what they wish they’d known when they were standing where this year’s finalists are now.
Dr. Brian Cameron is the Interim Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) at The Aerospace Corporation. In this role, Cameron leads a dynamic, nationwide team responsible for executing OCTO’s three-part mission: developing, implementing, and managing corporate technical and strategic investments; maturing innovative technologies and prototyping advanced concepts; and driving technology transition to government and commercial partners. Cameron leads four offices within OCTO: eLab, responsible for setting the technical investment strategy and priorities; xLab, responsible for developing, building, and operating prototypes; Solution Accelerator, responsible for delivering independent and innovative solutions with speed and national impact; and the Office of Tech Transfer, dedicated to driving the transition of technology to external stakeholders and bridging innovation with real-world application. He also manages the company’s $60 million-plus internal research and development program and the Aerospace Technical Fellows program, with the company’s top engineers and scientists.
Brian's Sessions
Breaking Into Space: The AI Builder’s Opportunity
AI builders are realizing that space problems mirror the ones they already solve on Earth – massive data streams, real‑time decisions, autonomy, and complex multi‑agent systems. As the industry shifts toward smaller, more agile players, technology‑first companies have new openings to bring existing tools directly into space missions. This roundtable outlines how AI developers can translate their capabilities into practical, mission‑relevant applications and plug into emerging commercial and government pathways built for rapid delivery. The discussion highlights clear entry points, overlooked opportunities, and the mindset that helps founders see space as an accessible, fast‑moving market ready for their technology.
Nikhil Chandhok is chief product and technology officer at Circle, one of the world’s leading internet financial platform companies. Nikhil is responsible for accelerating product, technology, and AI agendas, developing accessible and easy-to-use products for new and existing customers. He has experience developing tech-forward products and software that advanced mobile devices, streaming video, AI, and augmented reality at companies such as Meta, Google, YouTube, and Microsoft.
Nikhil's Sessions
The Future of Money Movement: Stablecoins, Instant Payments & What's Next
Stablecoins and instant payments are changing how money moves around the world. This session looks at how these new payment systems compare to traditional banking infrastructure, where FedNow and private networks fit in, and what regulatory and market changes could shape the future of payments. Hear where these new systems are gaining traction, and where challenges remain.
Srishti Chaudhary is a Senior Manager of Product at Walmart eCommerce, where she leads AI Shopping Experiences, building agentic AI that resolves natural language shopping intent for millions of shoppers. She shipped her team’s first beta in four months and owns the end-to-end product strategy, evaluation frameworks, and roadmap for Walmart’s AI shopping agent. Before moving into AI, Srishti led identity and growth initiatives at Walmart scale, converting hundreds of millions of in-store customers to digital, giving her a rare view of the full commerce funnel, from acquisition to transaction to AI-powered experience. She is a published researcher in IEEE Xplore with work on generative AI systems and LLM evaluation frameworks bridging the gap between research and production systems at scale.
Srishti's Sessions
Beyond Inventory: The Commerce AI Playbook for the Intent Era
Retail has spent a decade getting better at surfacing the right product at the right time. But the next trillion in commerce won’t just come from better ranking, It’ll come from models that interpret shopper intent. “Something for a beach trip under $50” is not a search query. It’s intent. And most commerce AI still can’t handle it.
This roundtable digs into what it actually takes — from the technical decisions that matter to the questions that don’t get asked enough: whether LLMs belong in transactional commerce, what “personalization” means for agentic AI, and who owns the customer relationship when an agent is doing the shopping.
Chi-Hua Chien is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Goodwater Capital, the largest consumer-tech focused VC firm in the world. Over a two decade career as a venture capitalist, Chi-Hua and his partners have invested in and helped founding teams build 17 iconic global consumer tech platform companies including Facebook, Fever, Monzo, musically / TikTok, Spotify, Square, Twitter, Toss, Weee! and Zepto. Chi-Hua’s passion is supporting entrepreneurs who are building digital utilities that promote human flourishing and seek to change the world for good. These software products provide better global access to high quality housing, healthcare, food, financial services, transportation, education, and entertainment. Prior to launching Goodwater, Chi-Hua was a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and an Associate at Accel Partners. Chi-Hua was an early employee or co-founder of four startups including Coremetrics, where he led the marketing and inside sales teams, served as interim CFO, and was appointed to the Office of the President. Chi-Hua fell in love with startups at Stanford University where he earned a BS in Industrial Engineering, a BA in Economics, an MS in Industrial Engineering, and an MBA. At Stanford he was named a Mayfield Fellow, President’s Scholar, and Arjay Miller Scholar. He enjoys staying close to the Stanford community and served as a co-instructor of the undergraduate Technology Entrepreneurship course at the Engineering School. Chi-Hua also serves on the board of charity: water, a non-profit organization bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations.
Chi-Hua's Sessions
Startup Battlefield Final
The grand finale of TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition. Watch the final 5 teams from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Battlefield Cup and $100,000.
Ask the Investors
What makes an investor say yes? In this audience-led Q&A, the Startup Battlefield finals judges take your toughest questions on what separates a fundable startup from the rest: team, traction, market opportunity, pitch delivery, red flags, and more. Come ready to ask and get candid answers straight from the investors making the decisions.
Dr. Rumman Chowdhury is a data scientist, social scientist, and leader in applied algorithmic ethics. Chowdhury holds two undergraduate degrees from MIT, a master’s degree in quantitative methods of the social sciences from Columbia University, and a doctorate in political science from the University of California, San Diego. Her interdisciplinary academic background bridges quantitative analysis with social science, positioning her at the intersection of artificial intelligence and society.
Rumman's Sessions
Building Then vs Now
Building a company has always required vision, resilience, and the ability to adapt. But the tools available to founders today are changing how businesses are built, scaled, and operated. Join AI expert Cassie Kozyrkov, data scientist Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, and ClassPass founder Payal Kadakia for a candid conversation about how the founder journey has evolved and what it means to build a business now. From making smarter decisions with AI to understanding the ways technology can introduce hidden bias, the conversation will explore the opportunities and challenges facing today’s entrepreneurs. Together, they’ll look at what has changed, what remains timeless, and what founders should be thinking about as they build what comes next.
Beezer Clarkson (American) is a Managing Director at LGT Capital Partners in San Francisco, California, where she is a member of the venture capital / growth Investment Committee. She is responsible for origination, due diligence, execution and monitoring U.S. and European venture and growth investments. Prior to joining LGT Capital Partners in 2026, Beezer spent 14 years at Sapphire Partners, where she built and led the firm’s primary venture fund investment strategy, investing in and supporting emerging and established venture managers globally. She began her career at Morgan Stanley in 1994 in the firm’s Global Infrastructure Group. Beezer is the co-founder of OpenLP, an industry platform advancing transparency around the LP perspective in venture capital. She also co-hosts the Origins podcast, featuring conversations with leading GP and LP investors. Among the first LPs ever elected to serve on the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) Board of Directors, Beezer is consistently sought after for her thought leadership and has been recognized on the Forbes 50 Over 50 Investors list, named a Wall Street Journal Woman to Watch and honored as a Venture Capital Journal Woman of Influence. Beezer holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from Wesleyan University, where she previously served as a Trustee and currently advises the Investment Committee of the university’s endowment.
Beezer's Sessions
What Limited Partners Want Now
Venture firms are competing harder than ever for institutional capital, while limited partners are rethinking everything from manager selection to AI exposure and liquidity expectations. Hear from leading LPs as they discuss what they’re looking for in today’s market, how they’re evaluating emerging managers versus established firms, and where they believe the next generation of venture returns will come from. **Investor Pass Only**
Austin Clements is a Managing Partner at Slauson & Co., a Los Angeles based early-stage venture capital firm rooted in economic inclusion. There he focuses on investing in tech tools that empower small business owners. Within the firm, he also developed an accelerator called Friends & Family, to provide capital, guidance, and resources to entrepreneurs at the beginning of their journey. Clements was previously at venture capital firm TenOneTen Ventures, after beginning his career in investment management with AllianceBernstein. He also founded Pi Digital Media, a firm that developed web and mobile applications for small businesses across the country. Clements was the founding Chair of PledgeLA, a city-wide initiative created by Annenberg Foundation and the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office to promote diversity in the tech community. He is currently a trustee for Knight Foundation in Miami. He previously served on the board of Library Foundation of Los Angeles where he served on the investment committee and HBCUvc where he helped create programs to create pathways for underrepresented professionals to find roles in venture capital. Clements is a Kauffman Fellow who received his MBA from NYU Stern and his BA from Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA.
Austin's Sessions
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 how to build credibility before revenue exists so investors will cut that first check.
Gavriel Cohen is co-founder and CEO of NanoCo, creators of NanoClaw, the secure open-source AI agent platform. Within six weeks of launch, the project had pulled in over 22,000 GitHub stars and earned a public endorsement from Andrej Karpathy, leading to partnerships with Docker and Vercel. That rapid adoption propelled the founding of NanoCo, built to bring security-first professional AI assistants to enterprises at scale. Before NanoCo, Gavriel spent seven years leading development teams at Wix, then ran an AI-native B2B agency powered by agents he built himself. Gavriel is Brooklyn-born, Tel Aviv-based and holds a double major in Computer Science and Physics from Tel Aviv University.
Gavriel's Sessions
The Agent Security Problem Nobody Is Talking About
Agentic AI is powerful, but it was never built to be secure. Now, enterprises trying to harness that are learning to rebuild the basic elements of cybersecurity from scratch. 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 the architectural decisions that really matter when deploying agentic AI.
Eléonore Crespo is co-founder and co-CEO of Pigment, a business planning platform. Pigment provides organizations with the tools needed to intuitively and intelligently build and adapt strategic plans. The company is trusted by industry-leading companies around the world, including Figma, Klarna, Miro, Poshmark, and PVH (Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger). Before co-founding Pigment with Romain Niccoli, Eléonore was an investor at Index Ventures where she spearheaded investments into a variety of European unicorns. Prior to Index Ventures, she worked as a financial analyst at Google, where she advised the EMEA president and CFO on strategy and planning.
Eléonore's Sessions
Can AI Take You Public? The New Playbook for IPO-Ready Finance
IPO prep used to mean a late-stage scramble. In the AI age, winning companies are building public-company muscle much earlier so that finance teams can answer “what changed, and why?” in real time. Pigment CEO Eléonore Crespo sits down with Sofia Fatakhova, the VP of Finance at Chime fresh off one of the most watched fintech IPOs in recent years, to give founders and finance leaders a practical playbook for building AI-enabled, IPO-ready finance. Attendees will learn what to build, automate, document, and lock down 12–18 months before filing to make sure every number can be defended to executives, auditors, bankers, and investors.
Nell Daly is a Founding and Managing Partner of Revenge Capital. Previously, roles include Capital Strategist and Head of Sports, Talent and Venture of The Together Group, a global creative agency roll-up, and the CCO of The Female Quotient, a US based media company advancing equality in the workplace. She has worked with some of the world’s most influential brands and such as Google, iHeart, Spotify, Facebook, TED and F1. She’s moderated panels at WEF, CES, Sundance Film Festival and many more. Nell started her career as a clinical social worker, championing social justice causes, especially around anti-discrimination issues and women’s rights. Nell’s been featured as a social and political commentator across numerous outlets including CNN, CNBC, Fox News, ABC Radio, and top ranked podcasts and publications such as Elle, Glamour, The Times, and Men’s Health. Nell has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and a MSW from NYU. She lives in Connecticut with her three children, and bases her work out of New York and London.
Nell's Sessions
The Startup Battlefield — Healthtech & Life Sciences
From new approaches to healthcare to breakthroughs in biology, healthtech and life sciences startups pitch expert judges for a place in the Startup Battlefield Finals and a shot at $100,000
Yes, It’s Hard to Be a Founder: An Honest Conversation
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.
Kevin A. Damoa Founder and CEO, Glīd Technologies Kevin A. Damoa builds the systems that move what matters. Over two decades, he has carried mobility from the factory floor to the launch pad and onto the battlefield, advancing the hard logistics of rockets, aircraft, electric vehicles, and now autonomous road-to-rail freight. As Founder and CEO of Glīd Technologies, he is building the dual-mode autonomous infrastructure that connects the nation’s roads and rails into a single logistics network. His operating discipline was forged in military service. Damoa enlisted in the US Army at seventeen, served two years in South Korea, and completed two combat tours in Iraq with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, where he ran railhead logistics in a theater of war. He continued his service in the Air National Guard as a Logistics Officer and firefighter supporting California’s Modular Airborne Fire Fighting System mission, retiring in 2018 after twelve years of concurrent service. Damoa joined SpaceX in 2012 as Flight Module Logistics Manager, where he built the logistics systems and programs behind a maturing launch operation and designed and deployed the transport apparatus that carried rockets from production to the launch site. Following a tour at Northrop Grumman as an Integration Program Manager on the F-35 program, he moved into senior operating leadership across a generation of clean-mobility companies, holding executive roles at Romeo Power, Xos Trucks, Canoo, and Serial 1, a Harley-Davidson brand. In each, he owned the unglamorous work that decides whether a product reaches the market: industrialization, supply chain, manufacturing deployment, and launch. In 2022, Damoa founded Glīd Technologies to solve a problem the freight system has carried for a century, the broken handoff between road and rail. Glīd designs and builds US-made autonomous dual-mode vehicles and the AI logistics orchestration software that directs them, serving commercial freight and national defense. The company is built on a granted dual-mode road-to-rail patent, is a certified Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business, and won the 2025 TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield. Damoa holds an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and an MBA in Project Management from Keller Graduate School of Management. He leads Glīd as both its CEO and its Architect, a reflection of his conviction that the people who set a company’s direction should understand, in detail, how the thing is built.
Kevin's Sessions
After Startup Battlefield: What Happens Next?
Winning over a room at Startup Battlefield is one thing. Building the company afterward is much harder. Three Battlefield alumni return to the Disrupt Stage to talk candidly about what happened after their moment in the spotlight: the bets that paid off, the plans that changed, the mistakes they’d avoid, and what they wish they’d known when they were standing where this year’s finalists are now.
Sara Deshpande is a General Partner at Maven Ventures, a Seed stage venture firm investing in tech companies addressing emerging consumer behavior and trends. Sara joined Maven as the first employee in 2014 and has been a VC for ten years. She invests in emerging trends across consumer software from digital health to consumer applications of AI. Sara received her MBA from Stanford where she now teaches a popular course on startups and entrepreneurship.
Sara's Sessions
The Startup Battlefield — Space and Physical AI
TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as founders building the next generation of space, robotics and physical AI technologies pitch expert judges for a place in the Startup Battlefield Finals and a shot at $100,000.
Rajeev is a partner at Sapphire Ventures and has been investing for nearly 15 years across a few dozen companies. He is focused on partnering with exceptional founders building category-defining B2B software companies in horizontal and vertical AI, as well as leading innovators in fintech and healthcare. Rajeev’s notable investments include Glean, monday.com, Square, Wise, Braze, Moveworks, Segment, Mercury, and Livongo Health. Prior to Sapphire Ventures, Rajeev invested in software companies for Silver Lake, a technology-focused private equity firm. Early on in his career, he worked for the investment banking division of Goldman Sachs and while in business school, worked with Amazon’s corporate development group.
Rajeev's Sessions
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.
Kristin Eberhard is the VP of Policy at Rewiring America, where she works on state and federal policies to advance residential electrification. She previously served as the Director of Climate Policy at the Niskanen Center, a transpartisan think tank in Washington, DC; as the Director of Climate and Democracy at Sightline Institute, a regional policy think tank based in Seattle; and as the Western Director of Climate and Energy at Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Kristin has taught climate change policy and energy law at Stanford Law School and UCLA School of Law. She is the author of the book Becoming a Democracy: How We Can Fix the Electoral College, Gerrymandering and Our Elections. She earned her JD cum laude from the Duke University School of Law, an MEM in Energy Economics from the Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment, and a BA with Honors from Stanford University.
Kristin's Sessions
Rewiring the Grid for the Electric Age
The demand for electricity is growing faster than the infrastructure needed to support it. From electric vehicles and new manufacturing facilities to renewable energy projects, the grid is facing new pressures and new opportunities. This session explores what’s needed to modernize the power system, where investment is flowing, and how utilities, startups, and technology providers are working to create a more resilient and flexible energy future.
Marshall Egger is Founder and COO/CFO of Spacemilk, a nutrition project unlocking life’s foundational biology to fuel human potential by providing complete protein from fermented yeast, an organism the food industry had only ever treated as a byproduct. Marshall runs the operations, SCM, and finance departments, and directed the company through its Q3 2026 brand evolution and move into national retail. With his drive for excellence, he jointly operates Inspired Science Coaching, an executive coaching practice for executives, and holds several advisory roles for organizations across high velocity environments.
Marshall's Sessions
Grow Like a Founder, Think Like a CFO: Balancing Growth and the P&L
Early-stage growth can look great on paper while quietly draining your cash. In this roundtable, we’ll unpack how finance and operations work together to make smarter growth decisions, from inventory and retail terms to forecasting and cash flow. Come with your questions, challenges, and real-world scenarios for a practical conversation about growing without losing control of the P&L.
Sofia Fatakhova has helped build some of the world’s most innovative technology companies across AI, fintech, and enterprise software. As Senior Vice President of Finance at Chime, she helped lead the company through its IPO, scale revenue nearly 5x from $700 million to $3 billion, and launch new products including MyPay, Instant Loans, and Chime Rewards. Previously, Sofia was the CFO partner for Salesforce’s high-growth businesses, including Tableau and MuleSoft, where she helped shape commercial strategy, pricing, monetization, and post-acquisition integration. Before that, she led Finance for Amazon Echo and Alexa, helping grow the business from an early-stage startup into a global AI platform spanning more than 20 devices and 10 international markets. Throughout her career, Sofia has partnered with founders, CEOs, product, and engineering leaders to scale businesses through AI, platform innovation, and disciplined capital allocation. Today, she is focused on one of the biggest questions facing technology companies: how AI is changing the way businesses build products, make decisions, and scale.
Sofia's Sessions
Can AI Take You Public? The New Playbook for IPO-Ready Finance
IPO prep used to mean a late-stage scramble. In the AI age, winning companies are building public-company muscle much earlier so that finance teams can answer “what changed, and why?” in real time. Pigment CEO Eléonore Crespo sits down with Sofia Fatakhova, the VP of Finance at Chime fresh off one of the most watched fintech IPOs in recent years, to give founders and finance leaders a practical playbook for building AI-enabled, IPO-ready finance. Attendees will learn what to build, automate, document, and lock down 12–18 months before filing to make sure every number can be defended to executives, auditors, bankers, and investors.
Abhishek Fatehpuria is the Vice President of Product Management for Brokerage at Robinhood Markets. Since joining Robinhood in May 2016, he has played a key role in building and evolving the brokerage platform. Prior to Robinhood, he attended the University of California, Berkeley.
Abhishek's Sessions
Winning the Modern Financial Consumer
The way people pay, invest, and manage money is changing fast. Robinhood, now worth nearly $100 billion, has evolved from a trading app into a financial platform spanning investing, banking, credit, crypto, and prediction markets. Head of Product Abhishek Fatehpuria discusses how technology and changing consumer expectations are reshaping financial services, and what it takes to build trusted products at massive scale.
Jackson Feder is a Vice President on MetaProp’s investment team, where he focuses on investing and supporting early-stage, high-growth technology companies reshaping how real assets are financed, insured, measured, managed, built, and powered. Prior to joining MetaProp in 2021, Jackson held investing roles at Contrary, Bowery Capital, and Armory Square Ventures. Before becoming an investor, Jackson was a founder himself, building Exxyte, a platform focused on expanding access to affordable tuition capital for prospective college students.
Jackson's Sessions
Atoms vs. bits: physical AI for the physical world
AI’s next frontier may not be another digital workflow—it may be the physical world. This roundtable will explore how AI, robotics, sensors, and real-world data are coming together to transform industries like construction, real estate, energy and infrastructure. Attendees will learn where physical AI is creating meaningful opportunities, what makes these businesses fundamentally different from traditional software companies, and the challenges founders face when deploying AI in complex physical environments. The discussion will also examine where investors see the strongest opportunities and what it will take for physical AI companies to move from impressive technology to scalable, enduring businesses.
Peter Fenton is a General Partner at Benchmark. Fenton works with both consumer and enterprise companies, with notable AI investments in Sierra with former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor, Digits, Sema4.ai, and current board seats including Airtable, ClickHouse, Docker, CarbonDrop, Sorare, Timescale, Exa AI, and Wildlife Studios. Fenton served as a director for 7 successful IPOs, including Twitter, Elastic, Cloudera/Hortonworks, New Relic, Zendesk, Zuora, and Yelp, and 7 acquisitions with valuations greater than $250M.
Peter's Sessions
What We Believe Now
Benchmark has backed some of the most iconic technology companies of the last three decades. For the first time on the Disrupt Stage in San Francisco, all five Benchmark partners come together to debate where the next generation of startups will come from, what founders are getting wrong, and the opportunities they believe are still hiding in plain sight.
As a managing director within the Tech Group at ICR, Ryan provides investor relations services primarily to enterprise software companies. Having spent over a decade on Wall Street as an equity analyst, Ryan has comprehensive IR knowledge and industry contacts that he leverages to advance his client’s corporate messaging, financial modeling and transactions. Since joining ICR, he has advised many IPOs, SPACs and issues where private companies are looking to explore the public markets. Ryan helps clients evolve and optimize their investor messaging by taking a concise and steady approach, underpinned by stable execution. A huge part of his value proposition is identifying potential problems that may not have been already known.
Ryan's Sessions
The New Rules of Going Public
The IPO window is reopening, but the playbook has changed. Founders and investors face a tougher path to the public markets, with higher expectations around growth, governance, and credibility. Join ICR’s Ryan Flanagan for a candid conversation on what makes a company IPO-ready today, the decisions that matter years before a listing, and how to position a business for a successful exit in a more disciplined market.
Cathy Gao is a Partner at Sapphire Ventures, where she invests in B2B AI and software, backing founders building AI-native companies that become core to how work gets done. She is particularly interested in companies that deliver measurable customer outcomes, build durable distribution, and compound into broader workflow ownership over time. Cathy serves on the boards of EliseAI, Blue J, Jeeva AI, Sword Health, and Medable. Before joining Sapphire, Cathy invested at AXA Venture Partners and began her career at TA Associates and Blackstone. She also spent time as an operator at Gusto, joining at the Series B, an experience that continues to shape how she partners with founders navigating rapid growth and strategic inflection points. Cathy studied economics and history at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating summa cum laude. Her perspectives on enterprise AI and software have been featured in Bloomberg, CNBC, and The Wall Street Journal.
Cathy's Sessions
Rewriting SaaS: Why AI Breaks the Old Business Model
Is the SaaS playbook dead, or is it just evolving? This session brings together founders and platform leaders who are grappling with that question in real time — and coming away with real answers. Walk away with a sharper understanding of how to price AI products sustainably, how to build defensible moats when models are commoditizing, and how to make SaaS work in the AI era.
Deepak Garg is the Founder & Co-CEO of Smart Energy Water (SEW). A respected leader in the technology and utility industry, Deepak has over two decades of experience in product development and is responsible for driving innovation, vision, and strategy at SEW. Deepak has spearheaded SEW’s initiatives to build innovative digital platforms that address the challenges of global sustainability and help utilities connect with people. He has successfully established high-powered technology teams, to develop the #1 Digital Customer Experience, Digital Workforce Experience, Smart AI/ML Analytics platforms that address key business challenges for energy, water and gas providers. All the SEW platforms leverage next-gen technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, IoT, to power customer and workforce experiences. Backing on scalability, modularity, flexibility, and security, SEW clients deliver award-wining experiences and set new benchmarks for the industry. Driven by Deepak’s stellar vision, SEW has navigated 37+ geographies to serve energy and utility companies, connecting 1.5 B+ people and serving 22000+ Smart Cities/communities. Deepak’s passion and dedication to transform the energy and utility industry is mirrored in the company’s vision to Engage, Educate, and Empower. Deepak founded SEW, guided by five core values — Sustainability, Integrity, Innovation, Compassion, and Performance. Over the years, he has brought together like-minded people, developed high-powered business and technology teams, and started a SEW family (now 1000+ strong) that aims to connect billions of people with their energy and water providers. The company has been recognized by INC 5000 and is one of the fastest growing companies in America. Deepak is an active contributor in the Forbes Technology Council. Deepak is also propelling the cleantech conversations with other utility and tech leaders with the WE3 platform. The thought leadership space brings perspectives from industry leaders on the key themes affecting the energy and water world to spark change and normalize innovation. Deepak has received multiple industry recognitions such as EY Entrepreneurship of the Year, Best CEO Award, Innovator of the Year and more. Before SEW, he held senior leadership positions with Fortune 500 companies, and successfully developed direct and in-direct business solutions for diverse markets. Deepak has an MS in Computer Science with Bachelor’s degree in engineering along with executive management from Stanford Graduate Business School & MIT.
Deepak's Sessions
When the Energy Gets Smart: What Vertical AI Actually Delivers at Scale
Generic AI tools are not built for energy. The organizations moving fastest are deploying AI purpose-built for the industry, trained on specific data and designed for real operational constraints. Deepak Garg, founder and CEO of SEW.AI, and Brandy Bolden, chief customer officer at SMUD, bring the builder and operator perspective to talk about what vertical AI actually delivers beyond the pilot phase. Walk away knowing what enterprise adoption really requires, where the gaps between promise and production still exist, and why energy and AI may be the most consequential infrastructure story of the next decade.
Grace Ge is a Partner at Amplify focusing on vertical AI companies with a particular interest in boring, unsexy industries. Her investments include Avoca, David AI, Datalane, and Codes Health. Before Amplify, Grace was an investor at Menlo Ventures.
Grace's Sessions
The Startup Battlefield — Enterprise & Security
Meet the startups building the next generation of enterprise technology and cybersecurity, as founders pitch expert judges for a place in the Startup Battlefield Finals and a shot at $100,000.
Dayna Grayson is the Co-Founder, Managing Partner of Construct Capital, that she founded alongside Rachel Holt in 2020. Construct is an early-stage venture firm investing in the transformation of Foundational Industries – manufacturing, mobility, supply chain, energy, and defense, that together represent half of the U.S. economy but have long lagged in innovation. Construct backs the builders modernizing the backbone of the real economy through automation, AI, and industrial resilience, with investments including Hadrian, Veho, Aetherflux, ReadyOn, Kinetic, Copia Automation, Sphere Semi and Vammo. The firm’s mission is to help founders at the Seed and Series A stages re-architect trillion-dollar sectors that define how we make, move, and power the world. Dayna was one of the first venture capitalists to focus on the digital transformation of industrial sectors, building a decade-long track record of backing the next generation of category-defining companies. Prior to founding Construct in 2020, she spent eight years as a Partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), where she led early investments in companies such as Desktop Metal (NYSE: DM), Onshape (acquired by PTC), Framebridge (acquired by Graham Holdings), Tulip, Formlabs, Neural Magic (acquired by Redhat) and Guideline (acquired by Gusto). Earlier in her career, she was an investor at North Bridge Venture Partners and began her career in product development and design at Blackbaud (NASDAQ: BLKB), helping the company grow to over $130 million in revenue and through its IPO. A graduate of the University of Virginia with a B.Sc. in Systems Engineering, Dayna also holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she now serves as a Venture Partner and advisor to the MS/MBA program.
Dayna's Sessions
Startup Battlefield Final
The grand finale of TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition. Watch the final 5 teams from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Battlefield Cup and $100,000.
Ask the Investors
What makes an investor say yes? In this audience-led Q&A, the Startup Battlefield finals judges take your toughest questions on what separates a fundable startup from the rest: team, traction, market opportunity, pitch delivery, red flags, and more. Come ready to ask and get candid answers straight from the investors making the decisions.
Shay Grinfeld is Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Greenfield Partners, a global early-growth investment firm with more than $2 billion in assets under management. He focuses on technology companies at the point where product-market fit turns into the challenge of building and scaling an enduring business, with investments spanning AI, enterprise software, healthcare and infrastructure. Shay has led Greenfield investments in companies including BigPanda, Avanan, Coralogix, Capitolis, Mixtiles and Quali. Before founding Greenfield, he was a Senior Advisor to TPG Growth and spent the earlier part of his career operating and scaling technology companies. He holds a B.A. from Fairleigh Dickinson University and an Executive MBA from Columbia Business School.
Shay's Sessions
Revealing AI Disruptors 60: What Can AI Do Next?
The AI conversation is shifting from what models can say to what they can actually do. Agents are navigating the open web and completing work, AI systems are taking on increasingly ambitious research, intelligent machines are beginning to operate beyond the screen, and a new infrastructure layer is emerging to make all of this possible at scale. Greenfield Partners’ Shay Grinfeld sits down with founders building across these emerging areas to separate what’s real today from what’s coming next, and explore where the biggest new opportunities are taking shape. The conversation will culminate in the reveal of Greenfield Partners’ 2026 AI Disruptors 60, spotlighting the companies Greenfield and TechCrunch believe are pushing AI into new territory.
Dr. Tim Heidel leads VEIR as Chief Executive Officer, driving the company’s mission to redefine how power is delivered at the scale that AI and the next generation of infrastructure demand. A recognized authority in power systems innovation, Tim brings a rare combination of deep technical expertise and strategic investment acumen to the helm of one of the most consequential energy infrastructure companies of our time. Before joining VEIR, Tim was an investment team member at Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), where he backed companies leveraging breakthrough technologies to combat climate change. Prior to BEV, he served as Deputy Chief Scientist at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), helping lead R&D strategy across the organization. Tim began his career as a Program Director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), where he managed a portfolio of more than 75 research projects focused on next-generation approaches to transmission, delivery, and optimization of electric power. Tim holds SB, MEng, and PhD degrees in electrical engineering, and an MS in technology and policy — all from MIT.
Tim's Sessions
Rewiring the Grid for the Electric Age
The demand for electricity is growing faster than the infrastructure needed to support it. From electric vehicles and new manufacturing facilities to renewable energy projects, the grid is facing new pressures and new opportunities. This session explores what’s needed to modernize the power system, where investment is flowing, and how utilities, startups, and technology providers are working to create a more resilient and flexible energy future.
Jack Hidary is CEO of SandboxAQ, an enterprise AI company developing large quantitative models (LQMs) that apply AI, simulation, and quantitative science to solve complex real-world challenges. Originally incubated at Alphabet and launched as an independent company in 2022, SandboxAQ works with leading enterprises and government organizations across biopharma, cybersecurity, advanced materials, navigation, and financial services. The company is pioneering a new generation of AI that moves beyond language models to accelerate scientific discovery, optimize critical infrastructure, and power what Hidary describes as “physical AI.” A technology entrepreneur, physicist, and AI researcher, Hidary is the author of “Quantum Computing: An Applied Approach” and “AI or Die: A Guide for Leaders.” Before founding SandboxAQ, he led AI and quantum initiatives at Alphabet’s X, where he helped advance applications of AI for scientific discovery. A frequent speaker at the World Economic Forum and other global technology forums, Hidary advises business and government leaders on the convergence of AI, simulation, and quantum technologies and their impact on the future of industry.
Jack's Sessions
What Comes After ChatGPT? AI for the Physical World
Most AI conversations today focus on copilots, productivity, and content generation. But what happens when AI starts discovering drugs, designing new materials, modeling financial risk, or solving energy infrastructure problems?
This interactive roundtable explores the rise of a new class of AI systems grounded in physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics rather than internet text alone. From healthcare and battery chemistry to navigation and industrial systems, the discussion examines where the next decade of AI value may emerge and what founders, investors, and industry leaders may be underestimating right now.
Sho Sho invests in early stage founders across sectors and serves as a board observer at Together AI. She joined General Catalyst in 2024 as the firm’s youngest partner. Her investments include Greylark, Autoscience, and Standard Kernel, and The Interaction Company of California (Poke). She holds an A.B. from Harvard.
Sho Sho Leigha's Sessions
The Startup Battlefield — Energy and Manufacturing
Meet the startups rethinking how we power, build and manufacture the physical world, as founders pitch expert judges for a place in the Startup Battlefield Finals and a shot at $100,000.
Max Hodak is the Co-founder and CEO of Science Corporation, which he founded in 2021. Science’s mission is to restore quality of life to those with debilitating conditions for which there are no treatment options, creating technology and devices aimed at restoring vision, cognition, and mobility. Prior to founding Science, Max was president of Neuralink, which he co-founded in 2016. He previously co-founded Transcriptic, a robotic cloud laboratory for the life sciences, where he was CEO. Max began his life-long passion for BCI as a young child and started programming at the age of six. As a freshman at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering, studying biomedical engineering, he worked his way into the renowned Nicolelis Lab – one of the best neural engineering labs in the country, typically open only to graduate students – and spent his undergraduate years immersed in BCI research. Since graduating from Duke, his primary research and professional focus has been on neural engineering and the brain.
Max's Sessions
Beyond Screens
For decades, humans have adapted to computers. Max Hodak believes the next era of technology will adapt to us. From brain-computer interfaces to entirely new ways of interacting with machines, join one of Silicon Valley’s most ambitious founders for a look at the future of computing — and humanity’s place within it.
Maddi Holman is a GP at Daring Ventures, a pre-seed VC firm backing operators building vertical software and applied AI companies in industries where domain knowledge, trust, workflow depth, and distribution matter. She is based in NYC. Before Daring, she spent close to a decade in corporate VC, including Touchdown Ventures across T-Mobile, Allegion, and Olympus managed funds, then at Cigna Ventures in healthcare. Maddi is a former D1 athlete at Rice University and used that same competitive drive to break into VC without a finance background. Maddi holds a B.A. in Biology from Rice University and an MSc in Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Management from Imperial College
Maddi's Sessions
So You’ve Got a Hit Product. How Does Your Company Do It Again?
Most startups stall out because they build a single great product instead of a repeatable multi-product engine. Join a venture capitalist and two founders as they reveal the precise operational playbook for capital allocation, systemizing internal innovation, and engineering a compounding “Second Act” before the core product’s growth curve flattens.
Ioana Hreninciuc is co-founder of Runware, where she leads the company’s commercial and operational efforts, working across partnerships, growth, and day-to-day execution to scale the business. Before Runware, she was Chief Product Officer at Homa Games and Huuuge Games, focusing on product strategy, growth, and scaling high-performing gaming platforms. Prior to that, she served as CEO of GameAnalytics, where she helped grow the platform to support over 100,000 developers and billions of monthly player events, becoming one of the most widely used analytics services in mobile gaming. Earlier in her career, she worked on large-scale cloud and infrastructure systems at companies such as Bigstep and Hostway. Her work sits at the intersection of product, data, and commercial execution, with a focus on building and scaling high-growth technology companies.
Ioana's Sessions
Competing for AI Talent: Pay, Equity, and Retention
The growth of AI startups has made hiring and retention more difficult for every tech company. From competing for AI talent to navigating secondary sales, founders are rethinking the human infrastructure of their startups. As 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 market.
Biwei Huang is the Founder & CEO of Aether AI and an Assistant Professor at the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI) at the University of California San Diego. At UCSD, Her work focuses on causal discovery and inference, causality-empowered AI, foundation models, world models, vision-language-action (VLA) models, and autonomous agents. At Aether AI, she leads the development of causal world models for real-world intelligence. Aether is building the AI systems that understand mechanisms, reason under intervention, and operate reliably in real-world systems. Biwei received her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2022, where she worked with Professors Kun Zhang and Clark Glymour. She previously studied Neural Information Processing at the University of Tübingen and conducted research on causal discovery at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Bernhard Schölkopf’s lab.
Biwei's Sessions
Has AI Understood Causality—and How Necessary Is It?
AI has become remarkably good at recognizing patterns, but does it actually understand how the world works? And as AI moves from prediction to action, how necessary is causal understanding for the next generation of intelligent systems?
This panel brings together leading researchers in causality and entrepreneurs building frontier AI systems to explore why truly intelligent AI needs to understand causality and whether today’s scaling paradigms can get us there. Drawing on advances in causality and Aether AI’s work on causal world models, the discussion will examine how causal reasoning could enable more reliable world models, agents, and Physical AI, and help systems adapt, plan, and make better decisions in the real world.
Crystal Huang is a general partner at GV, where she concentrates on investments across SaaS, infrastructure, and AI with a special interest in product and developer-led adoption strategies. Previously, she was an investor at NEA and Notable Capital (fka GGV) where she partnered with companies including Attest, BigCommerce, Bitsight, BrightWheel, Flow Commerce, NS1, Tile, Tray.io, and Wish. Earlier, she began her career in technology M&A at Blackstone. Crystal graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in Government and splits her time between San Francisco and New York.
Crystal's Sessions
The Zero-to-1K 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.
Aaron Jacobson is a Partner at global venture capital firm, NEA. He joined the firm in 2011 and currently partners with founders building generational companies in AI, cybersecurity, developer tools, and robotics. Prior to joining NEA, Aaron spent two years in M&A advisory at Qatalyst Partners, in San Francisco. Aaron graduated summa cum laude from the Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned dual bachelor of science degrees in economics and electrical engineering, and carried a minor in math.
Aaron's Sessions
Rewriting SaaS: Why AI Breaks the Old Business Model
Is the SaaS playbook dead, or is it just evolving? This session brings together founders and platform leaders who are grappling with that question in real time — and coming away with real answers. Walk away with a sharper understanding of how to price AI products sustainably, how to build defensible moats when models are commoditizing, and how to make SaaS work in the AI era.
Amit Jain is the CEO and Co-Founder of Luma AI, a research lab developing multimodal foundation models to enable “universal imagination.” Under his leadership, Luma has scaled from a 3D-capture pioneer to a leader in generative video, recently raising a $900M Series C following the success of its Dream Machine and Ray video-reasoning models. By 2026, Amit has steered the company into massive infrastructure projects, including Project Halo – a 2-gigawatt AI supercluster – to build the next generation of “world models” capable of simulating physical reality. Prior to Luma, Amit was a Systems and Machine Learning Engineer at Apple. He led the development of the Passthrough feature for the Apple Vision Pro and was instrumental in integrating the first LiDAR sensors into the iPhone, foundational work that paved the way for modern spatial computing.
Amit's Sessions
The Video Intelligence Race: Real-Time, Reasoning, and What Comes Next
Visual AI isn’t just about attention-getting videos anymore. The race has moved to real-time inference, physical reasoning, and AI models that genuinely understand the world they’re rendering. This session brings together the founders building at the frontier to talk about what happens when the technology crosses from generation into intelligence.
James invests early in breakthrough technologies that move humanity forward. He’s passionate about the responsible use of AI to solve the unsolvable across trillion-dollar industries. As a co-founder at Obvious, he has led investments for the firm that span advanced materials (Diamond Foundry), plant-based protein (Beyond Meat), and labor marketplaces (Incredible Health). As an experienced startup operator, James served as president and CEO of Xoom.com (IPO). He was previously president and CEO of Ofoto from its early beginnings through acquisition by Kodak, leading its growth into the world’s largest online photo service. James also co-founded When.com, an internet calendar and events service (acquired by AOL). He began his entrepreneurial career while studying computer science at Brown University, co-founding Clearview Software, which was acquired by Apple, where he spent six years in engineering and marketing roles. James grew up in a Portuguese fishing community in southeastern Massachusetts. He is a drummer, sailor, puzzler, and master of puns.
James's Sessions
I Built Before the Internet. AI Is Different.
From writing production code before the internet to building through multiple tech cycles, this isn’t the first platform shift. But AI is fundamentally different. It’s accelerating breakthroughs across energy, biology, and the physical world at a pace that challenges how we build and predict the future. This session breaks down what’s changed, where AI is already delivering real-world impact, and how to operate when the pace of innovation outstrips traditional timelines.
Michelle Johnson is a Senior Vice President at Insight Partners, where she leads Insight’s EMEA advisory presence. Based in London, Michelle works with CEOs and CROs across North America and Europe to design go-to-market strategy, build revenue-driving organizations, and support portfolio company leadership with AI implementation and the shifting shape of revenue teams. Before Insight, Michelle was a founding go-to-market executive at multiple high-growth software companies. Most recently, she was an early sales and revenue operations leader at Flock Safety, helping scale the business from <$1M to $90M in ARR.
Michelle's Sessions
Hiring When AI Is a Co-founder
Early-stage companies are no longer just building with AI, they’re hiring 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.
Mo Jomaa is a partner at Alphabet’s independent growth fund, CapitalG, where he helps lead enterprise software investing with a focus on IT management software, data infrastructure and analytics, and AI infrastructure. He played a leadership role in the firm’s investments in Databricks, CrowdStrike, Grafana, NinjaOne, Verkada, Cribl, Armis, LangChain, Lovable, and Collibra, among others. Prior to joining CapitalG in 2018, Mo helped lead enterprise software IPO and M&A transactions at Morgan Stanley. Mo graduated from UC Berkeley and holds a degree in Business Administration from the Haas School of Business. Having grown up in Southern California, Mo is a loyal Los Angeles Lakers fan and religiously watches almost every single game. In his free time, Mo loves to play basketball, cook, golf, and cycle.
Mo's Sessions
The Real Tokenmaxxing: 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.
Payal Kadakia is an entrepreneur and innovator in the fitness and technology sectors, known as the founder of ClassPass. Under Kadakia’s leadership, ClassPass expanded access to fitness and wellness experiences, developing into a global platform that connects users with studios and gyms worldwide. Kadakia’s expertise in scalable technology solutions and her focus on promoting healthy lifestyles have positioned her as a recognized figure in the startup ecosystem and a frequent contributor to discussions on business transformation and leadership.
Payal's Sessions
Building Then vs Now
Building a company has always required vision, resilience, and the ability to adapt. But the tools available to founders today are changing how businesses are built, scaled, and operated. Join AI expert Cassie Kozyrkov, data scientist Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, and ClassPass founder Payal Kadakia for a candid conversation about how the founder journey has evolved and what it means to build a business now. From making smarter decisions with AI to understanding the ways technology can introduce hidden bias, the conversation will explore the opportunities and challenges facing today’s entrepreneurs. Together, they’ll look at what has changed, what remains timeless, and what founders should be thinking about as they build what comes next.
Filip Kaliszan is Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Verkada, a leader in AI-powered physical security technology. Verkada is transforming how organizations protect their people and places with an integrated, AI-powered platform that unifies video security, access control, air quality sensors, alarms, intercoms, and workplace tools through a single platform, Verkada Command. Today, more than 2 million Verkada devices are online across 171 countries, actively turning data into actionable intelligence that makes security and operations faster, smarter, and more efficient.
Filip's Sessions
So You’ve Got a Hit Product. How Does Your Company Do It Again?
Most startups stall out because they build a single great product instead of a repeatable multi-product engine. Join a venture capitalist and two founders as they reveal the precise operational playbook for capital allocation, systemizing internal innovation, and engineering a compounding “Second Act” before the core product’s growth curve flattens.
Pankaj Kedia is an award-winning, globally recognized AI Thought-Leader as an early-stage investor, Chief AI Officer, adjunct MBA professor, keynote speaker, and board member. As the Founder and Managing Partner at 2468 Ventures, Pankaj has invested in 175+ early-stage AI and Deep Tech startups and 25+ VC funds across silicon, systems, software, and services. He is a partner at multiple VC firms and angel groups where he chairs the AI committees, teaches AI to MBA students at the University of San Diego, and sits on multiple public, private, and non-profit boards of AI companies. Pankaj also serves as an independent board director for Kodamai, which is focused on accelerating enterprise AI adoption by deploying specialized and trusted agents at scale. Previously, Pankaj played pivotal roles incubating and growing a series of businesses during the Internet, Mobile, and Cloud technology eras across three decades at Intel and Qualcomm. Pankaj is a frequent keynote speaker on AI, Internet, Mobile, and Wearables having spoken at leading conferences, has been an active spokesperson for AI and technology topics in the industry, and quoted in mainstream publications globally. Pankaj has been recognized with the Lifetime AI Innovation Award by TiE, included in the CAIO Innovators Circle by Bloomberg Tech, inducted into the Global AI150 Hall of Fame by Constellation Research, featured in the Top US 100 VC list by Stanford, and named a Distinguished Innovation Scholar by Stanford GSB.
Pankaj's Sessions
From Pilot to Production at Scale: Provable, Trusted Agentic AI for the Enterprise
Agentic AI represents an unprecedented opportunity to transform enterprises globally, and yet deployments have been slow and the pilot-to-production yield has been low. In this panel, we will explore what changes — technologically, economically, competitively, societally — we need to make to benefit from AI’s tremendous potential. We will discuss how the transition from “probably right” to “formal verification” will enable us to fully realize these benefits.
Jasvinder (“Jas”) Khaira is the Global Head of Blackstone N1 and Blackstone Growth, and Head of Tactical Opportunities Americas. He serves on several of the firm’s investment committees and is based in San Francisco. Mr. Khaira joined Blackstone in 2004. He founded Blackstone N1, the firm’s unified platform for growth, hybrid, and perpetual private equity investing across the AI ecosystem and the next generation of high growth companies, and helped build the firm’s Tactical Opportunities business. Earlier at the firm, Mr. Khaira was a member of the Private Equity Group and was involved in the execution of Blackstone’s initial public offering and its acquisition of GSO Capital, which became its credit business. Mr. Khaira received a BS in Business and a BA in History from the University of California, Berkeley, where he graduated magna cum laude and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He is also a founding sponsor of the Berkeley Changemaker program, currently serves on the board of the New York Philharmonic, and is a board member of Berkeley Haas’ M.E.T program.
Jas's Sessions
Building the Next Generation of AI Giants
AI startups are scaling faster, and demanding more capital, than any generation before them. Jas Khaira, Global Head of Blackstone N1, shares what separates enduring companies from early momentum, how founders should think about capital as they scale, and what Blackstone looks for when backing the next generation of category-defining businesses.
Nader Khalil is Director of Developer Tech at NVIDIA where he leads Open Source & local AI. He was the CEO & co-founder of Brev.dev, which was acquired by NVIDIA in July 2024.
Nader's Sessions
The Open vs. Closed AI Debate Is Just Getting Started
Open models are closing the performance gap, while proprietary frontier models continue to push the limits of what AI can do. For founders, choosing a side or deciding not to is one of the most consequential decisions they’ll make. NVIDIA’s Nader Khalil, Director of Developer Tech, and Sydney Sykes, Global Head of VC Partnerships, debate the tradeoffs between open and closed AI, including cost, control, infrastructure, differentiation, and whether either path offers a lasting competitive advantage.
Nomi Khedawala is a technology leader with a decade of experience building and scaling operations inside some of Silicon Valley’s most influential companies. His work has focused on creating process and structure to support rapid growth and product innovation. He has held key operational roles at Tinder, where he built the company’s product operations function, and at Reddit, where he led a complex compliance program that significantly reduced the company’s legal risk. Throughout his career, which includes roles at Twitter, Strava, and Snowflake, he has gained extensive experience in program management, process design, and establishing operational best practices. Leveraging this background, Nomi is an active angel investor and now helps companies of all sizes, from startups to enterprise-level organizations, build and scale their product operations and program management functions.
Nomi's Sessions
Talent as the Operating System: How High-Performance Teams Scale in the AI Era
As AI transforms how work gets done, many organizations are discovering that outdated people systems are slowing performance and weakening execution. This session explores how trust, talent strategy, and cross-functional alignment directly impact organizational outcomes in fast-changing environments. Attendees will learn practical frameworks to strengthen collaboration between leadership, product, and people teams, identify execution breakdowns before they impact morale, and build scalable systems that support accountability, psychological safety, and sustainable performance across distributed and hybrid teams.
Dr. David Kirtley is the founder and CEO at Helion, a privately funded fusion company focused on magneto-inertial fusion generators. He is passionate about inventing and developing disruptive technologies that will improve access to energy, reduce carbon emissions, and provide a better future for following generations. Dr. Kirtley is an NSF and NASA Advanced Concepts Fellow with expertise in high-beta plasmas for energy and space propulsion applications.
David's Sessions
Bringing Fusion to the Grid
For decades, fusion has been the energy technology of the future. Now, advances in science, engineering, and private investment are bringing commercial fusion closer to reality. In this session, leaders from Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Helion discuss the breakthroughs driving the industry forward, the challenges that remain, and what it will take to bring fusion power to the grid at scale.
John Koelliker is CEO and Co-founder of Leland, the career and talent platform for the AI era. He earned his MBA at Stanford GSB and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2022. Before Leland, he worked in product and growth roles at LinkedIn, Curated, and Uber, where he built and led the growth team for LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator business. Leland has raised funding from investors including Forerunner and GSV Ventures. John lives in Lehi, UT with his wife Karli and their four boys.
John's Sessions
Hiring When AI Is a Co-founder
Early-stage companies are no longer just building with AI, they’re hiring 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.
Cassie Kozyrkov, CEO of Kozyr, is a renowned leader in artificial intelligence. She is best known for founding the field of Decision Intelligence and serving as Google’s first Chief Decision Scientist, where she led the charge in Google’s transformation into an AI-first company. Today, Cassie is a sought-after AI advisor and speaker who has transformed how organizations like Gucci, NASA, Spotify, and Meta approach AI strategy. Passionate about elevating human potential through the responsible adoption of complex technology, she also serves on multiple advisory boards and is an investor in emerging product companies.
Cassie's Sessions
Building Then vs Now
Building a company has always required vision, resilience, and the ability to adapt. But the tools available to founders today are changing how businesses are built, scaled, and operated. Join AI expert Cassie Kozyrkov, data scientist Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, and ClassPass founder Payal Kadakia for a candid conversation about how the founder journey has evolved and what it means to build a business now. From making smarter decisions with AI to understanding the ways technology can introduce hidden bias, the conversation will explore the opportunities and challenges facing today’s entrepreneurs. Together, they’ll look at what has changed, what remains timeless, and what founders should be thinking about as they build what comes next.
The Founder Playbook
Join Cassie Kozyrkov for an interactive conversation on how founders can use AI to make better business decisions. Bring a real challenge you are facing and explore practical ways to think through it, where AI can help, and where human judgment matters most.
Naren Krishna is the co-founder and CEO of Balerion, an AI platform transforming mortgage operations. A UC Berkeley alumnus, he previously served as a technical lead on Snowflake’s financial services team. He was the first employee at Ponder, later acquired by Snowflake, where his first customer was Fannie Mae. Earlier in his career, Naren was a machine learning engineer at Determined AI, which was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Naren's Sessions
AI-Native Won't Work for the Enterprise
Fortune 500 companies are eager to adopt AI, but few are willing to replace the systems that run their businesses. Join Pruven Capital Partner Travis Skelly and Balerion founder Naren Krishna for a discussion on why the biggest near-term opportunity in enterprise AI is not rebuilding systems of record, but creating intelligent agent layers that automate the work performed inside them. Drawing on Balerion’s experience deploying AI agents on top of Encompass for mortgage processing, they’ll explore why rip-and-replace strategies struggle, what enterprises actually want from AI vendors, and how founders can build products that deliver immediate value without costly implementations, extensive customization, or disruptive change management.
Tushar and Vishal Kumar are twin brothers and cofounders of Twin Peaks Wealth Advisors in San Francisco, CA. Beginning their careers at Northwestern Mutual in 2009, they became one of the top investment advisor teams at the firm in just a few years. As Bay Area natives and after working in San Francisco for several years, the brothers identified an underserved market among technology professionals navigating complex equity compensation and company exit strategies. In 2015, the brothers founded Twin Peaks Wealth Advisors (TPWA) with these unique clients and their specialized needs in mind. A team that started as just a pair of brothers, is now a team of 13 which includes 7 private wealth advisors. The expanded team gives our clients the luxury of working with a multi-advisor team and has also allowed TPWA to expand its expertise. The firm currently manages financial planning and investments for over 400 clients nationwide with around $750M AUM (as of 7/15/26).
Vishal's Sessions
“My Company Is a Rocket Ship.” What Comes After the Landing?
Building a rocket ship is hard, but managing the aftermath of an IPO, tender offer, or major exit brings an entirely new set of problems. This roundtable moves past the hype to address the structural realities of massive liquidity. We will discuss tax strategy, concentration risk, and navigating lockup windows. Join us to map out how to protect what you built while figuring out what your numbers actually mean.
Tushar and Vishal Kumar are twin brothers and cofounders of Twin Peaks Wealth Advisors in San Francisco, CA. Beginning their careers at Northwestern Mutual in 2009, they became one of the top investment advisor teams at the firm in just a few years. As Bay Area natives and after working in San Francisco for several years, the brothers identified an underserved market among technology professionals navigating complex equity compensation and company exit strategies. In 2015, the brothers founded Twin Peaks Wealth Advisors (TPWA) with these unique clients and their specialized needs in mind. A team that started as just a pair of brothers, is now a team of 13 which includes 7 private wealth advisors. The expanded team gives our clients the luxury of working with a multi-advisor team and has also allowed TPWA to expand its expertise. The firm currently manages financial planning and investments for over 400 clients nationwide with around $750M AUM (as of 7/15/26).
Tushar's Sessions
“My Company Is a Rocket Ship.” What Comes After the Landing?
Building a rocket ship is hard, but managing the aftermath of an IPO, tender offer, or major exit brings an entirely new set of problems. This roundtable moves past the hype to address the structural realities of massive liquidity. We will discuss tax strategy, concentration risk, and navigating lockup windows. Join us to map out how to protect what you built while figuring out what your numbers actually mean.
Apeksha Kumavat is Co-founder and Chief Engineer of Gatik, where she leads the company’s autonomous driving technology and engineering organization. A lifelong technologist, she began building predictive agents and robotics systems as a teenager before earning her master’s degree at Purdue University. After working on autonomous vehicle systems at Ford and leading machine learning software at robotics startup OTSAW, she co-founded Gatik in 2017 with Arjun and Gautam Narang. In 2021, Apeksha led the deployment of the trucking industry’s first fully driverless commercial vehicles on public roads. Since then, she has helped take Gatik’s operations to commercial scale, with dozens of driverless trucks operating across North America for some of the world’s largest companies including PepsiCo and Canada’s Loblaw.
Apeksha's Sessions
When Machines Clock In (Hosted by NYSE Wired)
Robots are picking orders in warehouses, driving trucks with no one behind the wheel, and taking on jobs once considered too dangerous for people. In this session, the leaders behind three of robotics’ most ambitious deployments — Dexterity’s Samir Menon, Foundation’s Sankaet Pathak, and Gatik’s Apeksha Kumavat — join a candid conversation about what it takes to move autonomous systems from demo to daily operation. Expect a grounded look at scaling physical AI: the technical hurdles, the trust required from enterprise customers, and the hard questions about which jobs machines should — and shouldn’t — take over next.
Bosco Lai is Co-Founder and CEO of Little Place Labs, a space-tech company bringing AI to orbital infrastructure to deliver near-real-time insights for defense, government, and commercial customers. Its Orbitfy platform orchestrates satellites, sensors, and compute as a federated network, with deployments already proven in orbit. Bosco brings more than 20 years of experience across technology, finance, investment, and entrepreneurship. Before Little Place Labs, he held executive leadership roles in energy AI analytics, served as a Venture Partner with a climate-tech investment fund, and held global roles at a leading investment bank. He holds an Executive MBA from the University of Oxford, with an engineering and science background from the University of Toronto and McMaster University.
Bosco's Sessions
Breaking Into Space: The AI Builder’s Opportunity
AI builders are realizing that space problems mirror the ones they already solve on Earth – massive data streams, real‑time decisions, autonomy, and complex multi‑agent systems. As the industry shifts toward smaller, more agile players, technology‑first companies have new openings to bring existing tools directly into space missions. This roundtable outlines how AI developers can translate their capabilities into practical, mission‑relevant applications and plug into emerging commercial and government pathways built for rapid delivery. The discussion highlights clear entry points, overlooked opportunities, and the mindset that helps founders see space as an accessible, fast‑moving market ready for their technology.
Ben Lamm is the co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, the world’s first de-extinction company. He is a serial technology entrepreneur driven to solve some of the most complex challenges facing our planet. For more than two decades, Ben has built disruptive businesses focused on future-proofing industries through advances in artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, conservation, and space innovation. Prior to Colossal, Ben founded and led several pioneering technology companies, including Hypergiant, an enterprise AI software company focused on critical infrastructure, space, and defense that was acquired by Trive Capital; Conversable, the leading conversational intelligence platform that helped brands engage customers through automated experiences and was acquired by LivePerson; and Chaotic Moon, a global creative technology company acquired by Accenture. He was also the co-founder of Team Chaos, a consumer gaming company acquired by Zynga. In addition to leading and growing his own companies, Ben is deeply passionate about emerging technology, science, space exploration, biodiversity, and climate resilience. He currently serves on the board of directors of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF), the congressionally chartered nonprofit dedicated to conserving and restoring fish, wildlife, plants, and habitats across the United States through public-private partnerships and conservation grantmaking. Ben is also a Fellow and serves on the Board of Trustees of The Explorers Club, whose mission is to promote the scientific exploration of land, sea, air, and space by supporting research and education in the physical, natural, and biological sciences.
Ben's Sessions
Can We Engineer Nature's Comeback?
Ben Lamm has built one of the most controversial companies in tech by turning de-extinction from science fiction into a billion-dollar business. In this fireside chat, the Colossal Biosciences CEO will discuss the technologies used to revive extinct species, the role AI plays in modern biology, and the growing debate over whether engineering nature is a conservation breakthrough or a distraction from protecting what’s already here.
Vanessa Larco co-founded Premise, a modern VC firm focused on agentic technology. Premise invests in technical founders at pre-seed and seed who are building AI-native products that drive economic democratization across B2C, B2B and Fintech. Before starting Premise, Vanessa was a General Partner at NEA from 2016 to 2025, where she focused on enterprise SaaS and consumer internet investing. Vanessa has led investments in Cowboy Space Corporation, Kindred, Mejuri, Greenlight, and others. She was also a board observer at Robinhood from 2017 through the IPO in 2021. She also held senior product management roles at Box, Twilio, Playdom (acq. Disney), and XBOX. Vanessa holds a BS in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Vanessa's Sessions
Open-Weight Models and the New AI Stack
As increasingly capable, low-cost open-weight models offer another option for AI builders, companies need to evaluate the trade-offs around cost, security, control, and performance. Mercedes and Vanessa will break down how the rise of open-weight models is changing the economics of AI, where they are gaining an edge over closed models, and what this shift means for startups building the next generation of AI products.
Jeff Lawson builds and scales companies that redefine what is possible. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Inertia, a commercial fusion energy company. There, he is taking the only proven physics for fusion energy ignition and bringing it to the grid. A serial founder and inventor, Jeff scaled Twilio as its co-founder and CEO into a public company with over $4 billion in revenue and 300,000 worldwide customers. He defined the business model of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) as the first product leader at Amazon Web Services from 2004 to 2006, and was the founding CTO of StubHub. He also owns The Onion.
Jeff's Sessions
How Twilio’s Founder Is Tackling the Power Problem
Inertia Enterprises CEO Jeff Lawson joins us for a candid fireside chat about his journey from founding Twilio to leading one of the world’s best-funded fusion power startups. Hear how his experience scaling Twilio is informing Inertia’s approach to talent, timelines, fundraising, and the hard engineering questions ahead, and what changes when a software founder takes on a capital-intensive deep tech company.
Michelle Lee is the founder and CEO of Medra, where she is building the Physical AI Scientist – a closed-loop system that tightly integrates AI-driven scientific reasoning with automated experimentation to accelerate discovery. An award-winning researcher, Michelle has worked at NVIDIA, SpaceX, and McKinsey. Her work spans applied AI, robotics, and large-scale engineering systems, with a focus on translating advanced computation into real-world scientific and industrial impact. Michelle earned her PhD in Robotics, as well as her master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering, from Stanford University.
Michelle's Sessions
Operating at the Edge: How AI Works When the Cloud Doesn’t
The most valuable AI deployments in the world operate where the cloud can’t reach. And building for them requires a different technological playbook.
This session brings together leaders from defense, space, and industrial AI who will share how they have tackled the challenge of making AI work at the edge — where latency matters, connectivity is limited, and failure isn’t an option. Expect practical lessons on architectural principles, design decisions, and trade-offs that make AI-centric systems work in the real world.
Bruce K. Lee is the Founder and CEO of Keebeck Wealth Management, a boutique, independent advisory firm. Keebeck is built to help entrepreneurs, business owners, and multi-generational families move from being the CEO of their business to the CEO of their capital. Keebeck, the given name his first-generation U.S. immigrant parents gave him, means “to ascend,” and that idea still defines the firm he leads today.
Bruce's Sessions
From Founder to Investor: The Next Act – What Happens After You Win?
Mitesh Agrawal, CEO, Positron AI (exited founder of Lambda) speaks with Bruce Lee, founder of Keebeck, about why planning for what’s next as an investor starts well before your first exit, as he learned with Lambda, and ahead of any potential future exits. Bruce to share guidance on how to transition from being a founder raising capital and building businesses, to being an investor vetting investments in peers and next-gen founders. Come learn about what happens when entrepreneurs exit and transition from operating companies to being an allocator of capital. Find out why some entrepreneurs struggle to manage wealth after successfully building a business. Whether the thrill of innovation and creation, or supporting entrepreneurs and riding the returns of investing, what’s really motivating founders to continue to grow.
The New Power Players: How Family Offices Are Reshaping Venture Investing
Family offices have become one of the fastest-growing sources of startup capital, often moving faster and investing with greater flexibility than traditional institutions. Join prominent family office investors as they discuss how they’re approaching venture today, where they’re placing long-term bets, how they work alongside VCs, and why founders increasingly see them as strategic partners. **Investor Pass Only**
Beyond the Check: The Power of Access
Mark Wahlberg built his career by spotting opportunities before others did. Now, alongside Bruce Lee, Senior advisor to the Wahlberg family office and business affairs, he’s applying those same instincts to venture investing while learning the discipline required to compete at an institutional level. Join them for a conversation about what influence can and can’t buy, how intuition complements data in investment decisions, and why they’re betting on health technology as the next chapter of their investing journey.
Grant Lee is the CEO and co-founder of Gamma, the AI-powered presentation and website design tool that has scaled beyond 70 million customers and $100 million in ARR with only 50 employees. A Stanford-trained engineer with a background in finance and operations, Grant spent much of his early career creating countless slide decks, a pain point that inspired him to found Gamma and reimagine how people share ideas. Before Gamma, he served as COO of ClearBrain (acquired by Amplitude) and CFO of Optimizely.
Grant's Sessions
The Zero-to-1K 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.
Dean Leitersdorf is the 27-year-old co-founder and CEO of Decart, an efficiency-first AI video research lab developing the world’s fastest generative video and world-modeling technology. He earned his PhD from the Technion at 23- then the youngest in the university’s history, until his brother Orian later broke the record. Decart has raised $153 million from leading investors, including Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, and Zeev Ventures.
Dean's Sessions
The Video Intelligence Race: Real-Time, Reasoning, and What Comes Next
Visual AI isn’t just about attention-getting videos anymore. The race has moved to real-time inference, physical reasoning, and AI models that genuinely understand the world they’re rendering. This session brings together the founders building at the frontier to talk about what happens when the technology crosses from generation into intelligence.
Alex has spent his career moving between advising companies, building them, and investing in the people behind them. Before MVP, he worked in management consulting at Kearney and held roles at Voyage and Cruise. He joined MVP in its earliest days, drawn to the chance to help build a venture firm while working with founders and investors he could learn from for years to come. As Partner, Alex focuses on finding exceptional founders, building relationships with them, and earning the opportunity to invest alongside them. Consulting shaped how Alex sees the investor’s role: as a long-term partner founders can trust through every stage of building a company. He’s drawn to people with the ambition to build something meaningful and the conviction that makes him want to stay close to what they do next. Some of his closest founder relationships have spanned multiple companies and chapters, reinforcing his belief that the best partnerships rarely begin and end with a single investment. Alex has also learned not to underestimate relationships that begin by chance. Some of the most consequential in his career started in moments he couldn’t have known would matter years later. That’s made him more willing to leave room for serendipity, stay open to where an unexpected connection might lead, and trust that not every meaningful relationship needs an obvious destination from the start.
Alex's Sessions
Beyond the Term Sheet: How To Architect A Great Fundraise
Many founders believe the goal of a fundraise is to pitch investors and get capital in the door. Great founders know there is much more to it. Done right, every fundraise is an opportunity to leverage an often overlooked aspect of startups: the cap table. Great fundraises start long before the first pitch, and continues even after the money hits the bank. This session explores strategies to architect a great fundraise: choosing which investors to pitch, getting the right introductions, running a process, negotiating term sheets, and constructing a great cap table.
Dani London is a Principal at Base10, where she focuses on Seed and Series A investments. She partners with early-stage founders building the next generation of category-defining companies, with a particular interest in B2B software and vertical platforms. Prior to joining Base10, Dani was a multi-stage investor at Insight Partners, where she focused on B2B SaaS, with an emphasis on application software and vertical platforms. Before Insight, she was an investor at WTI, partnering primarily with early-stage founders across a broad range of sectors.Dani graduated from MIT with a BS in Economics and Data Science, bringing a data-driven perspective to her investment approach. Outside of investing, Dani is an avid New York Times crossword enthusiast, devoted coffee consumer, and enthusiastic reader.
Dani's Sessions
Specialty Post-Training Data: Powering the Next Wave of AI
As AI models continue to improve, access to high-quality, specialized post-training data is becoming increasingly important to model performance and unlocking new AI applications. This roundtable will explore how companies are sourcing, building, and leveraging specialty datasets to train models for increasingly complex and domain-specific tasks. Attendees will hear how leading founders and investors are thinking about the data layer—from identifying valuable sources of specialty data to evaluating the businesses emerging around its creation and delivery. The conversation will also examine where demand for specialized post-training data is growing fastest and the opportunities this creates for a new generation of AI companies.
At SpaceX, Ben started and co-led Starlink Mobile, contributing to the design and deployment of 660 satellites, while also developing an argon Hall Effect Thruster now flying on over 10,000 satellites. He co-founded Swarm Technologies, which was acquired by SpaceX in 2021. Former NASA postdoc and University of Michigan professor who has co-founded, scaled, and sold 3 aerospace startups, including to Apple and SpaceX. Ben is now the co-founder and CEO of Ambrosia Energy.
Ben's Sessions
Where the AI Infrastructure Boom Is Creating Winners
The race to build AI infrastructure is creating new markets across power, data centers, and the systems that support them, but the benefits will not be distributed equally. Leaders across energy, infrastructure, and market intelligence examine which constraints are creating durable business opportunities, where new categories are beginning to emerge, and what founders can build as the AI economy moves from software into the physical world.
Luke Arno leads Sales for the Americas at Lovable, helping scale the company’s enterprise business as AI transforms how software is built. He has nearly two decades of experience building and scaling revenue organizations at leading enterprise software companies. Before Lovable, Luke served as Chief Revenue Officer at Transcend and held senior sales leadership roles at Twilio Segment and Box, with earlier experience at Salesforce and Yammer. His career has focused on turning emerging technologies into durable businesses, building high-performing teams, and helping enterprises navigate major technology shifts.
Luke Arno's Sessions
The First 90 Days: How Startups Build Toward $10M ARR
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.
Hagay is SVP for AI Cloud at Cerebras. He brings more than two decades of industry experience in software engineering and machine learning. Prior to joining Cerebras, Hagay was the VP of engineering at MosaicML (acquired by Databricks), Director of engineering at Meta AI, and an engineering leader at AWS AI. Hagay holds a Computer Science MSc from Tel Aviv University.
Hagay's Sessions
The Inference Economy: Why AI's Next Trillion Dollars Won't Look Like Its First
As frontier models commoditize, the core of AI value is shifting from training to inference, and most founders are still building for the wrong era. Rudina Seseri, founder and managing partner of Glasswing Ventures, and Hagay Lupesko, SVP of AI Cloud & Inference at Cerebras, unpack what this shift means for early-stage AI companies: where moats actually form when models are a commodity, why latency is becoming a product, and how the unit economics of inference will reshape who wins. Founders will leave with a sharper lens on their roadmap, their infra choices, and what investors will actually want to see in 2027.
Adrian Macneil is the Co-Founder and CEO of Foxglove. Prior to founding Foxglove, Adrian was the first Director of Infrastructure Engineering at Cruise, where he led the team that built the company’s first multi-modal data platform required to develop and operate autonomous vehicles at scale. Prior to that, he was the first Director of Engineering at Coinbase, where he helped build the company’s digital currency exchange, and prior to that founded the E-commerce platform, Exp;resso, which was acquired in 2014. Adrian studied computer science at Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand and currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Adrian's Sessions
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 startups die. Founders might have the right team and tech, but they fail to understand what it takes to bring a prototype into production and eventually scale to higher, profitable volumes.
This session brings together founders who have crossed that gap in space hardware, humanoid robotics, and autonomous systems. They’ll share what they got wrong, what they’d do earlier, and what the prototype-to-production journey looks like when supply chains and manufacturing realities replace lab conditions.
Miloni Madan Presler is a Partner at IVP, where she focuses on high-growth companies in enterprise software, healthcare, and security—particularly businesses where vertical SaaS and AI can become the data layer on top of legacy systems. She is drawn to founders solving critical pain points in complex industries, connecting fragmented ecosystems, and transforming historically manual or paper-based processes into data-driven workflows. Miloni brings a rigorous, founder-first approach to investing, combining deep customer understanding, thoughtful market analysis, and a commitment to helping companies scale. Before joining IVP, Miloni invested at Summit Partners and Warburg Pincus, developing a disciplined foundation in growth investing. She was recognized as a Business Insider Rising Star of Venture Capital for her conviction, preparation, and hands-on support of founders. Miloni earned her BA in International Studies & Economics from Johns Hopkins University. Miloni’s investments include Laurel, GenLogs, and Solace Health.
Miloni's Sessions
The Startup Battlefield — Healthtech & Life Sciences
From new approaches to healthcare to breakthroughs in biology, healthtech and life sciences startups pitch expert judges for a place in the Startup Battlefield Finals and a shot at $100,000
Aidan Madigan-Curtis doesn’t just bet on the future — she helps build it. As a Partner at Eclipse, Aidan is a force of nature in the world of industrial innovation, investing at the nexus of where cutting-edge technology meets the physical industries that power our economy. From geopolitical disruption and supply chain upheaval to energy transition, onshoring manufacturing, and autonomous systems, she backs founders tackling the world’s hardest, most essential challenges with bold ideas and relentless execution. Aidan led Eclipse’s investment in Verkada and sits on 10 boards including Bedrock Robotics, Stand Insurance, Simbe Robotics, Liberate, and VoxelAI. Before Eclipse, Aidan was an executive at Samsara (NYSE: IOT), led manufacturing for the first Apple Watch, and invested at Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund. Most importantly, she’s originally Canadian! Aidan is a Fortune Most Powerful Women Ambassador, a board member of the Human Rights Campaign, and co-teacher at Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program. She has a Masters from Stanford and undergraduate degree from Harvard.
Aidan's Sessions
Operating at the Edge: How AI Works When the Cloud Doesn’t
The most valuable AI deployments in the world operate where the cloud can’t reach. And building for them requires a different technological playbook.
This session brings together leaders from defense, space, and industrial AI who will share how they have tackled the challenge of making AI work at the edge — where latency matters, connectivity is limited, and failure isn’t an option. Expect practical lessons on architectural principles, design decisions, and trade-offs that make AI-centric systems work in the real world.
Sachin Malhotra is an engineer at Anthropic, where he works on the continuous-integration infrastructure the company’s engineers build and ship on. Most of his day-to-day now runs through a fleet of Claude agents that triage incidents, watch rollouts, review changes, and draft the work. His job is to set direction, review their output, and step in when they get it wrong. He has spoken about agent-driven engineering at the AI Engineer World’s Fair 2026 and has taught hands-on Claude sessions to hundreds of engineers at enterprise companies. At TechCrunch Disrupt, he’ll talk about what it takes to hand most of an engineering job to agents, and what breaks along the way.
Sachin's Sessions
Outnumbered Either Way: How an Engineer and an Architect Run Their Jobs on Agents
Sachin Malhotra is an engineer at Anthropic who runs continuous-integration infrastructure by handing most of the daily work to a fleet of Claude agents. Steve Androulakis is an architect at Anthropic who works with enterprise customers, helping their teams put agents to work, and runs his own job on them the same way. They’ll walk through the toolkit as they actually use it: running multiple Claude Code agents in parallel, building skills agents reuse across tasks, and Claude Tag, the piece that lets people who don’t write code delegate real engineering work by tagging Claude where their team works – in Slack!. You’ll leave with practical patterns for delegating, reviewing agent output, recovering when agents get it wrong, and putting agents to work in your own jobs and scenarios.
Aditi Maliwal is a General Partner at Upfront Ventures, investing in early-stage companies in AI, developer tools and fintech. She partners closely with founders from inception through company building, working with companies like AlphaXiv, Arcade, Clair, General Translation, and Village. Before Upfront, Aditi spent time at Google across Corporate Development and the Next Billion Users team. She previously invested at Crosslink Capital, where her portfolio included Chime and BetterUp, and began her career in tech investment banking at Deutsche Bank. She holds a B.A. from Stanford and has lived across Mumbai, New Delhi, Hong Kong, Singapore, and San Francisco.
Aditi's Sessions
How to Land Your First Institutional Check (From the Person Who Writes Them)
This session demystifies what actually moves a GP from a first meeting to a term sheet. Aditi Maliwal leads first institutional rounds for first-time founders, and she will share insights into the real decision-making process behind early institutional bets. Using frameworks like the “cockroach plus killer” lens, founders will learn what resilience and edge VCs are actually underwriting before there’s any traction to point to. Attendees will walk away knowing how to position their story, what signals to lead with, and what kills deals before they start. (*Preference for roundtable)
The Startup Battlefield — Enterprise & Security
Meet the startups building the next generation of enterprise technology and cybersecurity, as founders pitch expert judges for a place in the Startup Battlefield Finals and a shot at $100,000.
Demetri is the co-founder and CEO of Nephrogen, a biotech spinout from Stanford using AI and high-throughput screening to improve gene delivery to enable curative genetic therapies for deadly diseases. Nephrogen won second place at TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in 2025. Nephrogen’s NeFIND™ discovery platform screens on the order of 10^17 variants to identify new gene delivery vehicles and cell-type-specific promoters capable of reaching the kidney and pancreas. Kidney and pancreatic diseases affect millions of patients and most have no disease-modifying treatment options. Under Demetri’s leadership, Nephrogen has raised financing from leading investors such as Y Combinator, Pillar VC, and Techstars, and secured sponsored research funding from seven global pharmaceutical companies, including Bayer, Novartis, and Bristol Myers Squibb. Before coming into biotech, Demetri was a professional alpine ski racer who competed at the 2021 FIS World Alpine Ski Championships. He completed his undergraduate and graduate coursework at Stanford University, where he received the Firestone Medal for having one of the top two research theses across the entire Department of Biology in 2020.
Demetri's Sessions
After Startup Battlefield: What Happens Next?
Winning over a room at Startup Battlefield is one thing. Building the company afterward is much harder. Three Battlefield alumni return to the Disrupt Stage to talk candidly about what happened after their moment in the spotlight: the bets that paid off, the plans that changed, the mistakes they’d avoid, and what they wish they’d known when they were standing where this year’s finalists are now.
Ankita Mehta is a Senior Product Manager at Databricks, where she builds AI-powered products and systems that help go-to-market and Product teams translate customer signals into better decisions. Her work focuses on applying agentic AI to enterprise workflows, improving how organizations capture customer feedback, identify product gaps, prioritize investments, and connect insights to execution. Ankita has held Product and strategy leadership roles across enterprise technology and consumer platforms, including TikTok. She brings a cross-functional perspective spanning Product management, go-to-market strategy, operations, and AI adoption. She is particularly interested in separating meaningful enterprise applications of agentic AI from industry hype and designing systems that earn user trust through strong data foundations, human oversight, and measurable business outcomes.
Ankita's Sessions
Agentic AI in the Enterprise: Separating Signal from Noise for GTM and Ops Leaders
Every enterprise wants agentic AI. Few are deploying it well. This roundtable cuts through the noise with an honest conversation about what’s working and what’s not. We’ll get into which agentic workflows are producing measurable ROI right now, why most internal AI tools stall after the pilot phase, how to drive adoption with teams that never asked for automation, and what infrastructure decisions matter before a single agent goes live. You’ll leave with a practical framework for evaluating where agents create value vs. friction, and a checklist for avoiding the most common deployment failures. Come with questions. Come with war stories.
Samir Menon is a visionary leader and robotics expert dedicated to revolutionizing logistics and supply-chain automation. As the founder and CEO of Redwood City–based Dexterity, Inc., he has guided the company to unicorn status and successfully raised over $200 million in funding, achieving a valuation exceeding $1.4 billion
Samir's Sessions
When Machines Clock In (Hosted by NYSE Wired)
Robots are picking orders in warehouses, driving trucks with no one behind the wheel, and taking on jobs once considered too dangerous for people. In this session, the leaders behind three of robotics’ most ambitious deployments — Dexterity’s Samir Menon, Foundation’s Sankaet Pathak, and Gatik’s Apeksha Kumavat — join a candid conversation about what it takes to move autonomous systems from demo to daily operation. Expect a grounded look at scaling physical AI: the technical hurdles, the trust required from enterprise customers, and the hard questions about which jobs machines should — and shouldn’t — take over next.
Nathan Michael is Shield AI’s Chief Technology Officer. He leads the development and deployment of Hivemind, Shield AI’s modular, platform-agnostic mission autonomy software that enables Shield AI and its partners to rapidly develop, test, and field autonomy at scale. He brings deep expertise in AI and autonomy engineering, built over a career spanning extensive publications on control, perception, and multi-robot systems, and years leading advanced research programs at Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining Shield AI, Nathan was an Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, where he directed the Resilient Intelligent Systems Lab.
Nathan's Sessions
Building AI Systems When Failure Is Not an Option
When AI enters the physical world, the consequences of failure change. A mistake could lead to a grounded aircraft, a vehicle crash, or a compromised mission. In this session, leaders who are building autonomous vehicles, defense technologies, and industrial systems will talk about one of the toughest questions that every hard tech founder must face: How do you know when your system is ready to be safely deployed?
We’ll dig into how founders can create a safety culture, test and validate AI, navigate regulatory hurdles, and build companies that can earn trust when the stakes are high.
Lindsey S. Mignano represents emerging technology companies and industry-adjacent firms and SMEs as their outside general counsel. Her team’s practice includes SAFE note or priced round raises for early-stage (seed through Series B) startups, including bridge/extension rounds; buy-side or sell-side acquisitions, including asset sales plus acquihires or entity acquisitions, including due diligence and any novations of existing customer contracts; flips from abroad entity structures to a DE C Corp structure for the purposes of procuring American venture capital and the related priced round; corporate restructuring in order to achieve tax optimization for raises, sales, or co-founder exits/business divorces; corporate due diligence and cleanup in preparation for a raise or sale, including due diligence and cleanup related to stock grants, IP assignments, commercial contracts, etc.; IP spinouts, particularly transferring IP out of consulting businesses into a C Corp structure for QSBS or venture capital fundraising purposes; and outside general counsel services. Most of her clients are venture-capital funded at the seed ($1M to 5M+ range), Series A ($10M+ range), and Series B ($20M+ range). In terms of verticals, her most popular vertical includes enterprise SaaS/PaaS companies, many of which are AI technology companies. Her other clients include venture capital firms deploying capital to startups and other adjacent businesses that sell to or otherwise do business with technology companies.
Lindsey's Sessions
M&A Is Now an Early-Stage Strategy
The smartest founders today aren’t just building for IPOs, they’re also building for possible acquisitions 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 the possibility of such an option through product strategy and partnerships. It delves into how big-dollar startup outcomes actually happen, even for small companies.
Rudra Mitra is a Vice President at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he leads product incubation, development, and commercial scaling for the company’s Security Services portfolio. Previously, he spent 27 years at Microsoft building multiple successful product franchises, including Microsoft Security Purview, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Office Live, and Microsoft Windows Live, that are trusted by hundreds of thousands of organizations and actively used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Rudra is a builder and versatile leader across product categories – productivity, security, consumers, and enterprise – driven by a mission to take on big ideas and craft products that users love.
Rudy's Sessions
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.
Barr Moses is CEO and co-founder of Monte Carlo, the leading data and AI observability platform. Under Barr’s leadership, Monte Carlo has pioneered the data and AI observability category, partnering with the world’s most data-driven and agentic organizations to reduce data and AI downtime and improve reliability at scale. The company is backed by leading Silicon Valley investors, including Accel, GGV Capital, ICONIQ Growth, and Redpoint Ventures. Moses has been named a Top 25 Data Management and Analytics Executive of 2025, a 2024 top Woman in AI by VentureBeat, and a 2023 Datanami Person to Watch.
Barr's Sessions
Rewriting SaaS: Why AI Breaks the Old Business Model
Is the SaaS playbook dead, or is it just evolving? This session brings together founders and platform leaders who are grappling with that question in real time — and coming away with real answers. Walk away with a sharper understanding of how to price AI products sustainably, how to build defensible moats when models are commoditizing, and how to make SaaS work in the AI era.
Katie Moussouris is the founder and CEO of Luta Security, a company that creates and manages sustainable bug bounty and vulnerability disclosure programs. She advises companies and governments on emerging trends in AI and cybersecurity and how the dynamics are shifting between attack, defense, national security, and human expertise adaptation and co-evolution. Ms. Moussouris is the co-author and co-editor of ISO standards 29147 vulnerability disclosure and ISO 30111 vulnerability handling processes. During her tenure with Microsoft, Ms. Moussouris started Microsoft Vulnerability Research as well as Microsoft’s first bug bounty program. She served as a technical advisor to the US Wassenaar delegation to help renegotiate clarifications to export control of intrusion software and technology. Ms. Moussouris led the launch of the U.S. government’s first bug bounty program, “Hack the Pentagon.” She also served as a member of DHS’s Cyber Safety Review Board and NIST’s Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board. Ms. Moussouris currently serves as a member of the U.S. Commerce Department’s Information Systems Technical Advisory Committee.
Katie's Sessions
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.
Dr. Richard Munassi MD MBA is a serial Entrepreneur and investor. As Managing Director, Dr. Munassi leads both the CORE and Accelerator programs for the nationally-recognized Tampa Bay Wave, helping software and hardware startups from throughout the US and abroad build, launch, and grow their technology companies. His background includes time with NASA as part of their iTech program, as Entrepreneur in Residence for Techstars, the University of South Florida (where he was also Adjunct Professor for the Graduate School of Business), and the University of Florida, and mentor for programs such as FedTech, UCSF’s Health Hub, MassChallenge, Founder Institute, the Director of Innovation at Moffitt Cancer Center, and more. He is also an active investor in early stage technology startups and several VC funds.
Dr. Richard's Sessions
Fundraising Mistakes That Will Kill Your Round, and How to Avoid Them
Raising venture capital as an early-stage startup can be both exhilarating and daunting. With fierce competition for limited funding opportunities and investor expectations constantly evolving, founders must approach fundraising strategically to stand out and secure the capital they need to grow. This session is designed to both identify critical mistakes that startup founders make that cause their fundraising rounds to fail, and also to equip early-stage teams with actionable insights to optimize their fundraising outcomes in today’s dynamic venture landscape. Whether you’re gearing up for your first round or navigating a Series A or beyond raise, this session will help you position your startup for long-term success. Expect a candid discussion, real-world examples, and a clear framework for approaching your next round with confidence and clarity, from pre-pitch to close.
Ben Narasin is the founder and general partner at Tenacity Venture Capital, as well as a prolific entrepreneur. His career spans 25 years as an entrepreneur and 10 years as an early-stage investor. His knack for spotting emerging trends led him to make seed investments in companies like Dropcam, Lending Club, TellApart, Kabbage and Zenefits. He founded several consumer companies before launching his investing career, including Fashionmall.com, one of the first e-commerce companies, which he launched in 1993 and led to a successful IPO in 1999. Narasin frequently writes and speaks about technology and investing, as well as food and wine, a lifelong passion.
Benjamin's Sessions
The Startup Battlefield — Space and Physical AI
TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as founders building the next generation of space, robotics and physical AI technologies pitch expert judges for a place in the Startup Battlefield Finals and a shot at $100,000.
Wendy Nather has been in tech for over 40 years. She was previously the Senior Research Initiatives Director at 1Password, Director of Advisory CISOs at Duo Security, Research Director at the Retail ISAC, and Research Director of the Information Security Practice at 451 Research. Wendy led IT security for the EMEA region of the investment banking division of Swiss Bank Corporation (now UBS), and served as CISO of the Texas Education Agency. She was inducted into the Infosecurity Europe Hall of Fame in 2021. Wendy serves on the board of directors for Sightline Security, is on the steering committee for the IST Ransomware Task Force, and is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative.
Wendy's Sessions
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.
Aatish joined Kleiner Perkins as a partner in May 2026 where he focuses on partnering with AI native founders with deep vertical expertise across all domains. Prior to joining Kleiner Perkins, Aatish was the first PM and VP of Product at Harvey, where he helped build the early product, design, marketing, analytics, and support teams. Before that he was an early product leader at Scale AI working on data infrastructure for ecommerce, early NLP (GPT-2), and autonomous vehicles. And before that he was at Shield AI working on the core knowledge stack for robotic defense systems that save lives. Originally from New Jersey, he graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering. When he’s not immersed in tech, he likes to travel the world, build legos, exercise, play golf, and nerd out about history.
Aatish's Sessions
The Startup Battlefield — Healthtech & Life Sciences
From new approaches to healthcare to breakthroughs in biology, healthtech and life sciences startups pitch expert judges for a place in the Startup Battlefield Finals and a shot at $100,000
Itamar is the founder of Recursive Ventures, a pre-seed fund investing in startups disrupting industries with Data & AI. Itamar has been on all sides of the startup table – a founder and executive, an institutional VC, and an angel investor. He has supported over 50 successful startups, including Deel, Honeybook, Placer, Credible (IPO), MileIQ (acquired by Microsoft), Automatic Labs (acquired by SiriusXM), Tile (acquired by Life360), SafeGraph, and Armory. He’s been recognized by Business Insider as a Top 100 global seed investor for the last four years. As an operator, he helped take Life360 from Seed to IPO, scaling the business to over $250m in revenue and over $8b market cap. Before that, Itamar was a founding team member and head of Product at Gigya (acquired by SAP for $350m). He holds an MBA from Berkeley Haas and an undergraduate degree in computer science from the Tel-Aviv Jaffa College.
Itamar's Sessions
VC Insights for Founders: How to raise your first VC round
Securing a first institutional check is a grueling rite of passage for high-growth founders. Itamar Novick from Recursive Ventures and Brian Sparkes of Silicon Valley Venture Corp share a blunt look at navigating the venture ecosystem. Learn exactly when to initiate fundraising, how to shape an authentic narrative that resonates with investors, and strategies to build momentum. Get the practical insights needed to successfully move from a first meeting to a closed round.
Michael Palank has been General Partner at MaC Venture Capital since its inception in January 2019. At MaC, Michael focuses on seed-stage consumer and enterprise startup investing across a number of sectors. Prior, he was General Partner at M Ventures, a Los Angeles and Bay Area-based early-stage venture fund. Prior to working in startups, Michael spent eight years working in media and entertainment, first as an agent trainee and agent at The William Morris Agency and then as Director of Business Development at Will Smith’s production company, Overbrook Entertainment. Michael started his career as a financial analyst at the Chicago-based hedge fund Coghill Capital Management. He has degrees in finance, accounting and psychology from DePaul University where he graduated with honors in the top 5% of his class. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Kottie and their two kids, Teddy and Lola.
Michael's Sessions
The Startup Battlefield — Space and Physical AI
TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as founders building the next generation of space, robotics and physical AI technologies pitch expert judges for a place in the Startup Battlefield Finals and a shot at $100,000.
Ashley Paston is a Partner at General Catalyst, an investment firm that partners with founders from seed through growth stages. In this role, she helps lead the firm’s Applied AI thesis and growth practice. Prior to this, Ashley was a Partner at Meritech, where she invested in companies such as Clay and Pigment. Prior, she was an investor at Bain Capital Ventures, investing in companies such as GoCardless, ACV Auctions, and Pleo. She started her career at McKinsey & Co.
Ashley's Sessions
Fundraising Mistakes That Will Kill Your Round, and How to Avoid Them
Raising venture capital as an early-stage startup can be both exhilarating and daunting. With fierce competition for limited funding opportunities and investor expectations constantly evolving, founders must approach fundraising strategically to stand out and secure the capital they need to grow. This session is designed to both identify critical mistakes that startup founders make that cause their fundraising rounds to fail, and also to equip early-stage teams with actionable insights to optimize their fundraising outcomes in today’s dynamic venture landscape. Whether you’re gearing up for your first round or navigating a Series A or beyond raise, this session will help you position your startup for long-term success. Expect a candid discussion, real-world examples, and a clear framework for approaching your next round with confidence and clarity, from pre-pitch to close.
Sankaet Pathak is a tech entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Foundation Future Industries (Foundation), a robotics company developing and deploying autonomous humanoid robots. He began his career building modern banking software for underserved communities. Today he focuses on advancing humanoid robotics through artificial intelligence, with applications across defense, manufacturing, logistics, and other complex labor environments. Foundation is the only approved humanoid vendor in the Department of Defense (DoD). His has been featured in TIME, Fox Business, Newsweek, NBC, and WIRED among many others. Under his leadership, Foundation is working toward a future where humanoid robots build and maintain cities, on Earth and beyond.
Sankaet's Sessions
When Machines Clock In (Hosted by NYSE Wired)
Robots are picking orders in warehouses, driving trucks with no one behind the wheel, and taking on jobs once considered too dangerous for people. In this session, the leaders behind three of robotics’ most ambitious deployments — Dexterity’s Samir Menon, Foundation’s Sankaet Pathak, and Gatik’s Apeksha Kumavat — join a candid conversation about what it takes to move autonomous systems from demo to daily operation. Expect a grounded look at scaling physical AI: the technical hurdles, the trust required from enterprise customers, and the hard questions about which jobs machines should — and shouldn’t — take over next.
Ivan Poupyrev is co-founder and CEO of Archetype AI, the Physical AI company building Newton, a physical world model that helps machines understand the physical world from sensor data. Before founding Archetype AI, Ivan led advanced technology work at Google, where his team developed Project Soli within ATAP. He also held senior research roles at Walt Disney Imagineering and Sony Corporate Research Labs in Tokyo, helping pioneer sensing and human-computer interaction technologies used in everyday consumer devices. His work has been recognized with a Cannes Lions Grand Prix and an Ars Electronica award, among other honors. Ivan founded Archetype AI with a mission to help humanity make sense of the real world.
Ivan's Sessions
Physical AI Isn't a Model Problem. It's an Execution Problem.
More than half of industrial downtime still traces to manual handoffs, not compute. Most “physical AI” today describes the world. The systems that will matter execute in it: closing the loop from perception to decision to action to verification, without waiting on a human.
Builders running execution-layer systems join investors backing the category to diagnose what separates intelligence that absorbs real-world variability from intelligence that narrates it. And why the next generation of durable industrial companies will be decided in that gap.
Vipul is the co-founder and CEO of Together AI, a research-driven AI company building the world’s most efficient AI cloud services and frontier open source models. Previously, Vipul founded Topsy, one of the largest search systems for social media, which was acquired by Apple, where he served as a senior director to lead search and AI efforts in Siri.
Vipul Ved's Sessions
The Real Tokenmaxxing: 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.
Chetan Puttagunta is a General Partner at Benchmark, where he focuses on early-stage investments in enterprise software companies. Puttagunta led Benchmark’s investments in and holds board seats on Airbyte, Bezi, Duffel, Levelpath, Legora, MindsDB, Modern Treasury, Numeral, Reducto and Stytch. Puttagunta also serves as Chairman and Lead Independent Director of Elastic (NYSE: ESTC). He previously led investments in Elastic, Manus (acquired by Meta), MuleSoft (NYSE: MULE, acquired by CRM), MongoDB (NASDAQ: MDB), Forter, Sentry, and others. Puttagunta earned his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
Chetan's Sessions
What We Believe Now
Benchmark has backed some of the most iconic technology companies of the last three decades. For the first time on the Disrupt Stage in San Francisco, all five Benchmark partners come together to debate where the next generation of startups will come from, what founders are getting wrong, and the opportunities they believe are still hiding in plain sight.
Everett “Ev” Randle is a General Partner at Benchmark. Prior to joining Benchmark, Ev was a Partner at Kleiner Perkins and previously an investor at Founders Fund, Bond Capital, and Vista Equity Partners. He’s invested across sectors and stages and has led investments in companies including Gumloop, Rippling, Flock Safety, Anthropic, Garner Health, Huntress, Mirage, Chainguard, SpaceX, Stord, and more.
Everett's Sessions
What We Believe Now
Benchmark has backed some of the most iconic technology companies of the last three decades. For the first time on the Disrupt Stage in San Francisco, all five Benchmark partners come together to debate where the next generation of startups will come from, what founders are getting wrong, and the opportunities they believe are still hiding in plain sight.
Josh Reeves is the CEO and co-founder of Gusto, helping 500,000 companies nationwide with payroll, health insurance, compliance, employee onboarding, HR, retirement savings, and more. By combining the power of AI with more than a decade of experience supporting small businesses, Gusto exists to power builders — giving them the capabilities, confidence, and technology to start, hire, pay, and grow. Josh leads the company on its mission to grow the small business economy with technology and heart, so that anyone can turn ambition into action, build a meaningful business on their own terms, and be successful doing it.
Josh's Sessions
Hiring When AI Is a Co-founder
Early-stage companies are no longer just building with AI, they’re hiring 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.
Carter Reum is the Co-founder and Managing Partner of M13. M13 is a venture capital firm investing early in visionary founders building disruptive technology businesses. Carter and his brother Courtney founded M13 in 2016, and today the firm has AUM of $2.1B and invests in infrastructure technology—such as AI and web3—that powers the future of work, health, commerce, and money. M13 has seeded or been in the series A of 19 unicorns, including: Lyft, Ring, Pinterest, Matterport, Rothy’s, and Transfix. M13 was recently named by HEC-Paris/Dow Jones as one of the top 20 performing venture capital firms globally.
Carter's Sessions
Startup Battlefield Final
The grand finale of TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition. Watch the final 5 teams from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Battlefield Cup and $100,000.
Ask the Investors
What makes an investor say yes? In this audience-led Q&A, the Startup Battlefield finals judges take your toughest questions on what separates a fundable startup from the rest: team, traction, market opportunity, pitch delivery, red flags, and more. Come ready to ask and get candid answers straight from the investors making the decisions.
Jason Risch is a Partner at Greylock, where he invests in entrepreneurs building category-defining companies in AI, cybersecurity, and enterprise software. He has partnered with companies including 7AI, Cribl, Gem, Kodem, LlamaIndex, Niteshift, and Predibase. Before joining Greylock in 2019, Jason worked with Andrew Ng at AI Fund, where he helped launch new AI companies. Earlier, he worked at Opendoor and McKinsey. Jason holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford University in mathematics and statistics, respectively. His current areas of focus include AI infrastructure and applications, cybersecurity, and the emerging opportunities created as AI agents reshape how software is built and used.
Jason's Sessions
The Startup Battlefield — Energy and Manufacturing
Meet the startups rethinking how we power, build and manufacture the physical world, as founders pitch expert judges for a place in the Startup Battlefield Finals and a shot at $100,000.
Rodney Robinson is co-founder and CEO of TabaPay, a real-time money movement platform that helps companies move money at scale—instantly, easily, and reliably. TabaPay powers payments and payouts across card, ACH, and modern payment rails, enabling fintechs, platforms, and financial institutions to send and receive money from customers when it matters most. Rodney is a longtime builder in payments and financial technology, with more than 40 years of experience. A four-time founder, his companies have been acquired by Intuit and Mastercard. Before TabaPay, he co-founded Omney, whose push-to-card technology was acquired by Mastercard and later became the foundation for Mastercard Send. He began his career at IBM and holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Industrial Engineering from Stanford University.
Rodney's Sessions
The Future of Money Movement: Stablecoins, Instant Payments & What's Next
Stablecoins and instant payments are changing how money moves around the world. This session looks at how these new payment systems compare to traditional banking infrastructure, where FedNow and private networks fit in, and what regulatory and market changes could shape the future of payments. Hear where these new systems are gaining traction, and where challenges remain.
Harrison Rolfes is a senior research analyst covering private companies at PitchBook, where he spearheads the group’s framework-driven analysis of AI (frontier, infrastructure, and applications) and pre-IPO sectors. Leveraging a background that merges applied mathematics, patent law, and machine learning, he develops proprietary valuation estimates and KPI-driven benchmarks in his core and quarterly reports that help global institutional investors navigate the complexities of late-stage private markets. Prior to joining PitchBook’s Institutional Research Group, Harrison was a CVC investment analyst at Topcon Healthcare (THINC Ventures). He currently serves as Chair of Venture Partnerships for TCA Venture Group, where he has directed diligence for over 500 companies. Harrison holds a bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics from UC Berkeley, a Juris Doctor in M&A and Patent Law from Chapman University, and a master’s certificate in AI and Machine Learning from Stanford University. He is also a registered patent agent with the USPTO and holds the Securities Industry Essentials license. He is based in PitchBook’s Seattle office.
Harrison's Sessions
The $100 Billion Entry Fee: Can Anyone Still Compete in AI?
Private AI companies command over $2 trillion in combined valuation on $300B+ in capital raised. Five companies alone are spending tens of billions on infrastructure. The question everyone is asking: Is the frontier AI market already locked up? This roundtable works through three questions together: Where do the real moats sit — models, data, or distribution? What does the capital concentration mean for startups building outside the frontier race? And how should investors think about entry points when the cheapest company per unit of business quality is not the one they expect? This conversation will be grounded in data, not hype.
David H. Rosmarin, PhD, is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, and Chief Clinical Officer of the LINKS Network. A clinical psychologist, noted author, and award-winning keynote speaker, he helps leaders and organizations transform anxiety from a liability into clarity, resilience, and high performance. His work has been featured on Good Morning America, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and TED.com.
David H.'s Sessions
Yes, It’s Hard to Be a Founder: An Honest Conversation
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.
Ian founded Cantos in 2016 to invest in innovation outside of Silicon Valley’s comfort zone, seeing that technology would permeate every industry and go three-dimensional. Prior to Cantos he was on the early teams at Invisible Technologies and SoFi.
Ian's Sessions
Physical AI Isn't a Model Problem. It's an Execution Problem.
More than half of industrial downtime still traces to manual handoffs, not compute. Most “physical AI” today describes the world. The systems that will matter execute in it: closing the loop from perception to decision to action to verification, without waiting on a human.
Builders running execution-layer systems join investors backing the category to diagnose what separates intelligence that absorbs real-world variability from intelligence that narrates it. And why the next generation of durable industrial companies will be decided in that gap.
Dave Sachse is a Gen 2 who works at his family’s SFO based in WI (family made wealth in manufacturing). He manages technology implementation and venture investing for his family’s SFO. Dave is an angel investor and managing partner at Sachse Family Fund, a pre-seed/seed fund whose LPs are only family members. Creator of Family VC, a global network of 350+ family offices collaborating on all things VC.
Dave's Sessions
The New Power Players: How Family Offices Are Reshaping Venture Investing
Family offices have become one of the fastest-growing sources of startup capital, often moving faster and investing with greater flexibility than traditional institutions. Join prominent family office investors as they discuss how they’re approaching venture today, where they’re placing long-term bets, how they work alongside VCs, and why founders increasingly see them as strategic partners. **Investor Pass Only**
Yuri Sagalov is a Managing Director at General Catalyst. He leads the firm’s seed investing strategy in the U.S., partnering with founders at the earliest stages. He focuses on non-consensus and outlier opportunities built by exceptional people. Yuri believes that the most meaningful impact that investors can make is through lasting relationships and the hands-on collaborative work that happens post-investment as you design the foundational architecture of your company. Yuri’s love of technology started early. He began programming at age 6 and launched his first business while still in high school. After studying Computer Science at the University of Toronto, he dropped out of grad school to participate in Y Combinator and to start a company in 2010. He ran that startup for seven years before it was acquired. In 2014, Yuri joined Y Combinator as a partner, where he spent five years working with some of the world’s most ambitious founders. After YC, he founded Wayfinder, his own seed-stage fund, where he worked hand-in-hand with founders from their earliest days. Outside of work, he enjoys flying airplanes, sailing in the San Francisco Bay, and spending time with his children.
Yuri's Sessions
How to Win When You're Not Building AI
AI may dominate the world of venture, but many enduring companies won’t be those that sell AI models or agents. 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.
Nabiha Saklayen, PhD, is co-founder and CEO of Cellino, where she is using Yamanaka factors to rebuild the body from your own cells, one replacement part at a time. A Harvard-trained physicist, she spent her PhD using pulsed lasers to edit individual cells, the work that became Cellino’s autonomous reprogramming platform. Cellino won TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield in 2021, the first biotech company to do so. It has since received the FDA’s first Advanced Manufacturing Technology designation for personalized stem cell manufacturing, launched a Parkinson’s cell therapy collaboration with Mass General Brigham, raised over $95M from investors including Khosla Ventures, 8VC, and Felicis, and earned $25M from ARPA-H. Nabiha’s life’s work is proving that manufacturing, not biology, is what stands between regenerative medicine and the people who need it
Nabiha's Sessions
Can You Bank Your Biology?
Five years after Cellino won Startup Battlefield, co-founder and CEO Nabiha Saklayen returns to the Disrupt Stage with a special announcement about what the company is building next. Saklayen walks through the science behind it and where she sees the field heading.
Pedro Sanzovo is Head of Fraud at Plaid, where he leads the team developing the models and tools that help companies detect more fraud, earlier, leveraging Plaid’s network intelligence of a billion devices interacting across 9,,000+ apps. Pedro has spent his career developing anti-fraud and identity technology. Prior to Plaid, he was the VP of Product at Signifyd, where he led the company’s expansion into new solutions for fighting fraud in digital commerce. Pedro joined Signifyd following the acquisition of a startup he founded, Legiti, an anti-fraud platform for ecommerce companies in Latin America. Pedro began his career at Palantir Technologies and holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Pedro's Sessions
AI, Trust & Verification in Financial Services
As AI moves beyond generating content and begins taking action, financial companies are rethinking trust, oversight, and security. Panelists explore how AI agents are changing financial workflows, why transparency and human judgment still matter, and how companies are approaching privacy, fraud prevention, and identity verification in an AI-powered world.
Jahanvi Sardana is an early-stage and growth investor at Index Ventures in New York, where she partners with founders building category-defining companies in AI, enterprise software, healthcare, and financial services. Since joining Index she has led investments across these categories and serves on the boards or works with companies including Sublime Security, Thatch, Crosby Legal, and others. Her investment philosophy is simple: invest for strength, not for the absence of weakness. “In the end, I think amazing success can be achieved by highly imperfect people,” she says. “What matters is finding alignment in values and conviction in a founder’s spike, an area of extreme competence or insight that will give them unfair advantage. The rest we can work on together.” Before Index, Jahanvi invested at Stripes, backing companies like Island, Axonius, Lithic, and Oyster. She holds a B.S. in Finance and Business Analytics from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Jahanvi's Sessions
The Series A in 2027
Series A is getting harder, with VCs growing more demanding. For founders planning to raise in the next one to two 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.
Neil Sequeira is Founder and Partner at defy.vc, where he partners with exceptional entrepreneurs building category-defining companies. With more than 25 years of experience in venture capital and technology, Neil has backed companies across AI, fintech, cybersecurity, healthcare, enterprise software, and consumer technology. Before founding defy, Neil spent 12 years as a Managing Director at General Catalyst, where he led investments in companies including The Honest Company, Vitrue (Oracle), Elemental Technologies (Amazon/AWS), HotPotato (Facebook), and ThisTech (Comcast). Earlier in his career, he held roles at Accenture, Goldman Sachs, CMGI, AOL Ventures, and TimeWarner Investments. Over the course of his career, Neil has served on more than 80 boards and overseen more than 30 exits, including IPOs and significant M&A. At defy, his current investments include ArenaClub, Airspace, HonorLock, Reveal, and Perplexity, as well as acquired companies and IPOs including Nautilus Biotechnology, Securly, and Apploi. Neil holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a degree in Business Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Neil's Sessions
Doing More with Less: Raising Venture Capital in an AI-first World "Helping entrepreneurs avoid the pitfalls of overcapitalization"
In today’s venture landscape, entrepreneurs are bombarded with headlines about billion-dollar fundraises at moonshot valuations. Rarely do they hear about the downside of overfunding, dilution, liquidation preferences, loss of control, and, perhaps most importantly, inflated and unaligned expectations. Raising too much capital, too fast, can quietly reshape a company’s incentives long before the consequences become visible.
In this session, we help entrepreneurs cut through the hype and think critically about what “good” capital actually looks like. We’ll explore red flags to watch for when negotiating a raise, how funding structure shapes long-term decision-making, and how to attract capital that’s not just generous, but genuinely aligned with your company’s goals, timeline, and vision for growth.
Rudina Seseri is founder and managing partner of Glasswing Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm dedicated to investing in the next generation of AI-powered technology companies. With over 20 years of investing and transactional experience, Rudina has led technology investments and acquisitions in startup companies in enterprise SaaS, IT software and data, marketing technologies, and robotics. Rudina’s investments include Asepha, Basetwo, Celtra, CrowdTwist (acquired by Oracle), Inrupt, Iris Finance, SocialFlow, Verusen, and Reprise. Rudina is a Harvard Business School Executive Fellow and previously was appointed a Rock Venture Capital Partner and Entrepreneur-In-Residence. She is also an MIT Connection Science Fellow and a member of the Business Leadership Council of Wellesley College.
Rudina's Sessions
The Inference Economy: Why AI's Next Trillion Dollars Won't Look Like Its First
As frontier models commoditize, the core of AI value is shifting from training to inference, and most founders are still building for the wrong era. Rudina Seseri, founder and managing partner of Glasswing Ventures, and Hagay Lupesko, SVP of AI Cloud & Inference at Cerebras, unpack what this shift means for early-stage AI companies: where moats actually form when models are a commodity, why latency is becoming a product, and how the unit economics of inference will reshape who wins. Founders will leave with a sharper lens on their roadmap, their infra choices, and what investors will actually want to see in 2027.
Shan joined Baillie Gifford in 2024 and is an investment manager in the Private Companies Team. Prior to joining the firm, she was an investment partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, a global venture capital firm. There, Shan focused on finding and leading investments into next-generation frontier technology companies from Series B to the pre-IPO stage. She began her career at Point 72, a long/short investment firm focusing on global Consumer and TMT stocks, as a senior research analyst. Shan holds dual degrees in BA in Politics (with a focus on Foreign Affairs) and a BS in Commerce from the University of Virginia.
Shan's Sessions
How to Win When You're Not Building AI
AI may dominate the world of venture, but many enduring companies won’t be those that sell AI models or agents. 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.
Rajeev Singh is the chief executive officer and member of the board of directors at Smartsheet, which is trusted by millions of people at companies across the globe. A proven technology leader and entrepreneur, Singh was the co-founder and president of Concur Technologies, where he helped build the company into the global leader in travel and expense management. In 2014, Concur was acquired by SAP for $8.3 billion — the largest SaaS acquisition at the time — setting a new standard for enterprise cloud valuations. Following his tenure at Concur, Singh served as chief executive officer and chairman of the board at Accolade, a pioneer in personalized healthcare navigation. Under his leadership, Accolade expanded its reach to more than 14 million members, transforming how employers deliver healthcare. He led the company to a successful IPO in 2020, and it was acquired by Transcarent in 2025. Singh currently serves on the boards of Basalt Health and Scala.ai, and has previously held board positions with high-growth enterprise technology companies, including Amperity, Apptio, and Avalara, where he played a key role in their strategic expansion and public market success. In addition to his corporate work, Singh is deeply committed to community service. He has served on the boards of the Seattle Children’s Hospital Foundation and the University of Washington Foundation, supporting initiatives that drive meaningful impact in healthcare and education.
Rajeev's Sessions
Is SaaS Dead? AI Is Exposing What Enterprise Software Got Wrong
AI agents are making enterprise software feel interchangeable and raising a bigger question: Is SaaS becoming obsolete? Raj Singh, CEO of Smartsheet, argues the opposite. AI isn’t killing SaaS. It’s exposing the fragmentation underneath today’s enterprise stack. As copilots and agents automate tasks inside individual tools, the real challenge is orchestration across systems, workflows, and teams. Singh will explain why the next generation of winners won’t just build AI features — they’ll build systems that accumulate organizational context and compound intelligence over time.
Shailendra Singh is a managing director at Peak XV (formerly known as Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia). He joined the firm in 2006 and has served as its leader since 2011. Peak XV has partnered with over 500 companies spanning technology, software, financial services, and consumer sectors across the world. The portfolio has seen 36 IPOs, multiple successful M&As and currently has 51 companies with over $100 million in revenue. Shailendra has led investments in several category leaders, including Supabase, PostHog, Pine Labs, CRED, GoTo, Druva, and Sirion. He received an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School (HBS) and currently serves on the HBS Board of Dean’s Advisors as well as the Board of the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF). He holds an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from IIT Bombay and is a Kauffman Fellow.
Shailendra's Sessions
The Series A in 2027
Series A is getting harder, with VCs growing more demanding. For founders planning to raise in the next one to two 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.
Parul Singh is an Investment Partner at 645 Ventures, where she invests across the AI stack, with a focus on enterprise software, developer tools, and infrastructure. A longtime builder, Parul spent a decade as a full-stack developer and product manager, including roles at The New York Times, Inc. Magazine, and Fast Company, and founded a learning analytics company before moving into venture capital. She began investing at Founder Collective, where she sourced or led investments in companies including Verkada, PillPack, Flatfile, and Smalls. As a Partner at Initialized Capital, she invested in Cofertility, Glass Health, Stellar Sleep, and Paradime. Parul brings a technical and product-driven perspective to investing, and has spent the past year exploring the agent stack and building AI agents firsthand. She holds a B.A. from Harvard College and an MBA from MIT.
Parul's Sessions
Autonomous Intelligence: Investing in the Companies Redefining Work
The next wave of AI does not just make workers more productive. It fundamentally changes what a company needs people to do. Autonomous agents are increasingly capable of executing complex workflows, from writing and deploying code to running core business operations. This roundtable will explore where autonomous intelligence is creating the biggest opportunities, which tools and categories are emerging, and what founders are doubling down on as AI moves from software that assists people to systems that can operate independently.
Carlotta “Lotti” is a Partner at Emergence Capital. She joined the firm in 2018 as a Senior Associate and was named Principal in 2020. Less than a year later, Lotti was promoted to Partner as a result of the extraordinary impact she has had on the firm, the team, and the companies Emergence backs. Lotti’s strong investor acumen and long-term perspective are instrumental in uncovering compelling and unique investment opportunities, and in leading operational change. She has an outstanding ability to understand complex business structures and to apply that knowledge both in her diligence and at the board table. At Emergence, Lotti invests in early stage enterprise software companies. She serves on the Board of Directors of Whistic and of High Alpha, and is a Board Observer at Convex, Talent Hack, and Oyster. Being an immigrant herself (originally from Italy), she is passionate about helping immigrants and other underrepresented founders build iconic technology companies. She is also a fierce advocate for women in the Venture Capital industry. Lotti brings to Emergence a deep understanding of fintech, where she spent several years both as an operator and as an investor. For three years, she was an investor in financial services and financial technology companies at Advent International, a large global private equity fund, where she was also an observer on the Transunion board. She also spent time in the BizOps group at Nerdwallet and was an early stage investor at Ribbit Capital, a fintech-focused VC, where she led diligence on companies in the cyber insurance and 401K space. Lotti began her career as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. She received a Bachelor of Science from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated cum laude, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Carlotta (Lotti)'s Sessions
The Future of Money Movement: Stablecoins, Instant Payments & What's Next
Stablecoins and instant payments are changing how money moves around the world. This session looks at how these new payment systems compare to traditional banking infrastructure, where FedNow and private networks fit in, and what regulatory and market changes could shape the future of payments. Hear where these new systems are gaining traction, and where challenges remain.
Travis Skelly is a Partner at Pruven Capital, where he leads investments across B2B AI and fintech. Pruven is backed by leading global financial institutions, including Prudential, TIAA, Lincoln Financial, Mutual of Omaha, Generali, WTW, Nuveen, PGIM, Nissay, and Nippon Life. The firm bridges exceptional founders with this enterprise network, helping portfolio companies navigate complex organizations and convert strategic interest into commercial momentum. Travis focuses on companies building the next generation of enterprise and consumer technology, particularly where AI is transforming financial services, insurance, asset management, real estate, and other regulated industries. His recent investments include Bilt Rewards, Gradial, Accrual, Balerion, Trunk Tools, First Connect, Brillian, KarmaCheck, HqO, Banner, TrustLayer, and Wealth.com. Before joining Pruven, Travis was a Director at Citi Ventures, where he led more than fifteen investments, including Socure, HighRadius, Betterment, SmartAsset, and Clarity Money. Earlier, he was a founding team member of FinTech Collective, where he helped lead investments in MoneyLion, Plaid/Quovo, Octane Lending, and NextCapital.
Travis's Sessions
AI-Native Won't Work for the Enterprise
Fortune 500 companies are eager to adopt AI, but few are willing to replace the systems that run their businesses. Join Pruven Capital Partner Travis Skelly and Balerion founder Naren Krishna for a discussion on why the biggest near-term opportunity in enterprise AI is not rebuilding systems of record, but creating intelligent agent layers that automate the work performed inside them. Drawing on Balerion’s experience deploying AI agents on top of Encompass for mortgage processing, they’ll explore why rip-and-replace strategies struggle, what enterprises actually want from AI vendors, and how founders can build products that deliver immediate value without costly implementations, extensive customization, or disruptive change management.
Shawn Sloan is the Corporate Fellow for Artificial Intelligence at The Aerospace Corporation, the first person to hold the role and the company’s principal AI authority. He owns the corporate AI strategy and the portfolio that delivers it, driving adoption across a 4,800-person technical workforce where nearly a quarter hold PhDs. Under his leadership, Aerospace’s enterprise generative AI platforms grew from concept to more than 3,000 active users company-wide and was extended onto an accredited classified network. Coding assistants built on the same platform are now used by 1,000+ engineers with measurable productivity gains. He secured the largest AI compute procurement in company history and chairs the Generative AI Council, the cross-functional body, spanning legal, the CIO’s office, and program leadership, that sets the standards for what AI reaches mission use. Before this role, Sloan spent 14 years with the Army and a major defense agency, leading deep reinforcement learning research and founding a new applied AI and digital engineering center that went from concept to an accredited operational facility in six months. He also co-developed the U.S. Space Force’s original enterprise data strategy. Sloan holds an M.S. in Systems Engineering from Colorado State University and a B.S. in Mathematics from New Mexico State University, and carries an active Top Secret/SCI clearance.
Shawn's Sessions
Breaking Into Space: The AI Builder’s Opportunity
AI builders are realizing that space problems mirror the ones they already solve on Earth – massive data streams, real‑time decisions, autonomy, and complex multi‑agent systems. As the industry shifts toward smaller, more agile players, technology‑first companies have new openings to bring existing tools directly into space missions. This roundtable outlines how AI developers can translate their capabilities into practical, mission‑relevant applications and plug into emerging commercial and government pathways built for rapid delivery. The discussion highlights clear entry points, overlooked opportunities, and the mindset that helps founders see space as an accessible, fast‑moving market ready for their technology.
Ric Smith is President of Products and Technology at Okta, where he leads the company’s global product, engineering, and technology strategy. Prior to joining Okta, Ric served as President of Product, Technology, and Operations at SentinelOne, where he helped scale the company’s AI-powered cybersecurity platform and drive strategic partnerships. He brings over two decades of senior leadership experience from roles at Oracle and Medallia, and holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Arizona and an MBA from the Wharton School.
Ric's Sessions
The Agent Security Problem Nobody Is Talking About
Agentic AI is powerful, but it was never built to be secure. Now, enterprises trying to harness that are learning to rebuild the basic elements of cybersecurity from scratch. 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 the architectural decisions that really matter when deploying agentic AI.
Boris is the Co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Robotics, an SF-based company focused on enabling fully autonomous heavy machinery to drive improvements in the cost, schedule, safety, and predictability of projects. Before that, Boris was an executive at Waymo leading the autonomous trucking application and key core technologies in the push to launch autonomous cars to the public. Fully driverless cars in the Waymo One ride-hailing network have driven over 100M driverless miles at super-human levels of safety. Prior to this, Boris led a consumer robotics company, Anki, as they released innovative consumer entertainment products globally. Boris holds a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University.
Boris's Sessions
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 startups die. Founders might have the right team and tech, but they fail to understand what it takes to bring a prototype into production and eventually scale to higher, profitable volumes.
This session brings together founders who have crossed that gap in space hardware, humanoid robotics, and autonomous systems. They’ll share what they got wrong, what they’d do earlier, and what the prototype-to-production journey looks like when supply chains and manufacturing realities replace lab conditions.
TaskRabbit founder Leah Solivan is a technology entrepreneur, investor, and board leader who has spent more than two decades building and scaling products that improve how people live and work. She is the founder and managing director of Precedent.vc, an early-stage venture capital fund backing category-defining technology companies, and continues to serve as a general partner at Fuel Capital, where she has invested across consumer technology, marketplaces, retail, education, and hardware. Leah founded TaskRabbit in 2008, pioneering one of the first large-scale on-demand marketplaces and helping shape the modern gig economy. As CEO for eight years, she scaled the company internationally across 44 cities, raised more than $50 million in venture capital, and ultimately led the company through its successful acquisition by IKEA in 2017. Before founding TaskRabbit, Leah spent seven years as a software engineer at IBM working on products, including Lotus Notes and Domino. She currently serves on the boards of PetMeds and the San Francisco Ballet, and previously served as chair of the YPO Pacific US Region. A proud Latina leader, Leah is a passionate advocate for diversity, entrepreneurship, and the future of work.
Leah's Sessions
The Startup Battlefield — Energy and Manufacturing
Meet the startups rethinking how we power, build and manufacture the physical world, as founders pitch expert judges for a place in the Startup Battlefield Finals and a shot at $100,000.
Brandon Sorbom co-founded Commonwealth Fusion Systems with the goal of commercializing fusion energy in time to combat climate change. As Chief Science Officer, he leads the scientific direction and R&D efforts of the company. In addition, he leads the company’s efforts to advance the design of Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ commercial fusion power plant, ARC. Sorbom is mission-driven to fight climate change, and believes that commercial fusion power can be a critical solution. He studied fusion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) because of its massive potential as a limitless clean energy source. While working on his PhD there, Sorbom was the lead author of the paper that proposed the original design for ARC that inspired the founding of Commonwealth Fusion Systems in 2018. A regular scientific presenter and academic speaker, Sorbom earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Engineering Physics from Loyola Marymount University and a PhD in Nuclear Science and Engineering from MIT. He was also named a “35 Under 35” Honoree from MIT Technology Review.
Brandon's Sessions
Bringing Fusion to the Grid
For decades, fusion has been the energy technology of the future. Now, advances in science, engineering, and private investment are bringing commercial fusion closer to reality. In this session, leaders from Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Helion discuss the breakthroughs driving the industry forward, the challenges that remain, and what it will take to bring fusion power to the grid at scale.
Brian Sparkes is Head of Strategic Ventures & Activation at STAK Ventures, and CEO of Silicon Valley Venture, Corp. Silicon Valley Venture is a Global GTM-Venture Partner — helping startups, executives, and fund managers build trust, foster connection, and drive collaboration in their markets for Access, Alignment, and Acceleration. A third-generation Silicon Valley entrepreneur with more than a decade in the startup ecosystem, Brian works with over 1,400 startups annually, and has coached roughly 1,000 international founders. He is the architect of the Go-To-Community and Give-to-Market frameworks, which reframe growth as a function of relationships rather than transactions — built on a simple conviction: the best communicator wins, and community comes first. Brian serves as Oakland Chapter Director for Startup Grind and as an Ambassador for Transform, and has led government-backed delegations from South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Italy through the Valley. Known across the ecosystem as a super connector, he brings a deep investor network to every engagement — the connective tissue behind the capital introductions, LP relationships, and investor programming he builds for his clients. That network was built over years on both sides of the table, including as Chairman of the Opal Group and Head of Communications at Bay Angels. He hosts the Silicon Valley Impact podcast, is a sought-after conference emcee and moderator, and has spoken at Stanford Law School.
Brian's Sessions
VC Insights for Founders: How to raise your first VC round
Securing a first institutional check is a grueling rite of passage for high-growth founders. Itamar Novick from Recursive Ventures and Brian Sparkes of Silicon Valley Venture Corp share a blunt look at navigating the venture ecosystem. Learn exactly when to initiate fundraising, how to shape an authentic narrative that resonates with investors, and strategies to build momentum. Get the practical insights needed to successfully move from a first meeting to a closed round.
Zuzanna Stamirowska is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Pathway, the AI lab building the architecture and models to unlock the next stage of AI by directly changing its foundations. Zuzanna was named one of “100 geniuses who will change the world” by Le Point. She holds a PhD in complex systems and has published research on emergent behavior in dynamic networks. Her work has been featured in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As CEO, Stamirowska leads Pathway with a systems-thinking approach, drawing on her background in algorithmic game theory and interdisciplinary modeling. Under her leadership, Pathway has built AI architectures and models that autonomously and continually reason, learn, and evolve. The paper introducing its BDH architecture was among 2025’s most popular papers and The Wall Street Journal predicts that Pathway, along with Yann LeCun, Fei-Fei Li, and Ilya Sutskever will expand AI beyond Language Models in 2026.
Zuzanna's Sessions
The Real Tokenmaxxing: 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.
Robby Stein is Vice President of Product, Google Search, working on the development of generative AI products and experiences that help people search and access information effortlessly. Robby started his career at Google in 2007, where he worked on new product launches for Gmail and ads. Today, Robby has over 17 years of experience as a product leader and entrepreneur, and several products Robby and his teams have built are now among the most widely used in the world. Before rejoining Google in 2024, he was the Head of Product at Artifact, an AI-powered newsfeed. Robby also led consumer products at Instagram for 5 years — where he built and scaled the products and teams around Stories, Feed, Direct Messaging, and Reels. Prior to these, Robby was the co-founder and CEO of Stamped, a social recommendations startup acquired by Yahoo in 2011.
Robby's Sessions
From MVP to Billions of Users: How Product Decisions Must Change at Scale
The instincts that win when building your first minimum viable product can break you at a 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.
Sydney Sykes is the Global Head of VC Partnerships at NVIDIA, where she leads the company’s engagement with the venture capital ecosystem and connects high-potential startups with the right teams and resources. Before NVIDIA, Sydney spent the past decade in and around venture. She started her career as NEA’s first analyst, is a graduate of Harvard College, and came to Lightspeed Venture Partners as a scout while finishing her MBA at Stanford before joining full time as an early stage investing Partner. She co-founded and co-led BLCK VC, a nonprofit focused on increasing Black representation in venture capital.
Sydney's Sessions
The Open vs. Closed AI Debate Is Just Getting Started
Open models are closing the performance gap, while proprietary frontier models continue to push the limits of what AI can do. For founders, choosing a side or deciding not to is one of the most consequential decisions they’ll make. NVIDIA’s Nader Khalil, Director of Developer Tech, and Sydney Sykes, Global Head of VC Partnerships, debate the tradeoffs between open and closed AI, including cost, control, infrastructure, differentiation, and whether either path offers a lasting competitive advantage.
Prior to joining Databricks, Arsalan was an associate principal at McKinsey and Company, where he advised enterprises, vendors, and the public sector on a broad spectrum of strategic topics, including next-generation IT, cloud computing, and big initiatives, as well as general IT and corporate strategy. Arsalan received a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley in the area of networking and distributed systems and a bachelor’s in engineering from the University of Virginia.
Arsalan's Sessions
The Enterprise Isn't Broken. Your Assumptions About It Are.
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.
Mikell Taylor has spent more than two decades making useful robots – from a robotic senior prom date to autonomous underwater vehicles to cutting-edge industrial robotic systems. She currently leads robotics strategy for General Motors’ Autonomous Robotics Center; previously, at Amazon Robotics, she led the team that developed Proteus, Amazon’s first AMR. She is passionate about building robots that are practical, reliable, and good partners for the people that work with and around them. Mikell was recognized as a top technology innovator in the 2026 MassLive 25, the International Federation of Robotics 2026 Women in Robotics list, and the 2023 Boston Globe Tech Power Players 50. She holds a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Olin College, where she was a member of the first class of graduates.
Mikell's Sessions
Building AI Systems When Failure Is Not an Option
When AI enters the physical world, the consequences of failure change. A mistake could lead to a grounded aircraft, a vehicle crash, or a compromised mission. In this session, leaders who are building autonomous vehicles, defense technologies, and industrial systems will talk about one of the toughest questions that every hard tech founder must face: How do you know when your system is ready to be safely deployed?
We’ll dig into how founders can create a safety culture, test and validate AI, navigate regulatory hurdles, and build companies that can earn trust when the stakes are high.
Janelle Teng Wade is a partner at Bessemer where she focuses primarily on early-stage investments in AI/ML apps, data infrastructure, developer platforms, and defense tech. She specializes in applied AI and is passionate about supporting highly technical teams and founders from research backgrounds. Currently, Janelle serves as a board director or observer for Claroty, Coactive, Moonvalley, Render, TurbineOne, and Virtru. Janelle developed many of Bessemer’s AI infrastructure, data tooling, and defense tech frameworks. Additionally, she is a co-author of Bessemer’s annual State of the Cloud Report and Bessemer Growth’s Scaling to $100MM Series. Before joining Bessemer, Janelle was a product manager at SalesforceIQ (formerly RelateIQ) where she led mobile development for Salesforce Inbox and was one of the inventors of Einstein Email Insights. She began her career as a business analyst at McKinsey and Company. A science enthusiast at heart, Janelle studied human biology and economics at Stanford University, where she graduated with academic distinction and departmental honors. She also earned an MBA at Harvard Business School. Outside of work, you can find Janelle skiing, hiking, or writing her Substack.
Janelle's Sessions
The Series A in 2027
Series A is getting harder, with VCs growing more demanding. For founders planning to raise in the next one to two 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.
The Startup Battlefield — Enterprise & Security
Meet the startups building the next generation of enterprise technology and cybersecurity, as founders pitch expert judges for a place in the Startup Battlefield Finals and a shot at $100,000.
Bill Thayer leads Bloom Energy’s data center business, working at the intersection of energy infrastructure, power resilience, and the growing demands of AI-driven computing. With more than four decades of leadership experience, he has built and scaled businesses across the energy, technology, and critical infrastructure sectors. A former U.S. Navy officer, Bill held senior leadership roles at APC by Schneider Electric before joining Bloom Energy in 2005, where he helped guide the company’s growth from pre-revenue startup to public company. After serving in executive and advisory roles across the clean energy ecosystem, he rejoined Bloom in 2024 to help shape the company’s strategy for data centers and other mission-critical applications. Bill holds a bachelor’s degree from the United States Naval Academy and an MBA from the University of Rhode Island.
Bill's Sessions
Where the AI Infrastructure Boom Is Creating Winners
The race to build AI infrastructure is creating new markets across power, data centers, and the systems that support them, but the benefits will not be distributed equally. Leaders across energy, infrastructure, and market intelligence examine which constraints are creating durable business opportunities, where new categories are beginning to emerge, and what founders can build as the AI economy moves from software into the physical world.
Atli Thorkelsson is the VP of Talent Network at Redpoint Ventures, where he advises founders on building outperforming teams and connects them top executive candidates and advisors. He previously worked at SPMB Executive Search, holds dual degrees from UC Berkeley, and grew up in the Bay Area and Iceland.
Atli's Sessions
Competing for AI Talent: Pay, Equity, and Retention
The growth of AI startups has made hiring and retention more difficult for every tech company. From competing for AI talent to navigating secondary sales, founders are rethinking the human infrastructure of their startups. As 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 market.
Rob Toews is a partner at Radical Ventures and leads the firm’s SF office. He writes a regular column in Forbes about the big picture of artificial intelligence. Before becoming a VC, Rob spent many years in the world of autonomous vehicles, including leading Zoox’s strategy team and working on autonomous vehicle policy as a staffer in the Obama White House. He started his career at Bain & Company. Rob holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, a JD from Harvard Law School, and a BA from Stanford.
Rob's Sessions
What Happens When OpenAI Ships Your Roadmap
Nearly all AI founders have the same worry these days: What if OpenAI or Anthropic launch a product that competes with mine? Even strong products are at risk of becoming features of the larger players. This session explores where defensibility exists, and what founders can do if they face competition from rapidly evolving AI giants.
Linda Tong is the CEO of Webflow, the leading visual development platform for building powerful websites without writing code. Prior to her role as CEO, Linda served as president and COO at Webflow, overseeing go-to-market and general administrative functions. During her tenure, Linda has played a pivotal role in guiding the company through significant growth, serving hundreds of thousands of global customers and achieving substantial revenue milestones. Linda brings a wealth of experience and a proven track record of leadership from her executive roles at Cisco, NFL, and Google. Additionally, she currently serves as an advisor to CruxOCM and sits on the board of directors at Prezi and Hex. She earned her bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale University.
Linda's Sessions
What Happens When OpenAI Ships Your Roadmap
Nearly all AI founders have the same worry these days: What if OpenAI or Anthropic launch a product that competes with mine? Even strong products are at risk of becoming features of the larger players. This session explores where defensibility exists, and what founders can do if they face competition from rapidly evolving AI giants.
As CEO and co-founder, Michel has grown Airbyte into the leading open source data integration platform, known for its extensive connector library and flexible self-hosting. The company has raised $181 million from the likes of Accel, Benchmark, and Y Combinator, reaching a $1.5 billion valuation, and is used by over 7,000 customers (including 18% of the Fortune 500), such as Siemens, Perplexity, Monday.com, Calendly, and Invesco. With over 600 connectors and 250,000+ deployments, it powers data movement across analytics, operations, governance, and AI — supporting both structured and unstructured data in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Prior to founding Airbyte, Michel served as Director of Engineering at rideOS and led data integrations at LiveRamp, where he helped shape foundational innovations in data infrastructure and engineering. He holds a Master of Science (M.S.) in Computer Science from EPITA (École d’Ingénieurs en Informatique).
Michel's Sessions
What Happens When OpenAI Ships Your Roadmap
Nearly all AI founders have the same worry these days: What if OpenAI or Anthropic launch a product that competes with mine? Even strong products are at risk of becoming features of the larger players. This session explores where defensibility exists, and what founders can do if they face competition from rapidly evolving AI giants.
Tomasz Tunguz is the founder of Theory Ventures, investing in early-stage AI, data, and blockchain companies. Previously, Tomasz was an MD at Redpoint and a product manager at Google, managing a billion-dollar business unit on the AdSense team. As an investor, he’s worked with nine unicorns, predominantly in data and data infrastructure, including Looker, Monte Carlo, Dremio, Hex, Omni, and Mother Duck. He writes a blog at tomtunguz.com that drives millions of page visits per month, featuring his analyses of GTM strategies, earnings, and trends across private and public technology companies.
Tomasz's Sessions
The First 90 Days: How Startups Build Toward $10M ARR
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.
Raquel Urtasun is the Founder and CEO of Waabi, the leader in Physical AI. Raquel is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and co-founded the Vector Institute for AI. Over her 25 year career within AI, she has been the recipient of several high profile and prestigious awards including a Longuet-Higgins Prize (test of time award), an Everingham Prize, an NSERC EWR Steacie Award, two NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Awards, three Google Faculty Research Awards, an Amazon Faculty Research Award, two Best Paper Awards at CVPR, the leading conference in computer vision, and more. In 2026, she was named to the Inc. Female Founders List and was named a fellow of The Royal Society. In 2025, she was included on Fast Company’s AI 20 and The Observer’s Power Index. In 2024, she was named a fellow of The Royal Society of Canada. In 2023, she was awarded the Ontario Chamber of Commerce’s Emerging Tech CEO Award, Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI (2023) and the Order of Ontario, the highest civilian honor in the province. She has published more than 200 papers in AI, which have been cited more than 100,000 times, giving her an h-index of 132, and she has filed more than 150 patents in AI for self-driving. Prior to founding Waabi, Raquel was the Chief Scientist and Head of R&D at Uber ATG and a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision. Raquel received her Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science department at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2006 and did her postdoc at MIT and UC Berkeley.
Raquel's Sessions
Building AI Systems When Failure Is Not an Option
When AI enters the physical world, the consequences of failure change. A mistake could lead to a grounded aircraft, a vehicle crash, or a compromised mission. In this session, leaders who are building autonomous vehicles, defense technologies, and industrial systems will talk about one of the toughest questions that every hard tech founder must face: How do you know when your system is ready to be safely deployed?
We’ll dig into how founders can create a safety culture, test and validate AI, navigate regulatory hurdles, and build companies that can earn trust when the stakes are high.
Sandhya is a Silicon Valley veteran operator and investor who has been building with and investing in AI since 2011. She sold her first company to Cisco for $1.5bn, and was VP of Product at Skype when it was acquired by Microsoft for $8.5bn. She was a GP at Social Capital and Khosla Ventures and led the first investment into Groq, recently acquired by Nvidia for ~$20 billion. Other notable investments include FirefliesAI (Unicorn status), ForethoughtAI (acquired by Zendesk), GalileoAI (acquired by Google), and Codegen (acquired by ClickUp). Sandhya currently runs Axiom, an early-stage venture firm that brings together the best AI practitioners in-market today to invest in founders using AI to change the world tomorrow. She believes in AI for the Real World, and backs visionaries that are building insanely useful and usable products for 8 billion people around the world, not just the elite 80 million. Sandhya holds an A.B. with Honors from Harvard University and an MBA from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Sandhya's Sessions
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 how to build credibility before revenue exists so investors will cut that first check.
Eric Vishria is a general partner at Benchmark, where he focuses on early-stage infrastructure and enterprise software. Vishria brings a long and varied background as an executive in technology startups and public companies, including consumer and enterprise, and across a range of functions, including product, marketing, and operations. He led Benchmark’s investments in and holds board seats on Amplitude (IPO 2021), AcuityMD, Benchling, Cerebras Systems (IPO 2026), Commerce Layer, Confluent (IPO 2021), Contentful, Deep Cogito, Nile, Quilter, Sunday Robotics, Fireworks.ai, and Pomerium. Other exits include Bugsnag (acquired by SmartBear) and Pixie Labs (acquired by New Relic). Prior to joining Benchmark, he served as co-founder and CEO of RockMelt, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2013. At Yahoo, he served as Vice President of Digital Magazines & Verticals.
Eric's Sessions
What We Believe Now
Benchmark has backed some of the most iconic technology companies of the last three decades. For the first time on the Disrupt Stage in San Francisco, all five Benchmark partners come together to debate where the next generation of startups will come from, what founders are getting wrong, and the opportunities they believe are still hiding in plain sight.
Rahul Vohra is the Founder of Superhuman Mail, which he built into one of the most beloved productivity products of the last decade before its 2025 acquisition by Grammarly. The combined company adopted the Superhuman brand and expanded into a broader AI productivity platform, which includes Grammarly, Superhuman Docs, Superhuman Mail, and Superhuman Go. Prior to Superhuman, Rahul founded Rapportive, the first Gmail plugin to scale to millions of users. Rapportive was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012, and is now part of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Rahul is also widely known for his expertise in product strategy and entrepreneurship. His unique approach to finding product-market fit is the most widely shared First Round Review article, and has since been covered by dozens of articles, podcasts, talks and business school case studies. Rahul is also a prominent angel investor, and his funds have invested over $50M in 120+ companies and 9 unicorns, including Supabase, Mercury, Zip, Placer, ClassDojo, and Writer. He holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge.
Rahul's Sessions
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.
Elia Wallen is the founder and CEO of Engine, where he leads the company’s mission to power connection through simplified travel. He began his entrepreneurial career in 2008 with Travelers Haven, which he bootstrapped into one of the nation’s largest corporate housing companies. In 2019, Elia raised Engine’s first outside capital, setting the stage for rapid growth. Shortly after, Elia appointed a CEO to lead Travelers Haven so he could dedicate his full focus to Engine. Travelers Haven was acquired by Blueground in 2022. Today, Engine has served 30,000+ businesses and more than 1 million travelers, is cash-flow positive, and is valued at over $2 billion. Elia’s track record of building and scaling companies has earned him recognition as EY Entrepreneur of the Year and ColoradoBiz CEO of the Year.
Elia's Sessions
The Zero-to-1K 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.
Rose Wang is Chief Operating Officer of Bluesky, the open social network, where she leads strategy, operations, and growth. She was previously Head of Customer Experience at Forethought AI, the CEO and co-founder of Chirps, a food startup. She holds a BA from Harvard University and was named a 2015 Echoing Green Climate Fellow for her work in sustainable food systems.
Rose's Sessions
Can Social Start Over?
Social media is entering a new era. With a new leadership team at the helm, Bluesky is betting that openness, user choice, and new technology can reshape how online communities are built. Join CEO Toni Schneider and COO Rose Wang for a conversation about the future of social media, competing with established platforms, and what it takes to build the next generation of consumer technology.
Stephen Ward, Founder & Managing Partner at Brightmind Partners is a cybersecurity investor, operator, and advisor with more than 25 years of experience across technology and security. His career began in the U.S. Secret Service, where he gained experience in cybersecurity, physical security, and fraud, followed by leadership roles in Security Operations at JPMorgan Chase and as CISO at The Home Depot and TIAA. An operator at heart, Stephen has spent the past decade serving on public and private boards and advising startup founders on strategy, product, and business development. In 2021, he joined Insight Partners as a Managing Director to lead the firm’s cybersecurity portfolio, bringing his deep operating experience to investing in the next generation of security companies. He now brings that experience to Brightmind Partners, where he focuses on supporting founders building innovative technology and security companies. Stephen is also a U.S. Coast Guard veteran and graduate of Seton Hall University. Outside of work, he is a passionate autism advocate, inspired by his son. He believes technology can play an important role in creating greater accessibility, safety, and opportunity for neurodivergent and special needs communities.
Stephen's Sessions
Brutal Truth: 12 Critical Mistakes That Nearly Derailed My CISO Career
Stephen Ward, Managing Partner at Brightmind Partners shares his unflinchingly honest examination of the most damaging mistakes from his CISO tenure at Fortune 100 companies like Home Depot and TIAA. From conducting premature maturity assessments to shouldering impossible risk loads causing team burnout – real failures with lasting consequences. Each mistake includes candid details on professional and personal impact, plus avoidance strategies.
Jack Withinshaw is the co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Airspeeder, the world’s first electric flying car racing series. Jack leads the company’s commercial strategy, partnerships, and global growth. His background spans media, technology, and early-stage ventures, where he has built and led commercial teams across multiple markets. At Airspeeder, he is focused on turning breakthrough aerospace technology into a scalable, sustainable global sport through partnerships, events, and new commercial models.
Jack's Sessions
Yes, It’s Hard to Be a Founder: An Honest Conversation
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.
Mark is a Partner at Index Ventures, investing across all stages in cybersecurity, infrastructure, and AI. He looks to partner with technical founders who demonstrate exceptional degrees of domain expertise, hustle, and customer obsession. Since joining Index, Mark has backed and partnered closely with founders building at the frontier of AI, including Flapping Airplanes, Simile, Fireworks, Parallel, and 7AI. Prior to Index, he was a growth investor at Lightspeed, where he supported companies like Wiz, Glean, and Grafana. He studied mathematics, economics, and computer science at Harvard and before that played violin at Juilliard.
Mark's Sessions
The Startup Battlefield — Enterprise & Security
Meet the startups building the next generation of enterprise technology and cybersecurity, as founders pitch expert judges for a place in the Startup Battlefield Finals and a shot at $100,000.
Zach Yadegari is a 19-year-old entrepreneur and the founder of Cal AI, an AI-powered nutrition tracking app that lets users log their meals by simply taking a photo. His entrepreneurial journey began at age 7, when he taught himself to code. He was building and selling online ventures before he was a teenager. At 17, Zach co-founded Cal AI during his senior year of high school. In under two years, he scaled the company to 15 million users and $30 million in ARR, a trajectory that caught the attention of one of the most recognized names in health and fitness. In December 2025, Cal AI was acquired by MyFitnessPal. Before Cal AI, Zach founded Totally Science, a gaming platform that drew over 5 million users during the COVID-19 pandemic and sold for a six-figure sum at age 16. Zach is one of the youngest founders to lead a successful exit in the consumer health tech space.
Zach's Sessions
How to Create Viral Growth and Capitalize On It
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.
Tamar Yehoshua is Atlassian’s Chief Product and AI Officer, driving the company’s vision for the future of teamwork in the age of AI. She leads Atlassian’s Teamwork Collection and AI strategy, uniting product, design, and intelligent experiences to help teams work smarter, faster, and more creatively. Her goal: build AI‑native, world‑class products that set the standard for how millions of knowledge workers get things done. She most recently served as President of Product and Technology at Glean, advancing intelligent search and knowledge discovery. Previously, as Chief Product Officer at Slack, she led product, design, and research through a tenfold revenue increase, a public listing, and acquisition by Salesforce. Earlier in her career, she led product and engineering for Search, Identity, and Privacy at Google, and held leadership roles at A9.com, Amazon’s search organization.
Tamar's Sessions
So You’ve Got a Hit Product. How Does Your Company Do It Again?
Most startups stall out because they build a single great product instead of a repeatable multi-product engine. Join a venture capitalist and two founders as they reveal the precise operational playbook for capital allocation, systemizing internal innovation, and engineering a compounding “Second Act” before the core product’s growth curve flattens.
Founder of Onchain Group, a firm that designs and executes strategic transactions for the token economy. Previously Coinbase CorpDev, where he built Coinbase Ventures to the most active investor by deal count in the digital asset space. Before that, investment partner at CoinFund.
Ryan's Sessions
M&A Is Now an Early-Stage Strategy
The smartest founders today aren’t just building for IPOs, they’re also building for possible acquisitions 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 the possibility of such an option through product strategy and partnerships. It delves into how big-dollar startup outcomes actually happen, even for small companies.
Chris Yu is President and Co-founder of ALSO, a Palo Alto-based electric micromobility company spun out of Rivian. He leads the company with a focus on creating the world’s most capable and inspiring small electric vehicles. Prior to founding ALSO, Yu served as Vice President of Future Programs at Rivian, where he kicked off the stealth product and business development initiative that became ALSO. Before Rivian, he was the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Specialized Bicycle Components, developing deep expertise in electric micromobility, user-centric product development and global operations. At ALSO, Yu is applying the combination of deep, vertically integrated technology development with exciting, thoughtful design to extend the positive impact of electric mobility into smaller-than-car form factors worldwide.
Chris's Sessions
How to Win When You're Not Building AI
AI may dominate the world of venture, but many enduring companies won’t be those that sell AI models or agents. 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.
Kim is the CEO and co-founder of Currence, an AI-native market intelligence company for the teams that finance and build the energy system. Its coverage spans the energy and AI buildout, from the power behind data centers to grids, fuels, and frontier technologies. She was previously an investor at Energy Impact Partners, a $3bn AUM venture capital firm backed by a coalition of 40+ energy and industrial companies. Prior to EIP, Kim was an investment banker at JPMorgan and graduated from Johns Hopkins University.
Kim's Sessions
Where the AI Infrastructure Boom Is Creating Winners
The race to build AI infrastructure is creating new markets across power, data centers, and the systems that support them, but the benefits will not be distributed equally. Leaders across energy, infrastructure, and market intelligence examine which constraints are creating durable business opportunities, where new categories are beginning to emerge, and what founders can build as the AI economy moves from software into the physical world.
Victoria is a partner at QED on the early stage domestic team. She joined QED in May 2022 as a principal based in San Francisco where she has a focus on investments in early stage fintech and commerce businesses. Prior to joining QED, Victoria helped lead fintech investing at Gradient Ventures, Google’s early stage venture fund, where she worked with founders building the next generation of fintech and commerce tech in categories like insurance, e-commerce, application software transaction processing and core fintech infrastructure. Victoria started her career in tech M&A at Qatalyst Partners, advising founders in their sell-side processes on more than $20 billion in M&A transactions. Victoria received her B.A. and M.S. in economics and engineering at Stanford University. Prior to college, Victoria was born and raised in Nanjing, China, and continues to draw inspiration from the boom in commerce innovation in Asia.
Victoria's Sessions
AI, Trust & Verification in Financial Services
As AI moves beyond generating content and begins taking action, financial companies are rethinking trust, oversight, and security. Panelists explore how AI agents are changing financial workflows, why transparency and human judgment still matter, and how companies are approaching privacy, fraud prevention, and identity verification in an AI-powered world.
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