Get all your questions answered at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026: The full breakout session agenda revealed

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 lands at Moscone West in San Francisco on October 13-15, bringing together 10,000+ founders, investors, operators, and tech leaders for three days of ideas, connections, and conversations about what’s coming next. Register now, save up to $100 off your pass, and get a second at 50% off.

Some of the most practical conversations won’t happen on any of the industry stages. Disrupt’s breakout sessions are built to go deeper and give you the mic to ask your burning questions to the leaders. Each 50-minute session combines expert insight with audience Q&A, giving you more room to unpack a problem, challenge assumptions, and leave with ideas you can actually put to work. The room capacity is limited, and attendance is first come, first served.

This year’s lineup gets into the questions founders and operators are dealing with right now: How do you build with AI agents? Where will value accrue as AI shifts from training to inference? What does physical AI really mean? How do you run a better fundraiser? And how does AI change the way you grow companies and teams?

Get into the room, get your questions answered, and make the connections that’ll spark your next move in the ecosystem. Save up to $100 on your pass and 50% on a second.Bring a group of four-plus to save more and get more insights. If you’ve recently been laid off, get a $75 Expo+ Pass before they run out.

The complete Disrupt 2026 breakout session agenda

Get to know the sessions and tech leaders shaping the conversation on the Disrupt agenda.

What Is Physical AI, Anyway?

Susan Schofer, Partner and Chief Science Officer, SOSV HAX; and Duncan Turner, General Partner and Managing Director, SOSV HAX

Sponsored by SOSV

AI is moving beyond software and into machines that need to perceive, reason, and act in unpredictable environments. Schofer and Turner break down what actually qualifies as physical AI, why building it requires a different playbook, and what investors are looking for in companies trying to define the category.

Outnumbered Either Way: How an Engineer and an Architect Run Their Jobs on Agents

Steve Androulakis and Sachin Malhotra, Members of Technical Staff, Anthropic

What does an AI-agent workflow look like when the people using it build AI for a living? Anthropic’s Androulakis and Malhotra show how they run multiple Claude agents in parallel, delegate real engineering work, review output, recover when agents get things wrong, and make agents part of their everyday jobs.

How to build AI we can trust

Robbie Goldfarb, Co-founder, Forum AI

As AI takes on more consequential work, accuracy alone isn’t enough. Drawing on experience spanning misinformation, online safety, and work with foundation-model labs, Goldfarb explores how expert human judgment can become scalable evaluations — and what it will take to build AI systems people can actually rely on.

The Inference Economy: Why AI’s Next Trillion Dollars Won’t Look Like Its First

Hagay Lupesko, SVP, AI Cloud, Cerebras Systems; and Rudina Seseri, Founder and Managing Partner, Glasswing Ventures

As frontier models become increasingly commoditized, AI’s economics are shifting from training toward inference. This session looks at where defensibility comes from when the model itself isn’t the moat, why latency is becoming part of the product, and what those changes mean for infrastructure decisions, startup economics, and what investors will look for next.

Building Then vs Now

Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, CEO and Co-founder, Humane Intelligence; Payal Kadakia, Founder, ClassPass; Cassie Kozyrkov, Founder, Kozyr; and Holly Ransom, CEO, Emergent

Sponsored by Signify Business Cash World Elite Mastercard by Wells Fargo

The fundamentals of building a company may not have changed, but the tools certainly have. Leaders spanning AI, data, entrepreneurship, and strategy examine how founders can use AI to make better decisions and move faster — while understanding where bias, judgment, and the human side of company building still matter.

Best Practices for Running a Successful Fundraise: From Preparation to Investor Engagement

Speakers to be announced

Sponsored by Fidelity Private Shares

A successful fundraise starts long before the pitch. This interactive session takes founders through the process from both sides of the table, covering investor targeting, relationship building, outreach, maintaining momentum, cap tables, data rooms, and due diligence. Come away with practical ways to run a more organized and effective raise.

From Founder to Investor: The Next Act – What Happens After You Win?

Bruce K Lee, CEO and Founder, Keebeck Wealth Management; and Abhi Tiwari, Co-founder and General Partner, Blank Ventures

Building and funding a company requires one mindset. Becoming an investor requires another. Lee and Tiwari explore what happens when entrepreneurs move from raising capital to allocating it — and why founders may want to start thinking about their post-exit strategy long before an exit actually happens. 

Breaking Into Space: The AI Builder’s Opportunity

Dr. Brian Cameron, Interim Chief Technology Officer, The Aerospace Corporation; Bosco Lai, CEO, Little Place Labs; and Shawn Sloan, Corporate Fellow for Artificial Intelligence, The Aerospace Corporation

Sponsored by The Aerospace Corporation

Space may look like a specialist market, but many of its problems will feel familiar to AI builders: huge data streams, autonomous decisions, real-time processing, and complex agent systems. This session maps those capabilities to real space applications and shows founders where new commercial and government opportunities are opening up.

Fundraising Mistakes That Will Kill Your Round, and How to Avoid Them

Dr. Irena King, Founder and CEO, Surgicure Technologies; Dr. Richard Munassi, Accelerator Managing Director and Chief Strategy Officer, Tampa Bay Wave; Ashley Paston, Partner, General Catalyst; and Emily Zhen, Principal, HealthQuest Capital

Sponsored by Tampa Bay Wave

Great companies can still run bad fundraising processes. This session gets into the mistakes that derail rounds, from positioning and preparation to investor strategy and execution. Expect practical lessons, real examples, and a clearer framework for taking your next raise from the first pitch through to close.

Building a Growth Engine in the AI Era: Lessons from a Bootstrapped Unicorn

Patrick Burke, Managing Director, Hostinger

Sponsored by Hostinger

AI is compressing the distance between spotting an opportunity and acting on it. Using examples from Hostinger, Burke explores how startups can identify underpriced distribution channels, shorten the loop between market signals and product launches, experiment faster, and put agentic marketing workflows to work to drive growth.

Physical AI Isn’t a Model Problem. It’s an Execution Problem.

Ethan Batraski, Partner, Venrock; Ivan Poupyrev, Founder and CEO, Archetype AI; and Ian Rountree, General Partner, Cantos

The real physical AI opportunity isn’t simply understanding the world — it’s acting in it. Builders and investors explore the execution layer between perception, decision, action, and verification, and why the companies that can reliably close that loop could become some of the most durable businesses in industrial AI.

Talent as the Operating System: How High-Performance Teams Scale in the AI Era

Nomi Khedawala, Senior Technical Program Manager, Reddit

AI can change how work gets done, but companies still depend on people, trust, and execution. Khedawala explores how leaders can build stronger alignment across teams, spot breakdowns before they become bigger problems, and create systems that support accountability and sustainable high performance as organizations scale.

Go deeper at Disrupt 2026

The industry stages show you where technology and the startup market are heading. The breakout rooms give you the chance to get closer to the problems — and the people solving them.

With limited capacity and first-come, first-served access, these are sessions worth adding to your Disrupt schedule early.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 takes place October 13-15 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Register now to save up to $100 before doors open, plus get 50% off a second ticket for your co-founder, colleague, partner, or peer. Save even more with a group of four or more. Laid off? Grab your $75 Expo+ Pass before they run out.