TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 is built around one question for founders: How do you build an enduring company in the AI era? For investors, it’s the opposite: How do you find that company before someone else does?

At Disrupt, the volume and competition are the point for investors, not a drawback. Year after year, investors who’ve explored the Expo Halls, met founders, and learned from peers at panels and Side Events have proven why you need to be on the ground to get ahead of the curve.

Consider that every founder pitching during the Startup Battlefield competition does so in front of a packed room of VCs. Why? Because they know their next cohort could be sitting right there. All it takes is making the trip to San Francisco this October 13-15.

This guide is for the investors who recognize that three days spent at Moscone West are well worth it and who plan to walk away with the insights and prospects that yield returns.  

And speaking of returns, we have up to $300 in savings with our current ticket tiers, which end Friday, August 21 at 11:59 p.m. PT, so act swiftly to get an even greater ROI on Disrupt.

Let’s dive in!

How Disrupt works for different investors 

Disrupt features numerous tracks, depending on the check sizes you’re able to write and the stage of startup you specialize in.

Angel, pre-seed, scout

If you’re coming to build out your portfolio of early bets and get in on rounds before they’re priced, prioritize the Startup Battlefield 200 semifinalist pitches, the Builders Stage, and the Expo Hall.

Seed, Series A

Disrupt will be all about volume and speed of qualified deal flow. Prioritize the founder list, our curated 1:1 meetings, and the Deal Flow Café. 

Growth, late stage

This stage is best suited for those coming to the event as much for market intelligence and strategic partnership scouting as for deal sourcing. Prioritize the Smart Money and Smart Systems Stages, as well as the exclusive StrictlyVC investor-only session.

Why Disrupt? 

More than 20,000 curated meetings take place over just three days, within dedicated environments like investor receptions and structured networking sessions. Investor-founder connections aren’t hallway luck –they’re built into Disrupt’s infrastructure.

You get direct access to 200 pitch-ready, TechCrunch-vetted startups through Startup Battlefield 200. And we’ll put an emphasis on “vetted.” Our Startup Battlefield team, working alongside TechCrunch’s incredibly discerning team of editors and writers, has done a significant amount of diligence for you already.

Past speakers have included investors like Elad Gil and Vinod Khosla, and this year’s lineup puts you in the room with the operators you’re underwriting, too. We’re talking Rivian’s RJ Scaringe, Amazon’s Panos Panay, Replit’s Amjad Masad, and Cerebras’ Andrew Feldman, just for starters.

The Disrupt crowd is your signal. With a mix of 10,000 founders, investors, and operators filling Moscone West, the companies worth knowing will get discovered by someone. This is your chance to make sure it’s you.

Startup Battlefield 200 is a sourcing engine, not just a pitch competition 

For founders, Startup Battlefield is a visibility engine and a trial by fire. For investors, it’s a filtered shortlist that the TechCrunch team has spent months narrowing down for you.

Consider that:

• 200 pre-Series A startups, handpicked by our Startup Battlefield and editorial teams and sharpened through the SB 200 program, are competing for $100,000 in equity-free funding. 
• Battlefield alumni have collectively raised over $32 billion and produced 250+ exits, which is evidence we produce fundable companies. 

Startup Battlefield is intensely competitive. Thousands of global startups apply, while just 200 make the cut and only a handful reach the finals. That funnel is doing your top-of-pipeline filtering for you before you ever take a meeting. If you’re not circling around these startups, your competitors are.

The exclusive access that an Investor Pass grants 

We have several different passes for Disrupt, and by joining the community via an Investor Pass, you get access to perks like…

The Deal Flow Café

This is a space exclusively for founders and investors, fostering impromptu run-ins with founders actively seeking capital. Grab coffee or a beverage of choice, explore opportunities, and start conversations that can turn into your next deal.

The founder list

You’ll get early access to the full list of Disrupt founders looking for connections with investors. The next addition to your portfolio can be identified before the event even begins, giving you more time to find even more opportunities.

Curated meetings

Through the Disrupt app, you can schedule 1:1 and small-group meetings with founders matching your focus areas, with AI helping match you by mutual interests instead of waiting on fate.

The investors who make the most out of Disrupt don’t leave sourcing to chance — they’ve already scanned the available resources and set up their agendas in advance.

The Disrupt programming that matters most to Investors 

Our editorially curated programming, including all three days of sessions and panels, is available here, stretching across six stages, breakout sessions, roundtables, and Side Events. Here are some of the stages that might be of interest:

The Smart Money Stage: Interested in capital markets, embedded finance, and stablecoins? Everything within the fintech realm, especially within the intersection of AI, is included.

The Smart Systems Stage: It’s all about compute, infrastructure, and energy economics. If you need to build a justification for underwriting AI infrastructure bets, this is the place to start.

The AI Stage and Real World AI Stages: Get market intelligence on where the fastest-growing startups are deploying, not just building.

The Disrupt Stage: This is where operators and CEOs set the narrative your current and future portfolio companies will be measured against.

Is Disrupt 2026 worth it? 

Disrupt’s value isn’t found in the size of the crowd, though that certainly helps. It’s in the potential, the expertise, the value of that crowd and the feedback it gives you. With so much overlapping investor attention, the companies worth knowing are getting found fast — regardless of whether you’re in the room. The cost of attending is a ticket and three days of your time. The cost of not attending is finding out about your next portfolio company from someone else’s term sheet.

Disrupt 2026 logistics for investors 

We’ve gone in depth about the benefits to you, your portfolio, and the opportunities Disrupt offers you. But there are always matters of hotels, expenses, and travel to sort out. Our Disrupt site has the bulk of these issues covered, but to tackle some common questions and pressing opportunities:

Disrupt passes are discounted until August 22, after which our next pricing tier begins. That means up to $300 discounts on tickets relative to their final prices.

For your hotel needs, we have partnerships with several stellar hotels near Moscone West. You’ll get exclusive discounts, easy access to Disrupt and anything else you might want to explore in San Francisco, and yes, you’ll get points for your accommodations.

If you’re bringing a large cohort or are interested in having a company in your portfolio take part in our Expo Hall to get wider visibility, check out our bulk ticket options here and our Exhibit Table options here.

For all other questions, you can explore our full Disrupt page to find more specific FAQs, and we hope to see you in San Francisco this year!

Adit Singh was a partner at Foundation Capital when he helped source and co-lead the first funding round into then-obscure chip startup Cerebras.

By the time Cerebras held its blockbuster IPO in May, Foundation Capital held a roughly 7% stake, making it the third-largest shareholder in the company, which now trades at a valuation of nearly $50 billion.

Singh now has a new VC firm to call home: On Thursday, he said he’s now joined the 57-year-old Mayfield as an infrastructure partner.

At Mayfield, Singh will invest in hardware, infrastructure software, cybersecurity, and physical AI. He says it was the firm’s strength in semiconductors that drew him to the role.

“If you look at Mayfield’s semiconductor portfolio, it’s probably the best in the market right now,” Singh told TechCrunch, pointing to Mayfield’s investments in Upscale AI, which was recently valued at $2 billion, and Lumilens, which just raised $700 million at a $5.5 billion valuation.

“I’m a chip designer by training,” Singh said. “My secret sauce is being able to look at any workload and see how it works from the application all the way down to the transistor.”

He credits his background in electrical engineering to helping him recognize the potential in Cerebras 10 years ago. However, Singh didn’t stick around as an investor at Foundation. In 2017, he co-founded Neotribe Ventures, and after spending four years leading the firm, he joined an early-stage firm, Cota Capital.

Singh says he decided to join Mayfield in large part because the size of seed infrastructure deals has ballooned in recent years. While smaller funds often get priced out of mega-seed deals, Mayfield’s $3 billion in assets under management allows it to write seed checks of up to $20 million.

Mayfield Managing Partner Navin Chaddha told TechCrunch that despite knowing Singh for 15 years and sitting on three startup boards together — including Upscale AI and unicorn AI startup Velaura AI — it still took some time to convince him to join the firm.

“We have been talking for a long time, and the time stars aligned,” Chaddha said.

Corporate expense management platform Ramp is hot on the heels of Stripe in setting up toll houses for AI inference.

Ramp on Wednesday evening launched its own AI model routing service, dubbed Router, that lets users and companies use and switch between various large language models through an API. The company says it has been using the router it built for its own AI usage needs over the past three years.

The service is only available in the United States. It’s free to use for the remainder of 2026 (users will still have to pay for AI model inference costs), and it comes with a $26 credit launch offer. The company did not say how much the service will cost next year.

In its function, Router is pretty similar to how OpenRouter operates, though the latter offers many more AI model options than Ramp’s current offerings.

Router offers access to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Moonshot, Minimax, Nvidia, xAI, and Z.ai. It also provides several “strategies” to help its customers route AI requests to models based on their preferences. For example, one lets users set a preference for model providers’ flex usage tiers, while another lets Router choose which model to route queries to based on up to three user-specified benchmarks. Users can also choose to route only difficult problems to expensive models or test models easily without having to switch.

Users get a dashboard, too, that lets them see token spend, cost, latency, fallback attempts, and other details.

Notably, Router has an opt-out data retention policy: it will record model inputs, outputs and tool calls for one year by default, though the company says it will remove “personally identifiable information before using that content to improve the product.”

For Ramp, entering the model routing business offers a two-pronged opportunity: it gets to tap the booming AI inference market, and also offer its existing clients a model routing service that fits in neatly with its existing products, which includes AI token usage monitoring and token spend management.

And, if Router proves as attractive of a model testing arena as OpenRouter has, Ramp may also be able to build long-standing relationships with AI labs and inference providers worldwide. That could help Ramp, which raised $750 million at a $44 billion valuation in June, gain new customers and a new point of entry for selling its expense management products.