TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 is seven days away, bringing 10,000+ founders, investors, operators, and tech leaders to Moscone West in San Francisco from October 13-15 for three days of conversations, connections, and ideas shaping what comes next. 

Included in your Disrupt pass, which you can currently save $100 on, plus 50% off a second, you’ll have the opportunity to take part in a series of interactive, deep-dive roundtables, where you’ll join founders, investors, operators, and industry experts tackling the same challenges you are. Bring your questions, share your experience, and get practical perspectives on everything from fundraising and AI to hiring, enterprise software, physical AI, and scaling a company.

Don’t miss the chance to spark meaningful connections in roundtables and throughout the event. Register now to save up to $100 on your pass and get a second pass at 50% off.

Explore the full roundtable agenda lineup

This year’s sessions run across two dedicated roundtable spaces throughout Disrupt. Here’s the full lineup currently on the agenda. Explore the Disrupt agenda to learn more about all the sessions.

Arm Wrestling Your Data: The Physical AI Challenge

Radha Basu, Founder and CEO, iMerit

Physical AI needs more than bigger models. Basu explores the data challenges behind robotics and autonomous systems, including edge cases, multimodal data, and building pipelines that can operate reliably in the real world.

Is SaaS Dead? AI Is Exposing What Enterprise Software Got Wrong

Rajeev Singh, CEO, Smartsheet

AI isn’t necessarily replacing SaaS — it’s exposing the fragmentation underneath it. Rajeev Singh explores why orchestration, organizational context, and intelligence across workflows could define the next generation of enterprise software.

Can AI Take You Public? The New Playbook for IPO-Ready Finance

Eléonore Crespo, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Pigment; and Sofia Fatakhova, Senior Vice President, Finance and Capital Markets, Chime

IPO readiness starts earlier than it used to. Learn how AI-enabled finance teams can automate, document, and build the financial discipline needed well before a company files to go public.

Specialty Post-Training Data: Powering the Next Wave of AI

Dani London, Investor, Base10 Partners

As models improve, specialized data is becoming an increasingly important differentiator. Explore where valuable datasets come from, which applications need them most, and the businesses emerging around this new layer of the AI stack.

Join these sessions and more at Disrupt. Register now to save up to $100 on your pass and get a second pass at 50% off.

AI’s Next Frontier: Modernizing Legacy Industries

Rob Biederman, Managing Partner, Asymmetric Capital Partners

Some of AI’s biggest opportunities may lie outside traditional tech. Biederman explores where outdated workflows and underserved industries are creating room for a new generation of startups.

The Science of Powerful Introductions: How to Be Remembered in an AI world

Cal Amir, Keynote Speaker and Founder, Introduction Lab

Your first minute with an investor, customer, or potential hire matters. Learn what makes an introduction memorable, which common approaches fall flat, and how to stand out without immediately launching into a pitch.

Atoms vs. bits: Physical AI for the Physical World

Jackson Feder, VP, Investment, MetaProp

AI is moving from digital workflows into construction, property, infrastructure, and energy. Explore where physical AI creates opportunities — and why building for the physical world requires a different approach from traditional software.

Beyond the Demo: Building Physical AI That Actually Works

Logan Farrell, Co-founder and CTO, Rugged Robotics; and Austin Yount, Partner, Brick & Mortar Ventures

A great robotics demo isn’t the same as a useful product. This conversation gets into reliability, workflow integration, trust, ROI, and what physical AI needs to deliver before customers adopt it at scale.

Beyond Inventory: The Commerce AI Playbook for the Intent Era

Srishti Chaudhary, Senior Manager, Product, Walmart eCommerce

Commerce is moving from understanding search terms to understanding intent. Explore what agentic shopping means for personalization, transactions, LLMs, and ultimately who owns the relationship with the customer.

The Quantum Revolution: What Investors Need to Know

Speaker details to be announced

Quantum computing is getting closer to commercial relevance. This session gives investors a practical grounding in the technology, emerging opportunities, and the milestones that matter when separating genuine progress from hype.

Healthcare Took 40 Years to Adopt EHRs, Then Adopted Generative AI in Three. What Comes Next?

Brian Butler, Partner, Questa Capital

Healthcare’s adoption of generative AI has moved unusually fast. Butler explores why, what barriers remain, and where founders can build durable value as healthcare organizations rethink the way they buy technology.

Beyond the Term Sheet: How to Architect a Great Fundraise

Alex Li, Partner, MVP Ventures

A fundraise is more than a pitch. Learn how to choose the right investors, secure introductions, manage a competitive process, negotiate terms, and build a cap table that helps rather than hinders future growth.

From Pilot to Production at Scale: Provable, Trusted Agentic AI for the Enterprise

Dr. Maha Achour, Co-founder and CEO, Kodamai; and Pankaj Kedia, Founder and Managing Partner, 2468 Ventures

Why do so many enterprise AI projects stay stuck in pilot mode? Explore what needs to change to move agentic systems into trusted, verifiable, scaled production environments.

Brutal Truth: 12 Critical Mistakes That Nearly Derailed My CISO Career

Stephen Ward, Founder and Managing Partner, Brightmind Partners

Ward shares lessons from mistakes made during his CISO career, from taking on unsustainable risk to approaching organizational maturity too early — and what other leaders can do differently.

What Comes After ChatGPT? AI for the Physical World

Jack Hidary, CEO, SandboxAQ; and Stacie Calad-Thomson, Global BD Lead, Life Science Labs and Manufacturing, Nvidia

The next wave of AI won’t just generate text. Explore AI grounded in physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics — and the opportunities opening across healthcare, materials, energy, finance, and industrial systems.

The Rise of SoCal Hard Tech: Why VCs and Founders Are Gravitating to Gundo

Kevin Hawkins, Head of Partnership Development and Media Distribution, New York Stock Exchange; with Drew Boyles, El Segundo City Councilmember

Sponsored by New York Stock Exchange

Why has El Segundo become such a magnet for space, defense, and hard tech startups? Hear what’s attracting founders, capital, and talent — and how a city can create an environment where hard tech companies can thrive.

The Founder Playbook

Cassie Kozyrkov, Founder, Kozyr and former Chief Decision Scientist, Google

Sponsored by Signify Business Cash World Elite Mastercard by Wells Fargo

Bring a real business challenge. Kozyrkov leads an interactive discussion about making better founder decisions, where AI can help, and where human judgment remains essential.

“My Company Is a Rocket Ship.” What Comes After the Landing?

Vishal Kumar and Tushar Kumar, Private Wealth Advisors and Co-founders, Twin Peaks Wealth Advisors

Sponsored by Twin Peaks Wealth Advisors

An IPO, acquisition, or tender offer creates a new set of decisions. Explore tax, concentration risk, lockups, liquidity, and how founders can protect what they have spent years building.

When Frontier Models Are Not Enough: How to Make AI Capable of Breakthrough Scientific Discoveries

Piotr Byrski, CEO and Co-founder, Molecule.one

What happens when AI can test thousands of scientific ideas instead of a handful? Byrski explores autonomous experimentation, AI-driven discovery, and how these systems could change the pace of scientific progress.

How to Land Your First Institutional Check (From the Person Who Writes Them)

Aditi Maliwal, General Partner, Upfront Ventures

Get inside the decision-making process behind an early institutional investment. Learn which founder signals matter before traction exists, how to tell your story, and what can kill an investment before it gets started.

Grow Like a Founder, Think Like a CFO: Balancing Growth and the P&L

Marshall Egger, Founder and COO, Spacemilk

Growth can look good while quietly draining cash. Bring your own questions and explore forecasting, inventory, retail terms, cash flow, and how to grow without losing sight of the P&L.

Agentic AI in the Enterprise: Separating Signal From Noise for GTM and Ops Leaders

Ankita Mehta, Senior Product Manager, Databricks

Everyone wants agents, but not every workflow needs one. Learn where companies are seeing measurable value, why pilots stall, and how to evaluate agentic AI before committing infrastructure and teams to it.

Open-Weight Models and the New AI Stack

Mercedes Bent and Vanessa Larco, Co-founders and Managing Partners, Premise

Open-weight models are creating more choice for AI builders. Explore the trade-offs around cost, security, performance, control, and where open models may offer startups a genuine advantage.

The $100 Billion Entry Fee: Can Anyone Still Compete in AI?

Harrison Rolfes, Senior Research Analyst, Private Company Coverage, PitchBook

With extraordinary amounts of capital flowing into frontier AI, is the market already locked up? Dig into where defensibility really sits and what capital concentration means for founders and investors outside the biggest labs.

VC Insights for Founders: How to Raise Your First VC Round

Itamar Novick, Founder and General Partner, Recursive Ventures; and Brian Sparkes, CEO, Silicon Valley Venture Corp.

Sponsored by Silicon Valley Venture

Learn when to start raising, how to build an investor narrative, generate momentum, and navigate the journey from an initial VC conversation to a closed institutional round.

FDE: The Best Commercial Motion in Enterprise Software You’ve Never Heard Of

Kevin Bai, Member of Technical Staff, Anthropic

Forward-deployed engineers sit somewhere between software engineering, product, and consulting. Learn when startups need them, where they fit commercially, and why the model can improve enterprise retention and expansion.

Doing More With Less: Raising Venture Capital in an AI-First World

Neil Sequeira, Founder and Partner, Defy.vc

More capital isn’t always better. Sequeira explores overfunding, dilution, investor alignment, and how founders can raise enough to execute without creating expectations or incentives that hurt the business later.

I Built Before the Internet. AI Is Different.

James Joaquin, Co-founder and Managing Director, Obvious Ventures

Joaquin has built through multiple technology cycles. Hear why he sees AI as fundamentally different, where its real-world impact is already emerging, and how founders can operate when innovation is moving faster than conventional planning cycles.

Autonomous Intelligence: Investing in the Companies Redefining Work

Parul Singh, Investment Partner, 645 Ventures

Agents are moving from helping people complete work to completing entire workflows themselves. Explore which categories could benefit most and where founders and investors see the biggest opportunities emerging.

AI-Native Won’t Work for the Enterprise

Naren Krishna, CEO and Co-founder, Balerion; and Travis Skelly, Partner, Pruven Capital

Fortune 500 companies want AI without ripping out the systems their businesses depend on. Explore why intelligent agent layers could be a bigger near-term opportunity than replacing enterprise systems of record.

Berkeley Connect: Experience the World’s #1 Startup Ecosystem

Maryanne Alhallak, Co-founder and CEO, Lumeria; Anthea Guo, Co-founder and CTO, Lumeria; and Keith McAleer, Chief Marketing Officer, UC Berkeley SCET

Sponsored by UC Berkeley Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (SCET)

Explore UC Berkeley’s approach to entrepreneurship, hear directly from founders emerging from its ecosystem, and learn how investors, companies, and entrepreneurs can get involved.

Join these sessions and more at Disrupt. Register now to save up to $100 on your pass and get a second pass at 50% off.

Take your seat at the Disrupt 2026 roundtables

Roundtables are where the Disrupt agenda becomes a conversation. Instead of just hearing how someone else approached a problem, you can ask the questions that matter to your company, compare experiences with the people around the table, and leave with ideas you can put to work.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 takes place October 13-15 at Moscone West in San Francisco. It’s the startup epicenter where 10,000+ tech leaders come together for insights designed to push the needle and spark meaningful connections.

Register before doors open to save up to $100 on your pass and get 50% off a second ticket for a co-founder, partner, colleague, or peer.

Google on Tuesday launched a new site that lets anyone verify whether a piece of media, be it an image, a video or an audio clip, is generated using AI.

The company had made this tool available to select journalists, media professionals and researchers for testing at Google I/O last year, and is now opening up access to the tool to everyone.

The site supports JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, WEBP, AVIF, HEIC, HEIF, TIFF, TIF, and GIF formats for images; MP4, MOV, and WEBM for videos; and WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, AAC, and M4A for audio.

Google is using SynthID, which it introduced in 2023, to identify whether media is AI-generated. The company’s Nano Banana, Veo and Lyria models, as well as tools with generation capabilities, like Gemini, Flow, ProducerAI and Vids, all use SynthID to watermark any media they generate.

OpenAI, NVIDIA and Kakao also support SynthID, and OpenAI maintains its own site for checking content. Apple is said to be adding support soon, too.

Google has baked SynthID verification into the Gemini app and Google Chrome. The company said people currently make 1 million requests to verify content every day.

Microsoft and Meta have their own standards for watermarking and verifying content. However, these tools are not infallible, often failing to identify content created by their makers’ models.

Ring, the Amazon-owned video doorbell maker, is entering a new market: smart locks.

Ring’s new device isn’t exactly a copy-and-paste of the other locks already on the market, however, as it tackles a big issue that often deters people from embracing this kind of smart home equipment: the fear of the battery dying and getting locked out.

To address this, Ring’s smart lock has added a power dial. If the battery on the device runs out, the homeowner can just turn the dial a few times to power the lock back up and enter their home.

Ring’s founder Jamie Siminoff said the idea to rethink smart locks came to him when he was looking to buy a lock for a vacation home. “I struggled because this particular house will get used very little, and I know the freaking battery will die on it,” he said.

He also worried that family or friends visiting the house might get stuck outside, as the door isn’t connected to a power source, and any smart lock would be dependent on the battery.

“I’m like, well, why don’t we just fix this,” he said. Using AI, he started working on a project to create a lock you could hand-crank just enough to power the lock to open. Once you’re in, you could then take out the rechargeable battery pack and charge it as usual.

Siminoff says the battery on Ring’s new lock will last about a year, and will alert users when it’s time to charge via the Ring app. The app also allows users to configure access for people who may need periodic access, like dog walkers or house cleaners. Eventually, the company wants to allow third-party app makers to design specialized software for the lock so it can be used in other ways — for example, Airbnb owners who may need to regularly change codes.

The Ring lock also offers four different ways to get in, so you won’t have to worry about forgetting a code. You can either use the device’s fingerprint reader, a backlit touchscreen keypad, the Ring app, or Alexa.

Siminoff admitted that the lock may be comparable to others on the market, but he thinks the fact that it addresses the anxiety over being locked out will be its biggest selling point.

“I do think the power thing is a huge limiter of why people are not buying, and why they’re not putting them in, and why they’re worried about them,” he said.

It’s also true that when smart locks do offer some sort of backup method, they usually involve something cumbersome and less secure — like hiding a physical key somewhere on the property.

Ring’s smart lock will fit a standard single-cylinder deadbolt, and will be available to purchase in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2027, after it receives FCC authorization. It will come in three finishes: black, silver, or brass.

Alongside the lock, Ring also introduced four new 4K cameras: the Outdoor Cam 4K Plus, Spotlight Cam 4K Plus, Floodlight Cam 4K Plus, and a pan-tilt Indoor Cam 4K.