TechCrunch Disrupt is where the tech community comes together to build, debate, and connect. And during Disrupt Week, that conversation doesn’t stop when the doors to Moscone West close.

Our Side Events program brings founders, investors, operators, and tech leaders together across San Francisco for everything from intimate roundtables and founder gatherings to happy hours, dinners, workshops, and community meetups.

Whether you’re looking to make a few new connections, find your next collaborator, go deep on a specific industry, or just get out of conference mode for a minute, there’s a lot happening beyond the show floor.

Explore the 2026 Side Events, and find your people.

More Side Events

Pursuit of Happiness: Revolutionary Demonstration of Whitney Electrolarynx by Uhura Bionics

October 7 | 6:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. PT

Experience a live demonstration of voice-restoration technology as Uhura Bionics co-founder Konrad Zieliński showcases the Whitney Electrolarynx for a U.S. audience. The event explores how technology can help people reclaim their voices and agency following cancer treatment.
Hosted by: Uhura Bionics
RSVP

Find the 10x Opportunity Hiding in Your Product

October 10 | 9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. PT

Learn how first-principles thinking can uncover overlooked customer needs, strengthen product-market fit, and reveal opportunities for significant growth. The session will use a real-world case study to explore how founders and product teams can identify new opportunities within products they already have.
Hosted by: PrincipiumX
RSVP

Long Lead Time: A Hardware Happy Hour

October 12 | 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. PT

Connect with founders, engineers, and operators building robotics, chips, rockets, and other frontier hardware. This casual, presentation-free gathering offers a chance to swap ideas, share experiences, and meet others working on the challenges of building physical technology.
Hosted by: Syntro
RSVP

Check the chronological schedule regularly as new Side Events are added weekly.

While you’re in San Francisco…

If you’re building your Disrupt Week calendar, don’t forget the main event.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 takes over Moscone West October 13-15, bringing thousands of founders, investors, operators, and tech leaders together under one roof. Come for the programming, stay for the hallway conversations, and leave with a calendar full of people you didn’t know you needed to meet.

Tickets are still available. Come be part of it.

Apple is set to launch Apple Pay in India later Tuesday with Axis Bank as its initial banking partner, TechCrunch has learned, bringing its payments service to the world’s most populous country after years on the sidelines of a market dominated by UPI.

The initial rollout will be limited, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple Pay will initially support eligible Axis Bank cards on Visa and Mastercard, but not India’s homegrown RuPay network. Acceptance will also be restricted to merchants and payment terminals that have been enabled for the service.

Unlike India’s ubiquitous Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system, which lets consumers make instant bank-to-bank payments without relying on cards, Apple Pay is card-based and requires individual issuers and payment infrastructure providers to integrate with the service. This makes a broad rollout more complex. Apple’s commercial terms have also emerged as a sticking point with some of India’s largest banks, the people said.

Apple is seeking a fee of about 20 basis points on transactions, according to the people, a significant bite out of the roughly 40 to 50 basis points of margin in the payments layer. The fee structure is broadly consistent with Apple Pay’s commercial model in other markets, the people said. HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, and SBI Card are not expected to support Apple Pay at launch as negotiations over commercial terms continue, one of the people told TechCrunch.

Apple, Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, and SBI Card did not respond to requests for comment. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Apple was preparing to launch Apple Pay in India in October, starting with Axis Bank credit cards.

Apple Pay is entering a payments market that looks markedly different from the U.S. and other card-heavy economies. India’s digital payments boom has been driven largely by UPI, the state-backed system that lets consumers move money directly between bank accounts.

UPI handles the bulk of digital payments in India, where scanning a QR code to pay directly from a bank account has become commonplace. Apple Pay, by contrast, will initially address a much smaller card payments market.

Nevertheless, Apple Pay could appeal to India’s growing base of iPhone users, who tend to be more affluent and are more likely to use premium credit cards. Those customers could make the service hard for banks to ignore, despite UPI’s dominance.

Even if Apple Pay remains a niche service, the economics could still make India meaningful for Apple. The transaction fee the iPhone maker would charge would give it another way to monetize its growing base of iPhone users in the country, the people said.

At launch, eligible Axis Bank customers will be allowed to add their credit cards to Apple’s Wallet app and use Apple Pay for online purchases as well as contactless payments at supported terminals, the people said.

An Apple Pay transaction could work at a terminal operated by an independent payments provider that has enabled the service but fail at another terminal whose acquiring bank has not, one of the people said. That could make acceptance uneven during the initial rollout, even for customers with supported cards.

The launch adds another piece to Apple’s growing business in India, where it has been expanding iPhone sales, local manufacturing and its retail footprint. Apple accounted for 28% of India’s smartphone market by value in 2025, up from 23% a year earlier, per an earlier report by Counterpoint Research.

India already accounts for about a quarter of global iPhone production, and that share could rise to 30% to 35% over the next five years, Indian English daily Business Standard reported last month, citing an Indian government official.

When Nvidia announced on Monday a new consortium of more than 100 companies dedicated to solving rogue AI agents, there was one name notably missing: OpenAI.

While OpenAI wasn’t the only big tech player that didn’t sign on — Amazon, Google, and Apple haven’t joined either — it was the most obvious missing player, especially because Anthropic is a supporter.

However, despite OpenAI’s lack of a public pledge to the consortium, which presumably means that each company will use and sell some version of the technology and contribute features back to the project, an OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company is supportive of Nvidia’s work.

The new effort, dubbed Nvidia’s Open Agent Safety Platform, is Nvidia’s attempt to spread its homegrown, and largely open source AI agent-security tech throughout the AI ecosystem as a direct response to the types of ongoing rogue AI agent incidents frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI have disclosed.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been calling rogue AIs an ordinary engineering problem that can be solved like any other tech issue. The Open Agent Safety Platform is Huang putting his money where his mouth is.

OpenAI is working with Nvidia on agent security, including on one of the key bits of software that’s part of this platform: OpenShell. OpenShell is open sourced software that creates a sandbox specifically designed to keep agents from escaping.

While it is still curious that OpenAI didn’t simply become a supporter of the initiative like its archrival Anthropic did, the fact that frontier AI lab is supporting the effort is good news.

That’s because OpenAI, in particular, could benefit from this tech, at least according to Hugging Face founder and CEO Clem Delangue (who just sold his company to Nvidia for $12.9 billion earlier this month).

“From what we know (take with a grain of salt, we need much more transparency!), if @OpenAI had been running this on their own agents that attacked us, they would have caught them before we did!” Delangue posted.

Delangue said Hugging Face has already contributed a feature to the Open Agent Safety Platform that will detect and shut down AI agents that are using websites they are allowed to visit but are doing so in unauthorized ways. For instance, this feature will act if agents are bypassing their guardrails and coordinating an attack by writing notes to one another in an open source code hosting repository.

That’s one of the ways OpenAI said its wayward swarm of agents coordinated its attack on Hugging Face.

But there’s another reason why some of these big names, including OpenAI, might not want to publicly commit to Nvidia’s efforts. To use the full system, there is a hardware component that is not open source software, remains proprietary, and can only be deployed on Nvidia’s hardware.

The Open Agent Safety Platform doesn’t just offer a sandbox. It also enforces agent behavior at a hardware layer, where agents can’t detect that they are being watched. (Some AI models and agents lie and pretend to be following the rules when they know they are being watched.)

The hardware monitoring part relies on Nvidia Sentry, a proprietary feature that runs on special Nvidia processors called BlueField-4 data processing units. Sentry continuously monitors agent behavior from these processors and can instantly shut agents down, Nvidia promises.

While a hardware solution is clearly a good idea, it means that the Open Agent Safety Platform isn’t exactly a pure open source play. It allows Nvidia to ensure that this solution always runs best on its own hardware. Indeed, Nvidia has said that, for those already running workloads on its latest hardware, implementing the Open Agent Safety Platform is an easy software update.

Still, Nvidia competitors, including Arm and Intel, have signed on as Open Agent Safety Platform supporters because the sandbox, OpenShell, can be modified to work with other chips and hardware. And Nvidia is sharing reference designs for the whole software-and-hardware idea.

All of which makes OpenAI’s absence even more noticeable.

Clearly, OpenAI sees AI safety as an opportunity for independence from its major investor Nvidia, as well as a chance to show its own leadership. That is true even though it was OpenAI’s AI agents that scared the industry with the Hugging Face incident.

For instance, the company is developing its own safeguards for its research and products and is disclosing the worst incident it discovers.Meanwhile, OpenAI has its own AI cybersecurity consortium to for sharing information, called the Defense Factory. Those that signed on to support that idea include Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, and Google — many of the names that didn’t sign on to Nvidia’s technology-oriented approach.

And, truth be told, some level of fear is good for business. OpenAI is busy crafting cybersecurity into an enterprise offering, with everything from its own cyber-oriented model, Daybreak, to a growing network of partners that enterprises can hire to implement AI security.