TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 is putting some of its most practical startup conversations into breakout rooms. The event takes place October 13-15 at Moscone West in San Francisco and is expected to bring together 10,000+ founders, investors, operators, and tech leaders.
The breakout sessions are designed as 50-minute discussions with audience Q&A. Capacity is limited and attendance is first come, first served, which makes the agenda especially relevant for attendees who want direct access to operators, investors, and AI leaders.
AI moves from broad promise to working systems
A major thread across the Disrupt 2026 breakout agenda is the shift from talking about AI in general terms to examining how it is built, evaluated, and used in daily work. Several sessions focus on AI agents, trustworthy AI, inference, and the operational demands of new AI products.
In Outnumbered Either Way: How an Engineer and an Architect Run Their Jobs on Agents, Steve Androulakis and Sachin Malhotra, Members of Technical Staff at Anthropic, will show how they use multiple Claude agents in parallel. The session centers on delegation, engineering work, reviewing output, fixing mistakes, and making agents part of routine jobs.
Trust is another core topic. Robbie Goldfarb, Co-founder of Forum AI, will lead How to build AI we can trust. The session looks at why accuracy by itself is not enough as AI systems handle more consequential work, and how expert human judgment can be turned into scalable evaluations.
The agenda also looks at the economics behind AI. The Inference Economy: Why AI’s Next Trillion Dollars Won’t Look Like Its First features Hagay Lupesko, SVP, AI Cloud at Cerebras Systems, and Rudina Seseri, Founder and Managing Partner at Glasswing Ventures. The session focuses on the move from training toward inference, the role of latency, infrastructure choices, startup economics, and what investors may look for as frontier models become increasingly commoditized.
Physical AI gets a closer look
Physical AI appears in more than one breakout session, which gives attendees multiple ways to examine the category. The sessions focus on machines that need to perceive, reason, and act in unpredictable environments, as well as the execution layer required to turn perception into real-world action.
What Is Physical AI, Anyway? features Susan Schofer, Partner and Chief Science Officer at SOSV HAX, and Duncan Turner, General Partner and Managing Director at SOSV HAX. Sponsored by SOSV, the session will define what qualifies as physical AI, why the category requires a different playbook, and what investors are watching for in companies building in the space.
A second session, Physical AI Isn’t a Model Problem. It’s an Execution Problem., brings together Ethan Batraski, Partner at Venrock; Ivan Poupyrev, Founder and CEO of Archetype AI; and Ian Rountree, General Partner at Cantos. The discussion focuses on the path between perception, decision, action, and verification, and why companies that close that loop reliably may become durable industrial AI businesses.
Together, these sessions frame physical AI as more than software intelligence. The agenda treats it as a problem of machines operating in real settings, where the hard part is not only understanding the world but acting in it.
Fundraising, founder transitions, and growth remain central
Disrupt 2026 is also keeping classic startup concerns on the agenda. Fundraising appears in two separate sessions, with one focused on process and another on mistakes that can derail a round.
Best Practices for Running a Successful Fundraise: From Preparation to Investor Engagement is sponsored by Fidelity Private Shares, with speakers to be announced. The session covers investor targeting, relationship building, outreach, maintaining momentum, cap tables, data rooms, and due diligence.
Fundraising Mistakes That Will Kill Your Round, and How to Avoid Them features Dr. Irena King, Founder and CEO of Surgicure Technologies; Dr. Richard Munassi, Accelerator Managing Director and Chief Strategy Officer at Tampa Bay Wave; Ashley Paston, Partner at General Catalyst; and Emily Zhen, Principal at HealthQuest Capital. Sponsored by Tampa Bay Wave, the session examines positioning, preparation, investor strategy, execution, and the path from first pitch to close.
The agenda also addresses what comes after a founder wins. In From Founder to Invest or: The Next Act – What Happens After You Win?, Bruce K Lee, CEO and Founder of Keebeck Wealth Management, and Abhi Tiwari, Co-founder and General Partner at Blank Ventures, will discuss the shift from raising capital to allocating it, and why founders may want to think about post-exit strategy before an exit happens.
Growth in the AI era gets its own session as well. Patrick Burke, Managing Director at Hostinger, will lead Building a Growth Engine in the AI Era: Lessons from a Bootstrapped Unicorn, sponsored by Hostinger. The session uses examples from Hostinger to explore underpriced distribution channels, faster experimentation, shorter loops between market signals and product launches, and agentic marketing workflows.
Teams, space, and company building round out the agenda
The breakout program also looks beyond models and capital. It includes sessions on talent, space applications, and the changing toolkit of company building.
In Talent as the Operating System: How High-Performance Teams Scale in the AI Era, Nomi Khedawala, Senior Technical Program Manager at Reddit, will discuss alignment, trust, execution, accountability, and sustainable high performance as organizations grow. The session keeps people and operating systems in the foreground even as AI changes how work gets done.
Breaking Into Space: The AI Builder’s Opportunity features Dr. Brian Cameron, Interim Chief Technology Officer at The Aerospace Corporation; Bosco Lai, CEO of Little Place Labs; and Shawn Sloan, Corporate Fellow for Artificial Intelligence at The Aerospace Corporation. Sponsored by The Aerospace Corporation, the session maps AI capabilities such as large data streams, autonomous decisions, real-time processing, and complex agent systems to space applications and commercial and government opportunities.
Company building itself is the focus of Building Then vs Now, sponsored by Signify Business Cash World Elite Mastercard by Wells Fargo. Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, CEO and Co-founder of Humane Intelligence; Payal Kadakia, Founder of ClassPass; Cassie Kozyrkov, Founder of Kozyr; and Holly Ransom, CEO of Emergent, will examine how founders can use AI to make better decisions and move faster while still accounting for bias, judgment, and the human side of building companies.
Why these rooms matter
The industry stages at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 are positioned around where technology and the startup market are heading. The breakout rooms are built for closer discussion of the problems founders and operators are facing now.
For attendees, the practical value is in the format: 50-minute sessions, expert insight, and room for audience questions. With limited capacity and first-come, first-served access, the sessions are worth choosing early for anyone building with AI agents, exploring physical AI, preparing a fundraise, scaling a team, or looking for new markets where AI can be applied.
Registration offers include saving up to $100 on a pass, 50% off a second ticket, group savings for four or more, and a $75 Expo+ Pass for people who have recently been laid off, while supplies last.