TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 roundtables: the full lineup, and who actually gets a seat

The pitch for the roundtables is intimacy. A small table, a few dozen people stuck on the same problem as you, questions instead of slides. TechCrunch’s announcement of the full lineup sells exactly that. What it leaves out is the mechanism that decides whether any of it reaches you: the format runs on scarcity, and the ticket you already bought quietly decides whether you are even in line for a chair.

Read the lineup as a system rather than a menu and three things surface that the promotional copy never spells out. The cheapest ways into the building do not include these sessions. The chairs are few against the size of the crowd. And a share of the tables are paid placements, sitting on the same agenda as everything else.

Start with what is on offer, because the roster is genuinely strong. The topics cluster on two lines. One is physical AI: Radha Basu of iMerit on the data problem underneath robots and autonomous systems, Logan Farrell of Rugged Robotics with Austin Yount of Brick & Mortar Ventures on why a robotics demo is not a product, and SandboxAQ’s Jack Hidary with Nvidia‘s Stacie Calad-Thomson on AI grounded in physics, chemistry and biology. The other is money: Alex Li of MVP Ventures on structuring a raise, Aditi Maliwal of Upfront Ventures on landing a first institutional check, and Neil Sequeira of Defy.vc arguing that more capital is not always better. Enterprise software gets its own corner, with Smartsheet CEO Rajeev Singh asking whether SaaS is dead, Anthropic‘s Kevin Bai on forward-deployed engineers and Databricks’ Ankita Mehta on why agent pilots stall. PitchBook’s Harrison Rolfes takes the bluntest title on the list, “The $100 Billion Entry Fee: Can Anyone Still Compete in AI?”

For a founder, the most concrete thing in that list is who sits in the host chairs. Of the 31 tables TechCrunch has published, 14 have a venture investor among the hosts, from Base10 and Upfront to Obvious Ventures and 645 Ventures. A half-hour conversation at a table of strangers is not a pitch meeting, but it is the closest thing to small-room time with a partner at a fund that the event sells as part of a standard pass.

Which is where the arithmetic matters. TechCrunch’s own rules for roundtable hosts set the format at 30 minutes, up to two facilitators, no slides and a cap of 40 attendees. Thirty-one tables at 40 seats comes to roughly 1,240 chairs, before any repeat sessions, against a crowd TechCrunch puts at more than 10,000 founders, investors and operators. This year the sessions run across two dedicated roundtable spaces; last year’s 29 ran across three rooms. The announcement does not say how seats are allocated, so anyone planning a day around a specific table should check the Disrupt agenda before building a schedule on it.

Then the pass. On TechCrunch’s ticket page, the Attendee Pass ($949, rising to $1,049 at the door) lists “Access to all Industry Stages, Breakout Sessions, and Roundtable discussions,” and the Founder ($999) and Investor ($1,099) passes inherit it, as does the $399 Non-Profit Pass. The Expo+ Pass ($299) and the Student Pass ($349) do not list roundtables among their perks. Last year TechCrunch stated it plainly: every pass except Expo+ included them. That gap lands on the people with the least room in their budget. Ecosistema Startup notes a $75 Expo+ ticket for professionals laid off this year and free Expo+ passes offered through KOTRA to qualified applicants, both of which sit in the tier whose listed perks leave the tables out.

The sponsored tables are the third layer. Five of the 31 carry a sponsor line: the New York Stock Exchange on why hard-tech startups are clustering in El Segundo, with city councilmember Drew Boyles; a Wells Fargo business card program behind Cassie Kozyrkov’s founder-decisions session; Twin Peaks Wealth Advisors hosting its own table on tax, lockups and liquidity after an exit; Silicon Valley Venture on raising a first VC round; and UC Berkeley’s Sutardja Center on its startup ecosystem. None of that makes those sessions useless. A wealth adviser on post-exit tax may be exactly the conversation a founder needs. It does mean some chairs at those tables face a sales conversation, and the agenda only flags it in small print. One more table, on quantum computing for investors, still lists its speakers as to be announced.

The logistics are short. Disrupt 2026 runs October 13 to 15 at Moscone West in San Francisco. TechCrunch’s discount of up to $100 on a pass, plus 50% off a second one, holds until doors open on October 13, and the publisher describes the lineup as what is “currently on the agenda,” so individual sessions can still move.

The roundtable is the one format at Disrupt where the audience is supposed to do the talking. At 40 chairs a table, the decision that shapes your three days is not which session sounds best on the list. It is which pass is in your pocket, and whether it lets you into the room at all.

Tags: startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, tech conferences, TechCrunch, physical AI