TechCrunch Disrupt 2025
TechCrunch Disrupt is where you’ll find innovation for every stage of your startup journey. Whether you’re a budding founder with a revolutionary idea, a seasoned startup looking to scale, or an investor seeking the next big thing, Disrupt offers unparalleled resources, connections, and expert insights to propel your venture forward.
Find innovation for every stage at Disrupt 2025
From idea to IPO, Disrupt 2025 will map out the path for startups to achieve their next major milestone.
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Gain insights from today’s tech giants
Tap into the wisdom of founders and tech titans at Disrupt. From actionable tips to hard-won lessons, they’ll share what works (and what doesn’t) to guide you as you build your own path forward.
Disrupt 2025 speakers
Partner Sequoia Capital
Chief Technology Officer US Dept of Navy
CEO and Co-Founder Writer
Chief Product Officer Netflix
CEO Wayve
Co-Founder & CEO Box
Founder and CEO Pinecone
Co-CEO Waymo
Co-Founder ElevenLabs
Captain of Moonshots X, The Moonshot Factory
I’ve always thought, “What can I do that opens up possibilities?” I grew up in South Africa and went to an Afrikaans high school, and we didn’t speak English at home. But I pushed myself to go to an English-speaking university, and that opened up a door. Then I chose to work for McKinsey, because I thought it would open another door and maybe I’d get a chance to work overseas. I was reading about what was happening in Silicon Valley in the mid 90s, before I came to the U.S. Already, I’m starting to see the beginnings of the internet. Did I fathom how big it would be? Absolutely not. I didn’t know what venture capital was. I didn’t know that I would join a startup. I just had an intuition that I needed to be here. A friend of mine introduced me to Elon in 1999 and I joined PayPal. Then when Mike Moritz asked me to come interview at Sequoia, that was just another door opening. Where might this one lead? Whenever I interview people, I ask about those key moments in somebody’s life where they’ve made career decisions. And I think about companies in the same way—there are these crucible moments that have an enormous bearing on ultimate outcomes.
Roelof's Sessions
What Sequoia Sees Coming Next
As one of the most influential VCs of the modern era, Roelof Botha has seen it all; booms, busts, and billion-dollar breakout bets. In this fireside chat, the Sequoia Capital managing partner opens up about how today’s most ambitious founders are navigating AI, geopolitics, and a shifting capital landscape.
Justin Fanelli is the Chief Technology Officer for the Department of the Navy and Technical Director of PEO Digital, driving measurable technology improvements and secure, high-performance digital transformation. He champions private-public collaboration to deliver innovation with unprecedented value. Fanelli advises numerous national science and technology boards and has held key roles including Chief Architect for Defense Health, DARPA Service Chiefs Fellow, and Chief Systems Engineer for Joint Command and Control. He teaches at Georgetown and has lectured all over the country at CMU, MIT, Stanford and others. He recently gave a TED Talk on innovation adoption and the Innovation Adoption Kit covered by TechCrunch, Forbes, CSIS and others. Fanelli holds engineering degrees from Penn State and the University of Pennsylvania and is a Senior Executive Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. He’s been an angel investor, VC and has been privileged to serve on public and private boards. His work has earned national awards including the Etter Award, Fed100, Defense50, and CMMI Project of the Year. He lives in Arlington, VA and enjoys book recommendations.
Justin's Sessions
AI and National Security in the High-Stakes Race to Innovate
From defense labs to Wall Street and naval operations, AI is reshaping how countries protect themselves and project power. DARPA’s Kathleen Fisher, Point72’s Sri Chandrasekar, and Navy CTO Justin Fanelli dive into the cutting-edge AI breakthroughs driving security innovation. They’ll discuss what it means for entrepreneurs, investors, and the future of global stability.
May Habib is the CEO and co-founder of Writer, a leader and pioneer in enterprise AI. With Writer’s end-to-end AI agent platform, hundreds of companies like Accenture, Mars, Uber, and Vanguard are building and scaling AI agents that are grounded in their company’s data and fueled by Writer’s enterprise-grade LLMs. From faster product launches to deeper financial research to better clinical trials, companies are quickly transforming their most important business processes for the AI era in partnership with Writer. Writer houses the world’s only enterprise-specific AI research lab. Its family of enterprise-grade Palmyra LLMs includes state-of-the-art frontier models, as well as self-evolving, open-source, and domain-specific models. Palmyra models define industry-leading standards for enterprise-grade transparency, reliability, safety, efficiency, and observability. May is an expert in natural language processing and AI-driven language generation. She has led Writer to become one of the world’s fastest-growing generative AI companies, securing its position as a Forbes 50 AI company and inclusion in the World Economic Forum’s Unicorn Community. Founded in 2020 with its headquarters in San Francisco and offices around the globe, Writer is backed by world-leading investors, including Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, Insight Partners, Balderton, B Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures, and others. May and the Writer team have raised over $326M in funding at a valuation of $1.9B. May graduated with high honors in Economics from Harvard University. She is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, a Fellow of the Aspen Global Leadership Network, a recipient of Inc.’s Female Founder Award, and one of Worth’s Groundbreaking Women for 2025.
May's Sessions
Writing the Future with AI?
What happens when AI learns to write with purpose, personality, and persuasion? Writer CEO May Habib joins us to talk about the evolving relationship between language and machines and what the rise of generative content means for the future of brand, business, and beyond.
Eunice Kim was named Chief Product Officer in October 2023. She previously led the company’s global Consumer Product Innovation team. Eunice joined Netflix in early 2021 after having spent 10 years in product leadership roles at Google Play and YouTube. Prior to Google, she worked at several tech startups as well as PepsiCo and Adobe Systems. Eunice holds a B.A. from Columbia University and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She serves on the Board of Directors for Cure CMD.
Eunice's Sessions
What's Next for Netflix and for Streaming Itself
As CPO of Netflix, Eunice Kim is steering the future of entertainment for hundreds of millions of users. In this fireside chat, Kim will break down how Netflix is evolving its product strategy—from personalized discovery to global growth, from ad tiers to gaming. We’ll explore how Netflix is adapting to a shifting content landscape, what it means to innovate at massive scale, and what design surprises Netflix has up its sleeve. For anyone building consumer experiences, this will be a masterclass.
Alex co-founded Wayve in 2017 to reimagine autonomous mobility through embodied intelligence. From his award-winning research at the University of Cambridge, he seized the opportunity to use deep learning to pioneer an entirely new way to solve self-driving. He showed for the first time that it was possible to teach a machine to understand where it is and what’s around it and then give it the “intelligence” to make its own decisions based on what it sees with computer vision. As CEO, Alex is responsible for the company’s overall strategy, primarily focusing on establishing all necessary ingredients to develop and deploy AV2.0 globally. He also works closely with our partners and investors to ensure that our technology is commercially viable and can be widely adopted. Under Alex’s leadership, Wayve is fast becoming one of the most exciting companies in the autonomous vehicle industry. Before founding Wayve, Alex’s passion for autonomous vehicles began as a research fellow at the University of Cambridge, where he earned his PhD in Computer Vision and Robotics. His research has received numerous awards for scientific impact and made significant contributions to the field of computer vision and AI. He was selected on the Royal Academy of Engineering’s SME Leaders Programme and named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 innovators list.
Alex's Sessions
Driving Intelligence
From self-driving cars to self-learning systems, Alex Kendall is rethinking how machines perceive and act in the world. The Wayve CEO joins us to explore how real-world autonomy is shaping the next chapter of AI, and why breakthroughs on the road may unlock progress far beyond it.
Aaron Levie is Chief Executive Officer, Cofounder at Box, which he launched in 2005 with CFO and cofounder Dylan Smith. He is the visionary behind the Box product and platform strategy, incorporating the best of secure content collaboration with an intuitive user experience suited to the way people work today. Aaron leads the company in its mission to transform the way people and businesses work so they can achieve their greatest ambitions. He has served on the Board of Directors since April 2005. Aaron attended the University of Southern California from 2003 to 2005 before leaving to found Box.
Aaron's Sessions
Survive, Scale, Reinvent: Lessons from a Cloud OG
Aaron Levie built Box before cloud was cool and the company is still thriving while competitors have come and gone. Known for his sharp takes and startup instincts, Levie joins us to unpack how to keep innovating inside a public company, the possibilities AI and agents bring to enterprise software, and why reinvention is the name of the game in tech right now. Expect real talk and a playbook for building companies that last in the world of AI.
Edo Liberty is the founder and CEO of Pinecone whose mission is to make AI knowledgeable. Pinecone is the leading vector database for building accurate and performant AI applications at scale in production. Prior to founding Pinecone, Edo was a Director of Research at AWS and Head of Amazon AI Labs where his team worked on data systems and services including SageMaker and OpenSearch. Before AWS, Edo was a Senior Research Director at Yahoo and Head of Yahoo’s Research Lab in New York. As an adjunct professor at Princeton and Tel Aviv University, Edo taught long-term memory in AI and data mining. His academic work focuses on numerical linear algebra, streaming algorithms, data mining, and mathematical foundations of machine learning. Edo holds a B.Sc in physics and computer science from Tel Aviv University, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Yale. He has authored more than 75 academic papers and patents.
Edo's Sessions
Why the Next Frontier Is Search
In a world overflowing with data, finding what matters is everything. Pinecone founder Edo Liberty unpacks why infrastructure, not algorithms, might be the biggest unlock in AI, and what’s coming next in the race to power smarter applications at scale.
Tekedra N. Mawakana is the co-CEO of Waymo, an autonomous driving technology company. As co-CEO, Tekedra oversees the company’s strategy for the wide adoption of the Waymo Driver. She boasts 20+ years of experience advising consumer technology companies to advance their business interests globally. Tekedra currently serves on the Board of Directors for Intuit and the Advisory Council for Boom Technology. She is a social impact-focused angel investor and an Advisor and LP with the Operator Collective.
Tekedra's Sessions
The Self-Driving Reality Check
Autonomous vehicles have been “just around the corner” for years—until now. Tekedra Mawakana, Co-CEO of Waymo, takes the Disrupt Stage to talk about where AVs actually stand, what it’s taken to get to real deployments, and why the race isn’t just about tech, it’s about trust. From regulation to rider experience to competition with Tesla and Tesla-adjacent hype, this conversation gets real about what’s next in mobility.
Mati Staniszewski is the co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, a research company building audio AI tools to solve audio intelligence and make digital interactions feel more human — with voice as the most direct path to that. Before founding ElevenLabs, Mati worked at Palantir as a Deployment Strategist, managing large-scale implementations across public and private sectors, and at BlackRock, where he helped launch the Aladdin Wealth platform.
Mati's Sessions
Synthetic Voices and Real Impact
From audiobooks to avatars, synthetic speech is having a moment. ElevenLabs is helping lead the charge. CEO Mati Staniszewski joins us to explore what it takes to build AI that speaks like us and how voice technology is reshaping the creative industries, accessibility, and entertainment.
Dr. Astro Teller currently oversees X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory for building breakthrough technologies and businesses designed to help tackle huge problems in the world. Before joining Google / Alphabet, Astro was the co-founding CEO of Cerebellum Capital, Inc, an investment management firm whose investments are continuously designed, executed, and improved by a software system based on techniques from statistical machine learning. Before his tenure as a business executive, Dr. Teller taught at Stanford University and was an engineer and researcher for Phoenix Laser Technologies, Stanford’s Center for Integrated Systems, and The Carnegie Group Incorporated. Dr. Teller holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Stanford University, Masters of Science in symbolic and heuristic computation, also from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a recipient of the Hertz fellowship.
Astro's Sessions
Moonshots, AI, and the Future of Alphabet
From self-driving cars to internet balloons to AI-fueled breakthroughs, Astro Teller leads the lab where Alphabet incubates the nearly impossible. In this rare Disrupt stage appearance, he shares what’s actually working inside X, why “failing fast” isn’t just a mantra, and how moonshots may evolve in the AI age. If you think your startup is ambitious, wait until you hear what he’s launching next.
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TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 is innovation for every stage
10,000+ tech leaders. 250+ sessions. 200+ speakers. 3 days. 6 stages. One epic experience of insights, strategy, and connections. Save up to $600+ before rates increase.
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