TechCrunch Disrupt 2024

The votes are in: Meet the Disrupt 2024 audience choice roundtable winners

Comment

We just announced the breakout session winners last week. Now meet the roundtable sessions that really “rounded” out the competition for this year’s Disrupt 2024 audience choice program. With five stellar sessions securing their spot among thousands of votes from across the globe, these finalists proved they’ve got what it takes to make things happen. You’ll take away that same can-do attitude and know-how by attending their roundtable sessions this October. Let’s meet the winners!

Enterprise GTM is broken — here’s how to fix it

Speaker: SC Moatti, Founding Managing Partner, Mighty Capital

The old tactics don’t work anymore. In an era where machines are bombarding inboxes with emails thousands of times a week, how do you break through the noise to make sure the right decision-makers are getting the message at a target enterprise company? Based on expertise and learnings from helping over half a million product leaders hone their GTM strategy, SC Moatti will lead this collaborative session exploring the challenges and opportunities of the enterprise GTM space. Founders and operators will walk away with the tools they need to start making real headway toward their enterprise ambitions.

Is there a thing as ‘startup within a big company’?

Speaker: Prerit Uppal, Group Product Leader, Adobe Inc.

What if more corporate managers tapped into the same entrepreneurial spirit that propelled Tesla’s Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to success? Large companies, often overlooked for innovation, are actually fertile ground for it. Just look at products like Post-it Notes from 3M or the Sony PlayStation, which started as internal projects and grew into separate success stories as new business units. Best innovators create new enterprises inside large corporations.

The takeaway revolves around understanding the essentials of launching a business within a larger corporation and the actionable steps required to do so successfully.

Next-gen medicine: AI simulation generating new data to accelerate drug discovery

Speaker: Jack Hidary, CEO, SandboxAQ

AI models require huge amounts of data to complete a given task — but what if this data doesn’t exist? SandboxAQ CEO Jack Hidary and Breyer Capital’s Jim Breyer will discuss how AI and quantum-powered simulation generates the missing data that AI models need to accelerate drug discovery — leading to breakthroughs for challenging conditions like Alzheimer’s while reducing the time, cost and risk of developing new drugs. Jack and Jim will showcase how UCSF, Riboscience and other biopharma researchers are using simulation to turn molecules into medicine, and recent findings showing how simulation data is performing beyond our wildest expectations.

Shoppertainment 2024: The future of consumer and commerce

Speaker: Khanh Ngo, Monetization Strategy and Operations, APAC and MEA – TikTok

Uncover new insights that decode consumer behavior. What does this mean for businesses, and how can you thrive in this $1 trillion shoppertainment space?

Winning at startup PR without paying for an agency, with ex-TechCrunch editor Josh Constine

Speaker: Josh Constine, Venture Partner, SignalFire

Sick of emailing reporters with no response and don’t want to cough up $15,000 per month for a PR agency? Lesson one: It’s about what audiences want to hear, not what you want to say. With the right mix of concise storytelling and data-driven content, you can learn to pitch press by yourself. In this roundtable session led by former TechCrunch editor-at-large turned VC Josh Constine, you’ll get the playbook for how to teach readers something while you boost your fundraising, recruiting, and sales. Ask your biggest questions about how PR works, and hear what red flags are getting your pitches deleted.

Isn’t that a lineup?! And we’ll have dozens more roundtables for you at this year’s event. Be sure to grab your ticket here.

More TechCrunch

Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. Last Sunday, President Joe Biden announced that he no longer plans to seek reelection, instead offering his “full endorsement” of VP Kamala…

This Week in AI: How Kamala Harris might regulate AI

But the fate of many generative AI businesses — even the best-funded ones — looks murky.

VCs are still pouring billions into generative AI startups

Thousands of stories have been written about former NFL quarterback and civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick. If anyone knows a thing or two about losing control of your own narrative,…

Colin Kaepernick lost control of his story. Now he wants to help creators own theirs

Several people who received the CrowdStrike offer found that the gift card didn’t work, while others got an error saying the voucher had been canceled.

CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

TikTok Lite, a low-bandwidth version of the video platform popular across Africa, Asia and Latin America, is exposing users to harmful content because of its lack of safety features compared…

TikTok Lite exposes users to harmful content, say Mozilla researchers

If the models continue eating each other’s data, perhaps without even knowing it, they’ll progressively get weirder and dumber until they collapse.

‘Model collapse’: Scientists warn against letting AI eat its own tail

Astranis has fully funded its next-generation satellite program, called Omega, after closing its $200 million Series D round, the company said Wednesday.  “This next satellite is really the milestone into…

Astranis is set to build Omega constellation after $200M Series D

Reworkd’s founders went viral on GitHub last year with AgentGPT, a free tool to build AI agents that acquired more than 100,000 daily users in a week. This earned them…

After AgentGPT’s success, Reworkd pivots to web-scraping AI agents

We’re so excited to announce that we’ve added a dedicated AI Stage presented by Google Cloud to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. It joins Fintech, SaaS and Space as the other industry-focused…

Announcing the agenda for the AI Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024

The firm has numerous legs to it, ranging from a venture studio to standard funds, where it does everything from co-founding companies to deploying capital.

CityRock launches second fund to back founders from diverse backgrounds

Since launching xAI last year, Elon Musk has been using X as a sandbox to test some of the Grok model’s AI capabilities. Beyond the basic chatbot, X uses the…

X launches underwhelming Grok-powered ‘More About This Account’ feature

Lakera, a Swiss startup that’s building technology to protect generative AI applications from malicious prompts and other threats, has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by European…

Lakera, which protects enterprises from LLM vulnerabilities, raises $20M

Alongside a slew of announcements for Play—such as AI-powered app comparisons and a feature that bundles similar apps—Google has introduced new “Curated Spaces,” hubs dedicated to specific topics. Announced Wednesday,…

Google Play gets ‘Comics’ feature for manga readers in Japan

Farmers have got to do something about pests. But nobody really likes the idea of using more chemical pesticides. Thomas Laurent’s company, Micropep, thinks the answer might already be in…

Micropep taps tiny proteins to make pesticides safer

Play Store is getting AI-powered app comparisons, automatically organized categories for similar apps, dedicated hubs for content, data personalization controls, support for playing multiple mobile games on PCs, and more…

Google adds AI-powered comparisons, collections and more data controls to Play Store

Vanta, a trust management platform that helps businesses automate much of their security and compliance processes, today announced that it has raised a $150 million Series C funding round led…

Vanta raises $150M Series C, now valued at $2.45B

The Overture Maps Foundation is today releasing data sets for 2.3B building “footprints” globally, 54M notable places of interest, a visual overlay of “boundaries,” and land and water features such…

Backed by Microsoft, AWS and Meta, the Overture Maps Foundation launches its first open map data sets

The startup is not disclosing its valuation, but sources close to the company say the figure is just under $400 million post-money.

Dazz snaps up $50M for AI-based, automated cloud security remediation

The outcome of the Spanish authority’s probe could take up to two years to complete, and leave Apple on the hook for fines in the billions.

Apple’s App Store hit with antitrust probe in Spain

Proton’s first cryptocurrency product is a wallet called Proton Wallet that’s designed to make it easier to get started with bitcoin.

Proton releases a self-custody bitcoin wallet

Dental care is a necessity, yet many patients lack confidence in their dentists’ ability to provide accurate diagnoses and appropriate treatments. Some dentists over treat patients, leading to unnecessary expenses,…

Pearl raises $58M to help dentists make better diagnoses using AI 

Exoticca’s platform connects flights, hotels, meals, transfers, transportation and more, plus the local companies at the destinations.

Spanish startup Exoticca raises a €60M Series D for its tour packages platform

Content creators are busy people. Most spend more than 20 hours a week creating new content for their respective corners of the web. That doesn’t leave much time for audience…

Mark Zuckerberg imagines content creators making AI clones of themselves

Elon Musk says he will show off Tesla’s purpose-built “robotaxi” prototype during an event October 10, after scrapping a previous plan to reveal it August 8. Musk said Tesla will…

Elon Musk sets new date for Tesla robotaxi reveal, calls everything beyond autonomy ‘noise’

Alphabet will spend an additional $5 billion on its self-driving subsidiary, Waymo, over the next few years, according to Ruth Porat, the company’s chief financial officer. Porat announced the commitment…

Alphabet to invest another $5B into Waymo

There is no fool proof way to prevent a buggy update like CrowdStrike’s, but there are best practices that could mitigate the fallout.

How to prevent your software update from being the next CrowdStrike

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek says the streaming service is still in the “early days” of its plans to bring hi-fi support to the platform. During the company’s earnings call on…

Spotify CEO says company is in ‘early days’ of hi-fi audio plans

Featured Article

A comprehensive list of 2024 tech layoffs

The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the…

A comprehensive list of 2024 tech layoffs

Tesla was not the first company to begin working on a humanoid form factor, but while being the first to market does carry weight in this high-tech space, we’re at…

Elon Musk sets 2026 Optimus sale date. Here’s where other humanoid robots stand.

Harvey, a startup building what it describes as an AI-powered “copilot” for lawyers, has raised $100 million in a Series C round led by GV, Google’s corporate venture arm. The…

OpenAI-backed legal tech startup Harvey raises $100M