Startup Events in San Francisco Bay Area

Open models are improving faster than most teams can evaluate them. Every release introduces new capabilities, new tradeoffs, and new decisions around inference, fine-tuning, serving, and production performance. Together with Gradient and Google DeepMind, we’re bringing AI engineers, researchers, technical founders, and open-source builders together in San Francisco to build with the latest open models, compare approaches, and see how they perform on real problems. Agenda 9:30 AM – Doors Open 9:45 AM – Kickoff 11:00 AM – Hack 1:30 PM – Lunch 4:30 PM – Demos 7:00 PM – Closing + Awards Hosted by: Gradient - The seed fund designed for founders in AI. Lambda - The GPU cloud built for AI. Lambda provides on-demand compute for training, fine-tuning, and inference at scale, and is powering this hackathon with cloud credits for all participants. Nango - The API platform for AI agents. Nango gives your agents production-ready tools and integrations with hundreds of external services through a single API. Respan - The AI gateway for inference. Respan routes, evaluates, and optimizes your model calls across providers — one endpoint for building with open models. GDM Gemma - Gemma is the most capable open models from Google Deepmind Note: This event is fully in-person in San Francisco. Capacity is strictly limited. All attendees must apply and be approved prior to the event. Unapproved or pending applicants will not be admitted at the door. Maximum team size is four. See what’s possible. Follow us on X · LinkedIn · Newsletter

Founders Running Club (FRC) brings founders, investors, operators and creators together for weekly easy runs and networking. We like to be comfortable when we run and finish with coffee and more conversations. Choose your pace or follow a pacer—pets, friends, family, are welcome. ​​🗓️ Launched in San Francisco, July 16, 2022 🌍 Now in 60+ cities 📅 Running + Networking events + Community ​​Join the community https://heylo.group/frc-sf ​Follow us: Instagram http://instagram.com/foundersrc/ Podcast https://podcast.foundersrc.com LinkedIn http://linkedin.com/company/foundersrc/ Strava http://strava.com/clubs/foundersRC Website http://foundersrc.com/ Chats http://foundersrc.com/chats

Join us for an intimate evening of installations, wearables, and sushi at AGI Inc. Come see the tactile, immersive work designers are exploring right now — from touch design to painting to hardware you can wear. A showcase from designers at Google, YouTube, Netflix, and AGI. Come curious, leave inspired. Featured Presenters Schedule Details RSVP here — we’ll ask about any dietary restrictions as part of registration.

Stop making AI slop. Make a short AI film in one day, then screen it that night. This practical masterclass teaches you to direct AI like a film director. You will work on story, camera choices, visual consistency, editing, sound, and delivery. Start from here: During the morning session, Roan Weigert will show the full production process. You will apply it during the afternoon hackathon with support from AI filmmakers, technical partners, and other participants. What your ticket includes A two-hour AI filmmaking masterclass A hands-on team hackathon Access to current image and video generation tools Support from partners working with frontier AI models A public film screening, judging, and awards Sponsored AI credits that you can use during the event and afterward Full online course access, valued at $897 Food and beverages (lunch from Sabor Gaúcho Prime Brazilian Steakhouse) Roan has directed more than 1,600 videos for 480+ companies across 6 countries. View his US portfolio and Brazil portfolio. His work has appeared on television, radio, in print, and online in the US and Brazil. He has published academic research, written a book about world models and video production, and produced viral videos. He also hosts the AI Insights San Francisco podcast. Roan is the DevRel AI Lead at GMI Cloud. He works directly with AI labs and tests video generation models before many of them reach public release. Partners from AI labs will demonstrate their technology and help teams during the hackathon. Sponsors will provide thousands of dollars in top AI tool credits for participants to use during the event and afterward, so they can continue creating. What you will learn How to direct a model instead of relying on longer prompts How film language controls framing, lenses, lighting, and movement How to write stronger hooks and pace a short story How to keep characters, products, and visual styles consistent How to combine generated scenes with recorded footage How to edit, add m

Whether it's a side project, an internal tool, an open source project, or a startup, this is your chance to show what you've been working on and see what others have created. The only rules: Live demos only No slides No company pitches Come share your work, get feedback, and meet fellow builders in the community. Demos by: @zobeir — Doppelganger @epoch_adesola — Epoch @gunhboo — Banquish @prat3ik — TestDino @rosemaryajukaL — HyperHat @mobile_ssh — Mobile SSH @okkshitij — Playground @JiquanNgiam — MintMCP @kgoedecke — Doop @svardnan — Facebook Paper Recreation Nikhil Lala — splitrr Vincent Chan — Capy @jinjingliang — Orca (60k GitHub stars) @dtdannen — Alinery @MarkVek13 — Vertical Flash @tessalaprofessa — Germ DM and more coming soon 👀 To sign up for a demo, fill out the form here: https://forms.gle/ARDz84NbWTQmAZDy5 WorkOS Event Code of Conduct

AI is changing more than how we work. It is changing how power works. Our legal systems were built for a world where people, companies, and governments were the primary actors. Increasingly, software makes decisions. It shapes what we see, determines which options are available to us, and acts on our behalf, or on behalf of someone else. This is a harder problem than regulating a new technology. It is a new kind of power, and our institutions were not designed for this. Join us for a fireside chat with leaders at the forefront of AI and law on what happens when analog-era institutions meet a radically different kind of power — and what the law may need to become in response. Kanjun Qiu, CEO of Imbue, will moderate a panel with Meng Jia Yang, a lawyer working on AI regulation at OpenAI and a former law firm litigator, and Matt Boulos, general counsel and head of policy at Imbue. Doors open at 5:30pm and close firmly at 6:15pm. — Imbue is an AI company building tools to empower humans in the AI age. We're building toward an open agent ecosystem where you can understand, modify, and verify agents — so they only work in your interest. Learn about our work and what we stand for: www.imbue.com

Kicking off our GTM Series where we bring in the best GTM leaders to chat with Granola's VP of Sales, Bardia Shahali! Joining us for our first chat will be Evan Cassidy from Decagon: Evan is VP of Sales at Decagon, the AI-native customer support platform now valued at $4.5B. He was the first sales hire and helped scale the GTM org from a team of ten through Series A to D. Join us to hear how a career built on reinvention and calculated risk led him from Yelp to Dropbox to Decagon! Doors open at 6pm. Please arrive by 6.30pm. Looking forward to hosting you in our new space!

About Event At nearly every Women + AI dinner, we grapple with 1) how are you actually using AI in your life outside of work, and 2) why it feels like women are underestimated walking into rooms—gyms included—either because we assume someone else already knows more than we do... or they assume the same. We're teaming up with LuxFit at Mission Rock for our first workout event. We hope this becomes a recurring series! Get ready for a real strength class, then dinner, and a conversation about AI for health and wellness. Following the workout, we will brainstorm with Amber Woolcock, Co-Owner of LuxFit, on questions her small business is facing and how AI can help them. What to Expect 6:00ish — Arrive, mingle in the outdoor tent with snacks (protein bars, nuts) 6:15pm — Welcome + a quick intro to LuxFit 6:30–7:20pm — "Oh She Lifts" strength class, 50 minutes including warm-up and cool-down 7:30–8:15pm — Dinner and small-group conversation 8:15–8:30pm — Closing remarks, wrap What Your Ticket Covers LuxFit's "Oh She Lifts" strength class (normally $40 standalone) A LuxFit membership offer: $75 off your first month Pre-workout snacks (protein bars, nuts, coconut waters courtesy of Moon Boo Sun) Sweetgreen wraps for dinner!! Thoughtful small-group facilitation and a room full of women worth knowing About Women + AI Women + AI is a grassroots community for non-technical women who want their share of the AI moment. We gather over dinner for real, screen-free conversations about what’s changing, what’s actually useful, and how women can participate in the upside. This time, we’re putting money on the table - literally and figuratively. Find us on Substack, where we share event recaps and distribute new events first. About LuxFit LuxFit is a premier training facility that focuses on results and community. With both indoor + outdoor workouts offered to their approach to personal training, group fitness and open gym is unparalleled. Your Trainer Alexis is a personal trainer and Pi

Grok Bot gives you AI teammates you can hand real work to. Each Bot has its own computer and works across the tools and websites your team already uses. Bots run in parallel, pass context between each other, and stop for your approval before anything consequential. Join Shub Gaur for how founders run a company through Grok Bot. He’ll show using bots for the messy day-to-day — research, follow-ups, ops, and keeping up with product changes and decisions — without building a big internal team around it. You’ll leave with a simple setup you can run from day one. Expect live demos, hands-on keyboard time to build with us, and room for questions.

Foundry Live Agentic AI demo night Join us for an exciting evening of live demos from local, Bay Area Agentic AI startups. Agentic AI represents the most significant shift in the Gen AI landscape today - changing our daily lives and the way we work. Come see the latest applications of Agentic AI in action, and mix and mingle with other Gen AI enthusiasts! Date and Location: Date: Tuesday Sept 15th 5:00pm (doors open at 5) Location: Github, 88 Colin P Kelly St, San Francisco Agenda 5:00-5:45pm: Doors open for networking and registration 5:45-6:00pm: Introduction 6:00-7:00pm: Demos 7:00-8:00: Networking Want to demo? If you are interested in demoing at one of our events, please fill out the application form.

Everyone is rolling their own agentic setup right now: for coding, for work, for factories, for the rest of life. Show us yours! Join us for All Things Agent Setups on Tuesday, September 15, at Sentry HQ. Three-minute lightning demos of the setups you actually use: What harness/framework are you using? Remote or on your laptop? And whatever else you think is important and makes your setup special. Can’t wait to see you there!

Friends in AI, Summer is coming to a close, so let's gather after you shake off the Playa dust, and your mind is refreshed and eager for stimulation. Join our next Humongous AI meetup on Wednesday, September 16 6-8pm in San Francisco. After 30+ gatherings on a wide range of topics, we're shifting to a new format that I think you'll love. Come mingle with other AI enthusiasts over cocktails, courtesy of Machina Ventures. Please make sure to RSVP soon since capacity is limited. The door code will be send via email the day of the event. Feel free to pass this invitation along to like-minded luminaries and creators in the field, but please don’t post publicly. Cheers, Matthew. p.s., if you're uninitiated to this series, here's a chronicle of previous meetups.

Get ready for the September Rust meetup! The theme for this meetup is graphics. And we'll meet at the new Atuin office in SF. We have a few speakers already lined up, and if you're interested in giving a talk, join our Discord server so we can chat more: https://discord.gg/e2UrCSm4vH Or email at esther@zed.dev. Our goal with these meetups are simple: meet regularly, learn from each other, and connect with others facing similar challenges. Here's the agenda for the meetup: 6:00pm: doors open 6:30pm: Talk 1 6:50pm: Talk 2 7:10pm: Talk 3 7:40pm: Networking and food! Your Bay Area Rust organizers, Yerke Tulibergenov Tauseef Khan Mikayla Maki Rain Mary Luna Esther Trapadoux

Ground Truth by Sphere ft. a16z A half day conference for senior engineers building at the edge of AI and regulation. Two in-depth panels with engineering and technical leaders on building in industries where there is no room for error. Then a reception that runs late. 1:00 – 2:00 PM · Doors open · Welcome 2:00 – 3:45 PM · Panel 1 Where do reliability guarantees sit in compliance heavy industries, and where does automation stop and human review begin? 3:45 – 4:15 PM · Subsurface session A 20-minute deep dive into a problem submitted with an application, tied to Panel 1. 4:15 – 5:15 PM · Break Introductions matched across the room. Coffee, light bites. 5:15 – 6:30 PM · Panel 2 Is deep domain depth genuine technical defensibility, or does it just delay the inevitable as models climb? 6:30 – 7:00 PM · Subsurface session The second deep dive from the room. 7:00 – 9:00 PM · Reception Heavy appetizers, open bar, and networking until late. ABOUT SPHERE SWIFT for money. Stripe for payments. Compliance is one of the last and largest — and the hardest, because trade rules aren't data to be looked up. They're a complex adaptive system with 190+ sovereign jurisdictions, in different languages, changing constantly, reacting to each other. Sphere built the system that solves it. Our AI (TRAM) ingests global trade law, interprets it, resolves conflicts across jurisdictions, and produces compliance determinations more reliable than human experts. We handle the entire lifecycle — calculation, registration, filing, remittance — at millisecond latency with zero downtime. Backed by a16z and YC. $21M Series A, 30%+ month-over-month growth, customers include ElevenLabs, Replit, Deel, Runway, and Lovable. Small team, global surface area. Everyone owns a domain that would be a full team at a larger company. San Francisco, in office. The problem keeps compounding. Expanding into input tax, withholding, e-invoicing, tariffs — each multiplies the complexity. Tens of millions of transactions t

AI is moving beyond engineering teams. The people building internal AI systems are creating new ways for GTM, marketing, post-sales, recruiting, and every other function to work. Join a small group of builders and operators for an evening of practical lessons from people who have built internal AI at companies like Ramp, Cursor, Cognition, and Decagon. What to expect Short on-stage show & tells from each speaker: what they built, what they learned, and what they’re excited about now Audience Q&A Small-group conversations No sales pitches. No long panels. Just real lessons from people who have done the work. Featuring Amy Jin, Matt Portnov – First Employee / Internal AI Leads @ Decagon Seb Goddijn – Founder of Ramp Glass, now stealth founder George Hou – Founder of Cursor's chatGTM, now founder @ Homefield Shawn Azman – Deployed Engineer @ Cognition Come meet peers, swap notes, and leave with practical ideas for building AI into how your company works. (location in South Park area in San Francisco, address to be shown upon registration approval)

Hosted by Edison Scientific x Multiply Labs Two complimentary parts of the same biopharma pipeline - AI discovery and development, and AI manufacturing - sharing a block for one night. Edison Scientific builds AI agents that help leading R&D organizations accelerate the discovery and development of new medicines. Multiply Labs uses physical AI and robotics to actually manufacture those complex therapies at scale. Together, they show how AI can help bring new medicines to patients sooner. We're also neighbors, which made it easy to decide the obvious thing to do was throw a block party together. Come hang out with the teams from both companies. Aside from a good time, you can expect: Food trucks and drinks Behind-the-scenes tours of Edison Scientific Humanoid robot demo at Multiply Labs A fireside chat with Fred Parietti, founder of Multiply Labs, and Andrew White, co-founder and CTO of Edison Scientific, on “AI Biofactories: The Full-Stack Future of Biotech" RSVP required for this exclusive gathering of invited investors, scientists, builders, partners, and people we'd love to work with. If that's you, come say hi. 21+ event. Address shared upon RSVP.

You are cordially invited to a funeral. On September 17, inside a 1914 San Francisco ex-mortuary, we lay the app era to rest, and unveil what comes next. Welcome to Photon's Dev Day. This is going to be the coolest product ever released in the agent communication layer. And you're going to experience it as a fully immersive launch, alongside the best developers and founders in the field, all there to witness it. Seats are extremely limited and curated. The Service 5:30 PM — Doors open · Demo playground6:15 PM — Keynote: Agents, Go EverywhereDaniel Tian — CEO & Co-founder, Photon Ryan Zhu — CTO & Co-founder, Photon 7:00 PM — Panels: Build With & Build OnPanel 1: After the App: Where Do Agents Live?Andrew Qu, Chief of Software at Vercel Hayden Bleasel, MTS at OpenAI Shirley Zhou, Product at Stripe Keith Zhai, Cofounder / COO at TinyFish Moderator: Josh Constine, Solo GP - Unexpected Investments / ex-TechCrunchPanel 2: The Next App Is a ContactEric Liu, Co-Founder / CTO at Ditto Sebastian Scott, Co-Founder at Clera Sanjay Amirthraj, CEO of Flip Labs Harsha, CEO at Slashy Sujal Dhakal, CEO at Vene Health Moderator: Julie Chen, CMO at Photon 8:00 PM — Community demos 8:10 PM — The Burial A moment of silence for the apps we loved. 8:30 PM — Drinks, playground & celebration Dress code: black and white About Photon Photon is the simplest way to deploy AI agents across iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, SMS/RCS and more - so your agents live where your users already are. X | Linkedin | Github

Join Workato's AI Journal Club series—we're bringing together the best AI researchers to share papers and exchange perspectives on how AI research is shaping real-world systems. Who Should Attend AI Researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of AI research and real-world systems. Schedule 5:30–6:00 PM: Check-in and registration 6:00–6:15 PM: Welcome to Workato AI Hub by Zhaozhuo Xu (Workato) 6:15–6:45 PM: Talk by Allen Chuang (Google) 6:45–7:00 PM: Q&A 7:00–7:30 PM: Talk by Ray Liu (NVIDIA) 7:30–7:45 PM: Q&A 7:45-8:30 PM: Networking Please arrive by 6:00 PM. We politely ask that attendees arrive by this time out of respect for our speaker. Sessions Allen Chuang — Taming the Dynamics of LLM Reasoning: Test-Time Exploration, Data Scheduling, and On-Policy Distillation Scaling reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) requires navigating complex optimization and search dynamics across both inference and post-training. However, modern reasoning pipelines suffer from critical inefficiencies throughout the model lifecycle: test-time decoding wastes compute on redundant search trajectories, reinforcement learning (RL) struggles with uniform data pacing, and on-policy distillation frequently undergoes catastrophic truncation collapse driven by length inflation. In this talk, I will present a unified perspective on understanding and taming reasoning dynamics. First, we examine inference-time search, demonstrating how Decoding Tree Sketching (DTS) enables structured exploration and early termination at decision tokens to eliminate redundant rollouts without retraining. Next, we turn to post-training optimization, showing how Adaptive Data Scheduling (ADS) leverages semantic clustering and policy-boundary selection to dynamically pace LLM RL curricula. Finally, we analyze the failure modes of On-Policy Distillation and introduce StableOPD to suppress trajectory explosion and restore distillation stability. Together, these methods provide practica

The Americas edition of INSEAD’s Global Alumni Forums comes to the SF Hub.

Claude Build Day · Claude Fable 5.1 Claude Fable 5.1 just shipped, and we're putting it to work. 🚀 The Claude Community Build Day lands in San Francisco on Saturday, September 19. A full day building on Anthropic's most advanced model, days after launch. What it's about Building with Fable 5.1. Attendees will focus on a continuous build block with hands on keyboard with the new model. Every team will then be invited at the end to present what they built. Part of the official Claude Community Build Day series. What you get $100 USD in API credits per attendee to keep building after the event. Exclusive launch content: Anthropic's official video on what's new in the model, screened only inside the event. Global reach: your build and the recap go into the roll-up Anthropic sends to the entire Ambassador network. A direct line to product: feedback from the room reaches Anthropic's product and model teams. The three tracks Delight · Build something surprising, beautiful or fun that you couldn't have built this well or this fast before. Breakthrough · Bring a problem the previous model couldn't solve and measure how far this one gets. Everyday · Solve a real problem from your day to day: reliability, tool use and real workflows. You pick the track. Solo or in teams of two to four. Everyone builds, everyone demos. Who it's for Developers, founders, researchers and builders who want to go from playing with Claude to shipping with Claude. No API experience required, just the itch to build. What to bring Laptop with Claude Desktop and Claude Code installed before the event Charger An account on console.anthropic.com with an Organization created (credits are redeemed there, not on a personal Claude.ai account) Coffee, water and snacks available all day. Details Date: Saturday, September 19, 2026 Time: 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM PDT Venue: 590 Howard St, San Francisco Language: English Registration Approval-based: request your spot and we'll confirm by email (confirmation only comes t

Founders Running Club (FRC) brings founders, investors, operators and creators together for weekly easy runs and networking. We like to be comfortable when we run and finish with coffee and more conversations. Choose your pace or follow a pacer—pets, friends, family, are welcome. ​​🗓️ Launched in San Francisco, July 16, 2022 🌍 Now in 60+ cities 📅 Running + Networking events + Community ​​Join the community https://heylo.group/frc-sf ​Follow us: Instagram http://instagram.com/foundersrc/ Podcast https://podcast.foundersrc.com LinkedIn http://linkedin.com/company/foundersrc/ Strava http://strava.com/clubs/foundersRC Website http://foundersrc.com/ Chats http://foundersrc.com/chats

Direct access to Claude, the Anthropic team, and an afternoon built around the work you actually do. This Claude Coworkshop, presented with Provectus, is a half-day product experience for business leaders who live in documents, spreadsheets, decks, and cross-tool workflows — Finance, Operations, Marketing, HR, Legal, Sales. You'll experience a live "Day in the Life" demo that follows a business leader through a real workday with Claude: the afternoon brief pulled from Slack and Salesforce, the variance analysis the CFO needed by noon, the board deck that built itself, the internal tool Engineering said they couldn't get to this quarter. Then you'll open your own laptop and build something real for your role — with the Anthropic and Provectus team in the room to help. The focus is the product, the people who build it, and the work you do every week. Why attend See Claude handle your actual workday. Cowork, Claude for Excel and PowerPoint, connectors across Google Workspace, Salesforce, Slack, Jira, and more — shown as one continuous story, not a feature tour. Build something real in 45 minutes. A hands-on Cowork session with a starter project tailored to your title and industry. Anthropic and partner teams on the floor to help. Leave with a plan, not a pile of notes. Every attendee walks out with a personalized "Your First Week with Claude" guide already saved in Cowork — ready to open Monday morning. Who should attend Working with Claude is built for Director and VP-level leaders of teams who own the document-heavy, high-scrutiny work their teams run every week. VP / Director, Finance & FP&A VP / Director, Operations VP / Director, Marketing VP / Director, HR & People VP / Director, Legal VP / Director, Sales & RevOps Schedule: 1 PM - 4 PM - Workshop 4 PM - 5PM - Networking Happy Hour What to bring Your laptop — the build session is hands-on, and you’ll leave with something saved in Cowork. A workflow you'd love to hand off — the weekly report, the board prep, t

Come hang out with the SF Codex community for an evening all about building with your voice brought to you by WorkOS and Parallel.ai Codex Voice lets you do a lot more than dictate prompts. You can talk through an idea, kick off coding tasks, steer agents while they work, check progress, and coordinate multiple threads without constantly going back to the keyboard. We’ll spend the first 30 minutes hanging out and meeting people, then jump into about an hour of live demos showing different ways to use voice with Codex, from everyday coding workflows to more ambitious voice-driven agent orchestration. If you’ve been experimenting with Codex already, come swap ideas. If you haven’t tried Voice yet, this is a good place to see what it can do.

AI Agenda Live returns to San Francisco!

Pitch Roast Live's SF Debut. 6pm cocktail hour; 7pm doors! Pitch Roast Live️‍ is the startup pitch competition comedy roast show. The show brings comedy, startups, and venture capital together. A Shark Tank and comedy roast crossover episode. Real comedians and real VC investors roast real startup pitches. 4 founders, 3 comedians, 2 VC investors, 1 winner! Come see professional comedians and venture capital investors roast real startup founders. See the show on Instagram Featuring incredible comedians and hosted by Noah Obstfeld. Want to pitch? Sponsor? Be on the panel? Apply here.

The SF Systems Club is back with a pair of exciting talks from researchers who are bringing cutting-edge science to the real world! Whether you’re a seasoned inference expert or programming languages enthusiast, you will learn a lot at this one. This meetup is generously hosted by LatchBio at their San Francisco office. Food and drinks will be provided! Agenda 5:30 PM: Doors Open, Food and Socializing 6:30 - 7:30: Introductions and Talks 7:30-: Community Socializing! Talks Shreya Shankar (CMU): Domain Specific LLM Inference for AI-SQL Database users have long wanted to query unstructured text, and LLMs have finally made this feasible. Major vendors now support AI-SQL, which adds AI-powered filters, joins, maps, and classifiers to SQL. To execute AI-SQL queries, databases lower these queries into plans with one LLM call per row, or, for joins, per tuple in a cross product. Even after query optimization, hundreds of thousands, or millions, of calls may remain! In theory, inference engines should be fantastic at this workload, because each call is almost entirely prefill and returns only a few tokens. Surprisingly, general-purpose inference engines take far longer than expected, because their KV caches do not know what the query will reuse, and processing so many requests adds high host overhead. We use these limitations to motivate Quail, an open source query engine for AI-SQL that our lab is building. We describe Quail's planner and execution engine, show preliminary exciting results, and end with some exciting open problems (and, a plea for help from inference experts). Parker Zeigler (UC Berkeley): Interactive, Multimodal Programming Systems The vast majority of programming systems give developers one modality for writing code: editing text. Text editing is remarkably expressive, but for programming domains with rich visual outputs — such as data visualization, graphics, and image processing — it lacks the live feedback and direct manipulation capabilities that shi

Join us for an evening of live pitches and demos from hardware founders working on frontier technologies for the physical world. We'll be showcasing 6 breakthrough hardware startups pitching to a live panel of leading VCs giving on the spot feedback. Real pitches, real feedback, and the kind of in-person networking that only happens when people who love hardware, build hardware, and invest in hardware are in the room. Here's the agenda for the night: 6:00-6:45pm: Arrival & Networking 6:45-7:45pm: Pitches & Feedback 7:45-9:00pm: Networking & Wrap up Startups: Orthestra makes smart apparel for athletic performance and recovery. mYa Solutions builds private, on-device AI for cybersecurity, education, and robotics. Agelox is a smart lock that lets users control whether a mechanical key alone is enough to unlock the door. Baru combines online design tools and local manufacturing to deliver affordable, custom-made cabinets. Extreme Machines builds fully autonomous parts manufacturing factories serving the U.S. industrial and defense base. Saro Energy builds physical Intelligence for Energy-constrained Infrastructure 🗓️ Apply to pitch at this link 👈 Judges: Soul Dayan, Senior Associate at True Ventures. Ruslan Al-Jabari, Investor at Founders Inc. If you invest in hardware, we'd love for you to join our panel of judges. Email nate@informal.fund if interested! Brought to you by: RiseLink Semiconductor company building WiFi chips for AI-connected devices. RiseLink works with hardware builders from prototype to production and is growing one of the first developer ecosystems for physical AI. riselink.ai informal is a freelance collective for the most talented independent professionals in hardware. Whether you’re looking for a single contractor, a full-time employee, or an entire team of professionals to work on everything from product development to go-to-market strategy, the informal collective has the perfect collection of people for the job. informal fund is an angel syndic

A live 2-hour workshop on the built-in specialist skills inside Claude -- contract review, accounting prep, document and spreadsheet production, and more -- and how to put them to work on your real tasks. Most people use about ten percent of what they are already paying for. Inside Claude sits a set of built-in specialist skills that work like the departments of a company: one reviews contracts and flags red lines, one preps financial documents, one builds polished spreadsheets, decks, and reports. Almost nobody knows they exist. You already have this team. You just have not met them. This is the back office your business has never been able to afford, and it is the reason you are still doing the invoicing at 10pm after everyone is asleep. In this live workshop, Arjita Sethi, founder of Build with AI Club and a Claude Community Ambassador, gives you the tour and then puts you to work: you will pick a real task from your own business and run it through the right skill, live. We close with an open floor. Anyone who wants to can come up and show the task they just ran and what came back. Seeing exactly what another woman put in and what she got out is worth more than any description of the feature. What you will learn: The skills tour: what specialist skills exist inside Claude today, what each one actually does, and how to find them The legal desk: how to run a contract or agreement through review and get plain-English red flags before you sign The finance desk: how to prep spreadsheets, financial summaries, and accountant-ready documents without a bookkeeper The production desk: how to generate polished documents, decks, and reports that are ready to send, not ready to fix Knowing the limits: what these skills should and should not replace, and where a licensed professional still belongs What you will walk away with: One real task from your own work completed through a Claude skill, live in the session A personal map of which skills replace which tasks in your week T

Founders Running Club (FRC) brings founders, investors, operators and creators together for weekly easy runs and networking. We like to be comfortable when we run and finish with coffee and more conversations. Choose your pace or follow a pacer—pets, friends, family, are welcome. ​​🗓️ Launched in San Francisco, July 16, 2022 🌍 Now in 60+ cities 📅 Running + Networking events + Community ​​Join the community https://heylo.group/frc-sf ​Follow us: Instagram http://instagram.com/foundersrc/ Podcast https://podcast.foundersrc.com LinkedIn http://linkedin.com/company/foundersrc/ Strava http://strava.com/clubs/foundersRC Website http://foundersrc.com/ Chats http://foundersrc.com/chats

No panels. No pitches. No awkward networking games. Just an evening on a San Francisco rooftop with an intentionally curated mix of SF Startup Labs founders, investors and operators, drinks in hand and the city around us. An intimate rooftop mixer to kick off SF Startup Labs week, bringing together founders arriving in San Francisco with investors and operators actively backing and building what comes next. What to expect Meet founders in town for SF Startup Labs week alongside a curated group of pre-seed and seed investors, operators, and friends from our shared network. Trade notes on what’s being built, what’s raising, and what everyone is excited about next. Details 🗓 Monday, September 28, 2026 🕕 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM PT 🍷 Drinks on us Invite-only. This is a small, curated gathering and registrations are personally reviewed. Meet the organizers SF Startup Labs is a highly selective, non-equity accelerator for ambitious pre-seed and seed founders looking to build and scale in Silicon Valley. This fall, we selected 19 startups from 530+ applicants for an intensive program combining top mentors, investor access, practical workshops, and a week of curated events across San Francisco. Clarifi VC is an AI-native financial operating system that gives founders and investors a clear, shared view of cash, burn, runway, and the decisions that matter most. We turn fragmented financial data into actionable insight, helping early-stage teams spend less time assembling spreadsheets and more time building, while giving investors a trusted financial picture for better conversations and decisions. Clera is an AI-powered talent agent built in San Francisco, matching exceptional engineers and operators with hand-picked roles at fast-growing startups. Founders on Tap is a workshop and event series bringing founders together in some of SF’s coolest spots. Each gathering goes deep on something genuinely useful, from GTM and fundraising to community, automation, and landing your first cu

Join us for a relaxed social run, followed by time to hang out over a beverage after. All paces are welcome! Note: we do not have a place to store bags, so please plan accordingly!

Join Foresight Institute and Convergent Research on a salon on FRO's. We'll be talking in more detail about: Oath Oath is building tool for overseeing and controlling advanced AIs using formal methods. Future AIs will operate at scales and speeds that mean we can't oversee them directly. Oath's aim is to scale human oversight, with trustworthy mathematical evidence that rules are obeyed. We're starting with powerful reasoning tools such as Lean, and developing ways for humans to wield them that is understandable and robust to AI deception. Our aim is to help humans work safely with AIs in consequential situations. Atlas Research Institute Atlas Research Institute identifies the gaps AI is creating in society’s defenses and turns the most promising opportunities into action. Through field strategy, Atlas maps attacker–defender dynamics, identifies interventions that could shift the balance toward defense, and builds the teams, organizations, and funding pathways needed to execute. Working across epistemic security, cybersecurity, model-weight security, and critical infrastructure, Atlas operates upstream of traditional incubation to create solutions where they are most needed. 5.30 PM: Doors open, food & drinks available 6.30 PM: Fireside chat 7.00 PM: Audience Q&A 7.15 PM: Mingle & Hang 8.30 PM: Event ends Dress code, casual. +1s are very welcome - just make sure they register here so we can let them in. This salon is hosted by Foresight Institute at the Node.

The VAST Builders Challenge is a three-city technical event series bringing together founders and engineers across New York, London, and San Francisco to build production-ready AI systems. Spend the day building agents to unlock the value of video. Because video is hard to search and analyze, most of it stays in storage, unwatched and underused. Experiment with the latest AI infrastructure, collaborate with other ambitious builders, and turn your ideas into shippable prototypes - with access to expert guidance, compute, and the tools you need to ship. Hosted with VAST Data in collaboration with NVIDIA, SpaceXAI, CoreWeave and Weights & Biases. The Builders Stack Here's what you get out of the box, a lightning-quick setup: Video understanding: reason over a video clip with NVIDIA Cosmos. Semantic search: find moments across hours of footage using natural language. Object detection: real-time detection and tracking across frames with YOLO. General-purpose LLMs: models from Weights & Biases to power your application logic (e.g. video agents). The VAST AI OS orchestrates the video ingestion and data layer, models are served on CoreWeave GPUs, and builders ship with Cursor. Build your own video agent or something no one’s thought of. We'll share the videos to get you started on building video agents. Judges Hassan Moustafa - TME, Multimodal AI @ NVIDIA Adam Ryason, Ph.D. - Product @ NVIDIA Ram B. - Sr. Developer Advocate @ VAST Data Brian Verkley - Director, AI Data Platform @ VAST Data Anushrav V. - Solutions Architect, Physical AI Lead @ CoreWeave Anna Shive - Senior Community Operations Marketer @ Weights & Biases Who should attend Developers, ML/AI engineers, agent builders, and data engineers, from startups to enterprise teams working with video or multimodal AI. While individuals are welcome, we encourage teams of up to four members and will prioritize team applications. You can form a team on the day of the event or arrive with one already assembled. Applicatio

The way software gets built is changing shape. For the last few years, AI helped you write code faster. Now a new category is emerging: Software Factories. Systems where AI agents don't just assist a developer, they run the full pipeline: spec, build, test, review, ship, and iterate, often with multiple agents working in parallel like stations on an assembly line. It's one of the hottest threads in AI right now, and for good reason: Coding agents got good enough, fast. Once agents could reliably plan, write, run, and debug code, the obvious next question became: why stop at one agent helping one person? The industry is now racing to figure out how to orchestrate fleets of agents against real codebases, with the guardrails, evals, and human checkpoints that make it trustworthy. Come see it in action. We've got a lineup of builders demoing real software factories live: the agents, the pipelines, the interfaces that make it usable, and the hard-won lessons from putting this in front of real users. Expect sharp demos, honest war stories, and plenty of room to talk shop with the people building this space. Agenda Speaker demos: Lineup TBA (30 mins) Community demos: 5 mins each. No pitches. (30 mins) Smoothies, boba, and networking (30 mins) 🚨 Community demos open! DM your best demo to /sofiiiiiasz to get selected Hosted by CopilotKit, the agentic frontend stack. Big thanks to Corgi for the space.

Let's hang! Join the San Francisco founder community to connect with other founders and hear stories from a founder who went through the wringer and came out the other side. The Schedule: 6-7pm: Get here, eat pizza, make friends 7-7:30pm: Fireside chat 7:30-8pm: Q&A 8-8:30pm: Finish pizza, make more friends 8:30pm: End Meet Max Marchione, Co-Founder and CEO of Superpower Join Max Marchione, co-founder and CEO of Superpower, as he sits down with Janel Spilker, Partner at Hustle Fund, for a conversation on what it really takes to build a startup from scratch. They dig into the story behind Superpower's rapid rise, from early-stage grit to raising a $30M Series A backed by top investors, and the lessons learned building a category-defining company from the ground up. Who's behind this? Mercury is a radically different banking* product — engineered from the ground up to hold, move, and help you truly understand your money like never before. Everything you need is built in: cards, invoicing, bill pay, spend management, real-time insights, intelligent categorization. And because it all lives in one place, it gets smarter the more you use it — surfacing what you need, when you need it, in ways a patchwork of tools never could. To join the more than 300K entrepreneurs that trust Mercury, visit mercury.com. *Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC. The IO Card is issued by Patriot Bank, N.A., Member FDIC, pursuant to a license from Mastercard International Incorporated. Sprinto is the world's first Autonomous Trust Platform, detecting change across your posture, determining what's at risk, and acting across compliance, vendor risk, AI governance, and more — so your organization stays trustworthy without the operational chaos. Supported by Singapore Global Network (SGN), a division under Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB). Join SGN to become a member of our globa

Your website or product has design issues nobody's told you about. We are about to fix that. Bring your landing page, product UI, or brand. Present for 5 minutes. Get 3 minutes of live, unfiltered critique from Ondrej (Founder, Head of Design @ TRAU) and the audience. This is the feedback you'd usually pay for, delivered in front of a room of people who came to learn from it. Honest, specific, useful. Designed to make your next iteration sharper. ⚠️ Want to present? You must submit this form. Marking yourself as a attendee on Luma doesn't reserve a slot. 📋 Format 2:00 pm – check in and drinks 3:00 pm – 10 presenters, 5 min present + 3 min roast 5:00 pm – wrap up 🎯 What to bring A live URL, a Figma frame, or 3 slides max. No 30 slide decks. Show the work, not the pitch. 👥 Who this is for Founders ready to defend their work in public Designers who want their instincts tested Operators tired of polite, useless feedback 🤩 What you walk away with Specific, actionable critique A sharper read on what's working and what isn't Patterns you'll keep spotting in your own work for months 👉 Presenters sign up Sign up here if you want to present and get roasted! 10 presenter slots. First come first served. Audience seats open. 🚀 About TRAU We build brands, websites, and products for seed to Series A startups, and invest in founders we believe in. This roasting session is our way of doing in public what we usually do behind closed doors.

Strive welcomes you to 'Fashion and Business Networking', San Francisco's hottest networking event! We are set in the perfect central location in North Beach for all to join. Are you interested in fashion and business? Want to elevate your career? Meet Designers, Models, Manufacturers, Entrepreneurs, and more who are active in the space or are eager to get started. **This will be a multi-vertical event ** There will be professionals with backgrounds in the arts, finance, tech, real estate, healthcare, and more. Come with an open mind, and leave with connections that wouldn't be possible otherwise! Pack some business cards and come with an open mind! Meet your future business partners, employers, coworkers, investors, and friends. You don't want to miss this opportunity to expand your network and create a brighter future. We will have a space for our event to check-in. The event will go from 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM(feel free to come at any point in this timeframe). Name tags will be provided. Business casual dress code. Job fair attire. Remember - it's not about who you know today, it's who you'll meet tomorrow! We look forward to meeting you at the event! Sincerely, Strive Networking Team Refund requests are permitted up to 24 hours after purchase, so long as we are not within 48 hours before the event start time. Refunds will be made in full and repaid to your method of payment. Note that we are unable to reimburse for eventbrite fees. Disclaimer: By attending Strive Networking events you agree to photos/videos taken during the event being used to promote future events.

Strive welcomes you to 'Tech and Business Networking', San Francisco's hottest networking event! We are set in the perfect central location in North Beach for all to join. Are you interested in tech and business? Want to elevate your career? Meet Consultants, Analysts of all types, Bankers, Software Engineers, Entrepreneurs, and more who are active in the space or are eager to get started. **This will be a multi-vertical event ** There will be professionals with backgrounds in the arts, finance, tech, real estate, healthcare, and more. Come with an open mind, and leave with connections that wouldn't be possible otherwise! Pack some business cards and come with an open mind! Meet your future business partners, employers, coworkers, investors, and friends. You don't want to miss this opportunity to expand your network and create a brighter future. We will have a space for our event to check-in. The event will go from 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM(feel free to come at any point in this timeframe). Name tags will be provided. Business casual dress code. Job fair attire. Remember - it's not about who you know today, it's who you'll meet tomorrow! We look forward to meeting you at the event! Sincerely, Strive Networking Team Refund requests are permitted up to 24 hours after purchase, so long as we are not within 48 hours before the event start time. Refunds will be made in full and repaid to your method of payment. Note that we are unable to reimburse for eventbrite fees. Disclaimer: By attending Strive Networking events you agree to photos/videos taken during the event being used to promote future events.

Strive welcomes you to 'General Business Networking', San Francisco's hottest networking event! We are set in the perfect central location in North Beach for all to join. Are you interested in business? Want to elevate your career? Meet Consultants, Analysts of all types, Bankers, Software Engineers, Entrepreneurs, and more who are active in the space or are eager to get started. **This will be a multi-vertical event ** There will be professionals with backgrounds in the arts, finance, tech, real estate, healthcare, and more. Come with an open mind, and leave with connections that wouldn't be possible otherwise! Pack some business cards and come with an open mind! Meet your future business partners, employers, coworkers, investors, and friends. You don't want to miss this opportunity to expand your network and create a brighter future. We will have a space for our event to check-in. The event will go from 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM(feel free to come at any point in this timeframe). Name tags will be provided. Business casual dress code. Job fair attire. Remember - it's not about who you know today, it's who you'll meet tomorrow! We look forward to meeting you at the event! Sincerely, Strive Networking Team Refund requests are permitted up to 24 hours after purchase, so long as we are not within 48 hours before the event start time. Refunds will be made in full and repaid to your method of payment. Note that we are unable to reimburse for eventbrite fees. Disclaimer: By attending Strive Networking events you agree to photos/videos taken during the event being used to promote future events.

Strive welcomes you to 'Law and Business Networking', San Francisco's hottest networking event! We are set in the perfect central location in North Beach for all to join. Are you interested in law and business? Want to elevate your career? Meet Attorneys, Clerks, Consultants, Scholars and more who are active in the space or are eager to get started. **This will be a multi-vertical event ** There will be professionals with backgrounds in the arts, finance, tech, real estate, healthcare, and more. Come with an open mind, and leave with connections that wouldn't be possible otherwise! Pack some business cards and come with an open mind! Meet your future business partners, employers, coworkers, investors, and friends. You don't want to miss this opportunity to expand your network and create a brighter future. We will have a space for our event to check-in. The event will go from 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM(feel free to come at any point in this timeframe). Name tags will be provided. Business casual dress code. Job fair attire. Remember - it's not about who you know today, it's who you'll meet tomorrow! We look forward to meeting you at the event! Sincerely, Strive Networking Team Refund requests are permitted up to 24 hours after purchase, so long as we are not within 48 hours before the event start time. Refunds will be made in full and repaid to your method of payment. Note that we are unable to reimburse for eventbrite fees. Disclaimer: By attending Strive Networking events you agree to photos/videos taken during the event being used to promote future events.

Strive welcomes you to 'Politics and Business Networking', San Francisco's hottest networking event! We are set in the perfect central location in North Beach for all to join. Are you interested in politics and business? Want to elevate your career? Meet Consultants, Analysts of all types, Entrepreneurs, Lawyers, Political Science Professionals and more who are active in the space or are eager to get started. **This will be a multi-vertical event ** There will be professionals with backgrounds in the arts, finance, tech, real estate, healthcare, and more. Come with an open mind, and leave with connections that wouldn't be possible otherwise! Pack some business cards and come with an open mind! Meet your future business partners, employers, coworkers, investors, and friends. You don't want to miss this opportunity to expand your network and create a brighter future. We will have a space for our event to check-in. The event will go from 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM(feel free to come at any point in this timeframe). Name tags will be provided. Business casual dress code. Job fair attire. Remember - it's not about who you know today, it's who you'll meet tomorrow! We look forward to meeting you at the event! Sincerely, Strive Networking Team Refund requests are permitted up to 24 hours after purchase, so long as we are not within 48 hours before the event start time. Refunds will be made in full and repaid to your method of payment. Note that we are unable to reimburse for eventbrite fees. Disclaimer: By attending Strive Networking events you agree to photos/videos taken during the event being used to promote future events.

Strive welcomes you to 'Non-Profit and Business Networking', San Francisco's hottest networking event! We are set in the perfect central location in North Beach for all to join. Are you interested in non-profits and business? Want to elevate your career? Meet Executives, Consultants, Benefactors, and more who are active in the space or are eager to get started. **This will be a multi-vertical event ** There will be professionals with backgrounds in the arts, finance, tech, real estate, healthcare, and more. Come with an open mind, and leave with connections that wouldn't be possible otherwise! Pack some business cards and come with an open mind! Meet your future business partners, employers, coworkers, investors, and friends. You don't want to miss this opportunity to expand your network and create a brighter future. We will have a space for our event to check-in. The event will go from 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM(feel free to come at any point in this timeframe). Name tags will be provided. Business casual dress code. Job fair attire. Remember - it's not about who you know today, it's who you'll meet tomorrow! We look forward to meeting you at the event! Sincerely, Strive Networking Team Refund requests are permitted up to 24 hours after purchase, so long as we are not within 48 hours before the event start time. Refunds will be made in full and repaid to your method of payment. Note that we are unable to reimburse for eventbrite fees. Disclaimer: By attending Strive Networking events you agree to photos/videos taken during the event being used to promote future events.

Office Hours are unstructured discussions between Golden Seeds members and entrepreneurs. This opportunity is particularly relevant for companies that are likely to seek funding in the next 12 to 24 months.

Meet Like Minded Entrepreneurs, Techie, Founders & Professionals Sharing Ideas, Building Relationships & Forming Partnerships M UST READ ALL DETAILS MAKE SURE TO RSVP ***RSVP MUST FOR ADMISSION*** This is the largest networking mixer for Entrepreneurs , Startups and Business Professionals In San Fran. Calling All: Tech Startups ! Entrepreneurs ! Business Owners ! Professionals ! Free-lancers, policy-makers, game-changers, and heroes! Starting Of 2026 with San Francisco Biggest Professional Networking Affair. Please join us for an evening of creativity, inspiration and passionate conversations. Join & raise a glass - make connections with co-founders, partners, coaches or core team members for your start-up- meet fellow professionals and mingle with makers of great and big ideas - take home treats from growing community and some business cards. Please use @TechWebTalks to share your comments/pics for this event. Ambiance:- Name Tags will be provided to everyone who attends. We request you put your name and industry on your name tag. Make sure you bring enough business cards. The dress code is Business Casual. Timings:- Event is from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM.***Arriving on time recommended. Admission: FREE to attend FIRST 120 RSVP. Drinks Policy: One drink minimum (mandatory),Two recommended. Support the venue. ***Since this is a drinking establishment, all attendees must be 21+.*** For Business Queries - Moveyourcareer@gmail.com VENUE SPONSOR - Hardwood Bar & Smokery Note - Event details Including Venue/Date of event May Change Prior To Event. Attendees will be informed via email. Hosted By - San Francisco Entrepreneurs, Startup & Business Coalition. Facebook Group F acebook Page Meetup Group Instagram Youtube LinkedIn Looking for a second hostess of the event. Paid Job.Please send resume with Linkedin Profile link to moveyourcareer@gmail.com RSVP as of March 1 First Name Last Name Olivia Ruiz Joycie Wu Carlo Vergara Kirill Sukov John-Miguel Mitchell Emm