AI Native Summit - SF TechWeek 2026
Code. Build. Compete.
📍 San Francisco Tech Week
📅 Friday, October 9, 2026
🕙 10 AM–5 PM PDT
TICKETS ARE $50
https://connections.ainative.studio/summit
AINative Summit is where builders become champions.
Join engineers, founders, AI researchers, infrastructure teams, and startup operators for one packed day of technical talks, hands-on build labs, and the AINative Hack Champion 2026 Finals.
Learn from people shipping real systems. Build alongside them. Help fuel what comes next.
Friday, October 9 · 10:00 AM – 3:00 PM
10:00 · Doors open and check-in
10:15 · Summit opening
10:30 · Opening session: After LLMs: The Race to Build a World Model
Martin Trajkow, o-machine
10:55 · Activate the Perspicacity Effect
Ayori Selassie, AiNative Studio
11:25 · Merlin: A Production Harness for AI Coding Agents
Mayank Pahadia, Tinder
11:50 · Ai Native Startup Leaders Panel
Arun Krishnaswamy, KG Charles-Harris, Kaan Karakas
Kaan Karakas is an Applied AI Engineer at Delphi, where he joined as an early engineering hire. He works on the agent harness, tool calling, memory and evals that make Delphi's responses sound like the person who created them, across chat and voice calls. He also works on content training and post-training, scaling content training from 10k to 100k items a day. He manages efficient compute allocation for the AI workloads behind both, which power 100k+ daily conversations.
Before Delphi, Kaan was at Salesforce AI, where he built model-serving infrastructure handling up to 500M requests a day. He also built the first version of realtime indexing that gave Agentforce its context, a product line that has grown into a $1B+ ARR business alongside Data Cloud. He holds a B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics from NYU Courant and is based in San Francisco.
KG CHARLES-HARRIS is a multi-time startup founder across industries as varied as genomics, artificial intelligence and aquaculture, and a former investment banker. He is presently the Founder & CEO of Quarrio and has been involved in the AI and Big Data Analytics spaces before they were popularly called so.
KG is a prominent international entrepreneur and spirited advocate for improving the way people work and connect through technology. Guided by this vision, he led the charge to give small and mid-sized businesses access to the same process automation and intelligence tools once limited to Fortune 100 companies. He also invested in and worked with philanthropic projects he designed in the Developing World. His achievements were recognized on a global scale when he received the United Nations Global Young Entrepreneur Award at the UN’s World Summit of Young Entrepreneurs.
KG continues to be deeply involved in philanthropic community initiatives, and serves as advisor, investor or board member of technology companies and community organizations.
Arun Krishnaswamy is an AI and technology executive with leadership experience across Yahoo Research, Microsoft Research, Visa, Workday, and Zuora. His career has focused on applying data science, machine learning, and large-scale intelligent systems to complex enterprise problems. In 2019—three years before ChatGPT—Arun and his team built one of the first enterprise foundation models, designed for forecasting and real-world business decision-making. That experience shaped his belief that the real opportunity in AI is not simply building better models, but turning intelligence into reliable enterprise outcomes. Today, as Founder & CEO of MoolAI, Arun is building toward AGI for Enterprise Operations—transforming business intent directly into trusted, compliant, production-ready outcomes.
12:30 · Lunch break and unconference tables
We'll run two 20-minute rounds of discussion tables starting at 12:45, then everyone regroups at 1:25. Bring a topic you want to dig into.
1:30 · Anusheel Bhushan, co-founder and CTO of Plank
Anusheel Bhushan is co-founder and CTO of Plank (https://joinplank.com), an FDE-as-a-service platform that trains and embeds AI-native engineering teams inside fast-growing startups and enterprises. Previously, he co-founded PlatoAI, an Accel-backed global engineering talent marketplace. Anusheel is a technical mentor at Stanford's StartX and advises multiple AI startups. He is passionate about AI-native SDLC, harness engineering, enterprise AI deployments, and FDE organization design. He has an MS in Computer Science from UC Irvine and a BS from IIT Delhi.
1:55 · Fireside chat: The Evolving AI-Native Perspective for Industries and International
Vinit Bhansali, Atrium Frontier Fund
Vinit Bhansali lives in Bangalore with his wife and two kids. Vinit is General Partner at Atrium Frontier Fund, writing pre-seed cheques into DeepTech, Robotics and AI. Prior to this, Vinit was the Head of Investments at Orios Venture Partners, managing $200m in startup investments. As an entrepreneur, Vinit founded the HomeDepot of India, Buildkar.com in 2014. In 2007 he co-founded CopperSpiral RFID, one of India's top three independent RFID companies. Prior to this, Vinit was a Partner at New Jersey and Florida based Adeena LLC, designing innovative supply chain software for the American and European transportation industry. Buildkar was successfully acquired in 2018 and Adeena in 2007. Vinit recently moved to SF and actively speaks on the founder life on his linkedin and blog he has maintained since 2024.
2:20 · Lightning round: five 6-minute talks
Including
KG Charles-Harris, Founder and CEO, Quarrio
Charles is a repeat founder and former investment banker with multiple enterprise software exits in data integration, BI, and genomics. UN Global Young Entrepreneur Award winner.
Muhammad Kaleem Khan, CEO Heyfon.ai
Muhammad Kaleem Khan is a repeat founder, AI engineer, and startup operator with 8+ years of experience building and commercializing AI products across generative AI, real-time agents, computer vision, and applied machine learning. He is currently the Founder of Heyfon, where he is building production AI agents that help businesses automate customer-facing workflows across voice and chat. Previously, Kaleem worked on GenAI and machine learning systems at Johnson & Johnson and founded Adlytic AI and OMNO AI, building AI products deployed across thousands of cameras and used by 50+ companies. His work has received recognition through the Google Cloud and Google for Startups, P@SHA ICT Awards, and APICTA awards. He brings both a technical and founder perspective, helping teams evaluate product-market fit, AI architecture, technical defensibility, go-to-market strategy, and the path from prototype to a scalable business.
Rowena Tulacz, President, R. Construction Solutions
Rowena Tulacz brings more than 30 years of construction experience spanning estimating, project management and contractor operations. As president of R. Construction Solutions, she helps contractors improve how they pursue work and deliver projects. She is developing AI workflows and products, including Bid Engine, that apply construction expertise to better bid decisions while keeping people accountable for the commitments.
3:00 · Break
3:15 - Present the Builds
4:00 - Judging
4:45 - Winners Announced
Times may shift a little as we finalize the program. We'll send any updates before the event.
🏆 $50,000 already committed—and we’re building from here
Our partners have contributed credits and services to help the winners keep building long after the competition:
Partner Prize value What winners can put to work:
Salt & Ledger $5,500 (Bookkeeping and accounting services 1 year, plus 2026 tax preparation)
Open Cap Stack $2,500 (Cap Table management, Founder SAFEs, and 409A services)
Builder by AINative $25,000 (Builder credits to build with Cody, your autonomous CTO cofounder agent)
AINative $12,000 (AINative platform credits (includes Agent Cloud, Zero DB, Cody CLI, Inference)
Total committed so far: $50,000 Credits and services for the winners
Now we’re growing the cash prize pot.
100% of cash collected from ticket sales, build-lab sponsorships, and other branded event sponsorships will go into the prize pot for the winners.
Every ticket adds to the pot. Every cash event sponsor raises the stakes. Additional contributions of tools, credits, and services give winning teams more resources to keep building.
The community determines how big the prize pool gets. Attendees also get a FREE pass to Shotwell's Speakeasy 2026, the official after party!
🧠 Track 1 — Nonstop UnConference Style Technical Talks
Practical sessions for people building AI-native systems:
AI-native development workflows
Multi-agent orchestration
GPU optimization and inference strategies
Vector databases and agent memory
Model fine-tuning and evaluation
Open-source AI tooling
Infrastructure scaling
Lessons from real AI-native startups
Come ready to ask questions, compare approaches, and take ideas back to your own stack.
🛠 Track 2 — Hands-On Build Labs
Bring your laptop. Leave with something you built.
Planned labs include:
AIKit rapid UI builds and A2UI experiments
ZeroDB vector memory
AINative API integrations
Agent Cloud orchestration workflows
Builder Track (Vibe Coders, Product Managers, Designers)
Infrastructure optimization
Partner-led product challenges and build sessions
Work directly with the tools, explore real use cases, and get into the code.
🥇 The AINative Hack Champion 2026 Finals
Winning teams from regional AINative hackathons in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Detroit advance to the championship finals in San Francisco.
They’ll compete for a prize pool that already includes $50,000 in committed credits and services, with cash from ticket sales and event sponsorships added for the winners.
Come build. Come compete. Come back the teams taking AI-native systems forward.
🤝 Work at a company that should be involved? Make the introduction.
We’re welcoming companies that want to:
Sponsor a build challenge, starting at $1,000
Lead a hands-on lab around tools builders can use
Contribute prizes, including services, software, cloud credits, GPU access, or hardware
Create a branded sponsorship that supports the championship
Bring technical mentors to help teams build
Cash collected from build-lab and branded event sponsorships goes directly into the winners’ prize pot.
Tell us what your company brings and what you want builders to experience. We’ll help shape a relevant opportunity.
Bring your company into the prize pool →
Email developer@ainative.studio
Subject: AINative Summit Sponsorship — [Company]
🎙 Shipping something worth teaching? Take the stage.
We’re inviting proposals for:
Deep technical AI talks
AI-Native startup use case studies
Infrastructure breakdowns
Open-source showcases
Live build sessions
Send your proposed topic, three audience takeaways, and a short bio.
Pitch your talk or build lab →
📣 Be part of what happens next
Attend. Compete. Speak. Sponsor.
Join us on Friday, October 9, in San Francisco.
Tickets go on sale Friday, September 25—and every ticket adds to the winners’ prize pot.
Want to compete, contribute a prize, volunteer or connect us with your company?
Send your name, company or team, and how you’d like to participate.
$50,000 committed + A cash prize pot powered by the community. Help us make the next win bigger. All Summit attendees get a FREE pass to Shotwell's Speakeasy 2026, the after party!