Official Step SF 2026 Schedule

Vetted startups take the stage to pitch a live panel of investors for the Step SF 2026 grand prize.

How high‑growth product teams went from scattered AI experiments to fleets of production agents embedded across finance, ops, and customer workflows. This panel walks through the before/after stack from data pipelines, retrieval, and context graphs to orchestration and observability, and then digs into what broke, what was rebuilt, and which governance patterns now keep 100+ agents safe and reliable.

Investors are used to fast-built AI products, but they still underwrite long-term companies, not weekend hacks. This session clarifies what matters to seed VCs when the barrier to shipping is near zero.

Silicon Valley is no longer the only center of gravity for ambitious founders and early-stage investors. From established tech hubs to emerging ecosystems, global-by-default companies are increasingly built across multiple startup capitals at once. Dubai is a leading case study in this shift, a market that has rapidly positioned itself as a magnet for founders, capital, and talent moving between East and West. In this session, experienced investors and ecosystem leaders will explore what it takes to build and back companies across markets: how they think about geography in their portfolios, what makes a hub like Dubai attractive, and how founders decide where to base teams, raise capital, and expand.

As AI agents move from isolated pilots to production‑critical systems, the hardest questions shift from “what can they do?” to “who owns them?”. This panel examines how leading teams design, deploy, and govern agents that execute real workflows, including how responsibility splits across data, infrastructure, and product. Speakers will discuss how they define “reliable enough to ship,” what guardrails and evaluation loops they put in place, and how escalation and accountability work when autonomous agents touch customers, revenue, and core operations.

Fundraising can unlock a company or quietly consume it. This roundtable goes beyond term-sheet jargon to explore how founders decide when to raise, how much to take, and which instruments actually serve them over multiple rounds rather than just the next one. We’ll unpack dilution and cap table math, the hidden costs of chasing high valuations and marquee pre-seed funds, and what “enough runway” really means for an early-stage team. Most importantly, we’ll talk about how to run a tight fundraising process so it doesn’t steal the very time you need to be shipping product and talking to customers.

Physical AI must do more than impress in controlled demos. It must operate safely, reliably, and economically in complex real-world environments. Leaders in autonomous systems, robotics, and venture capital discuss the operational, commercial, and funding requirements for taking physical AI from prototype to scalable deployment.

Most founders talk about product-market fit as a milestone; fewer can describe what it actually feels like inside the company. In this roundtable, we’ll distinguish real PMF from the comforting illusion created by vanity metrics and noisy growth. The conversation will dive into how to work in the pre-PMF phase, running sharp experiments, doing unscalable things, and staying close to customers, while avoiding aimless thrashing. We’ll also explore the “messy middle” where traction is okay but not undeniable, and discuss how teams decide whether to refine what they have, pivot in a new direction, or commit more fully to the existing path.

Operators and founders unpack the go‑to‑market decisions that turned early products into durable revenue, not just launch buzz and share how those choices look through an investor’s lens. They’ll walk through how they chose their first motion (PLG, outbound, partnerships, or enterprise sales), what changed once real customers arrived, and how they built a repeatable revenue engine. Along the way, a VC perspective will highlight the signals that matter most in pricing, packaging, and sales strategy, and what leading GTM teams do to maintain strong win rates and retention in an AI‑flooded market.

In this debate, speakers take opposing views on what happens when users interact with AI agents instead of SaaS dashboards. One side argues that agent‑first workflows will fundamentally reshape product design, pricing, and go‑to‑market as interfaces disappear; the other side contends that UI‑driven products and traditional SaaS models will remain central. Together, they explore how an agent‑first world changes who wins, how value is captured, and whether “no UI” is a feature or a threat.

For many early-stage companies, the real blocker isn’t a lack of ideas, it’s a lack of focus. This roundtable looks at how founders identify when their startup is spread across too many customers, channels, or features, and what it takes to commit to a single core bet. We’ll discuss practical ways to choose that “one thing,” stay disciplined without becoming blind to new information, and build internal alignment around a focused strategy. The group will also tackle one of the hardest moves in practice: turning down distracting opportunities and even short-term revenue when they drag the team away from the product that actually needs to exist.

When anyone can ship an AI demo in a weekend, differentiation lives below the surface. This panel unpacks the moats that matter most for AI startups today from proprietary data and customer‑embedded workflows to security, compliance, and platform choices. Along the way, panelists will share how they respond when copycats appear and what boardrooms look for to decide whether a company is truly pulling away.

Top selected startups pitch live in front of investors and industry leaders for the final round of the Step SF Pitch Competition, showcasing their companies, traction, and vision while competing for recognition on the Step SF stage.