/ About this event
AI is leaving the cloud and entering the physical world.
Cars. Cameras. Robots. Wearables. Glasses.
As AI starts to see, hear, understand, and act in the world around us, a new set of questions emerges:
What actually belongs on the edge? What should stay in the cloud? And what does it take to turn an AI hardware demo into a real product — and a venture-scale company?
For SF Tech Week, we’re bringing together founders, product leaders, and investors for a candid conversation about AI at the edge — from architecture and product decisions to manufacturing, margins, defensibility, and venture capital.
Featuring
Harrison Jiang — Founder & CEO, Waybox Building Miles, an AI device for cars, between San Francisco and Shenzhen.
Homer Wang — Head of Product, TinyFish Bringing a deep product perspective on edge devices, AI architecture, and what intelligence actually belongs on-device.
Mark Liu — Investor, UpScaleX Bringing the investor perspective on what makes the next generation of AI hardware companies worth backing.
+ a special video dispatch from Shenzhen
Lening Hou — co-founder & CPO, Waybox Sharing the sourcing, supplier, and manufacturing mistakes we learned the hard way while building an edge device in Shenzhen.
We’ll get into:
— Why edge AI, and why now? — What belongs on-device vs. in the cloud — Latency, connectivity, privacy, power, thermal & inference cost — What software founders underestimate about building physical products — Prototype → production, and what breaks in between — Shenzhen supply chain & manufacturing war stories — Where the moat lives when foundation models commoditize — Hardware margins, distribution & defensibility — What investors actually look for in edge AI companies — What the next $10B edge AI company might look like
No polished panel answers. No hardware 101 lecture.
We want disagreements, hot takes, expensive mistakes, and things you only learn after actually building — or investing in — hardware.
We’ll also have real prototypes, PCBs, components, enclosure iterations, and a redacted BOM on the table. Pick them up. Ask questions.
For software founders thinking beyond the screen, hardware founders already in the trenches, engineers building at the edge, and investors looking for what comes after the AI app.
2:30 PM — Doors Open / Networking 3:00 PM — Conversation Begins 4:15 PM — Drinks / Hardware Table / Networking
Limited capacity. Approval required.
Part of #SFTechWeek.
