/ About this event
An evening robotics x AI event during SF Tech Week, hosted by DigitalOcean and Catalyst Bay.
We're bringing together robotics and AI founders, investors, and builders for an evening of real content and curated pitches.
What's happening
🟢 Speakers
•Anand Lalwani - Co-Founder and CEO of Cardinal Robotics, Stanford PhD | Robotics - https://www.linkedin.com/in/anandlalwani/
• Katherine Scott, Developer Relations Engineer, Intrinsic - https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherineascott/
• Jeson Lee, Founder, Savant Ventures -https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeson-lee-junzhen-7b175b8a/
• Justin Wasserman, Research Scientist @ Skild AI - https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-wasserman-52a939ba/?isSelfProfile=false
🟢 Judges • Katherine Scott, Intrinsic • Daniel Ho, Prometheus • Jeson Lee, Savant Ventures • Ryan McCrackan, Yamaha Motor Ventures • Meghna Gummadi, Foundry Robotics • Varad Mohod, Zacua Ventures • Ainur N., Robotics Founder
Past speakers have come from OpenAI, Anthropic, Tinder, Qualcomm, Rivian, AGI, Inc., Liquid AI, Respeecher, Superpower, and Stanford School of Medicine.
🟢 Pitch Competition, 8-10 robotics x AI startups with tractions pitch to a panel of investors and operators. Three minutes to pitch, two minutes of Q&A.
🟢 Winners announced live
🟢 Open networking before and after.
Apply to Pitch: https://whk06pk37nm.typeform.com/to/SxU3pRL0
We're looking for pre-seed to seed-stage startups building in robotics, embodied AI, or hardware automation.
Criteria: up to $500K raised (pre-seed) or $500K+ raised / $10K+ MRR (seed).
Investors/Enterprise Leaders, join the judging panel or stay in the loop: https://whk06pk37nm.typeform.com/to/yO2KnddE
Tuesday, October 6, 2026 5-8 pm
Hosted by:
Catalyst Bay
Catalyst Bay started with Techstars Startup Weekend SF hackathons. Now it's a 10,000-person SF community running pitch nights, fireside chats, and meetups for the people building and betting on AI products: founders, investors, engineers, designers, PMs, marketers, and devrels.
DigitalOcean 🔗 https://www.digitalocean.com/?utm_source=luma
DigitalOcean is the Agentic Inference Cloud built for production AI. We deliver predictable cost efficiency, radically simple operations and high performance at scale so teams can focus on building AI products instead of managing infrastructure or absorbing surprise costs.
DigitalOcean Startups 🔗 https://www.digitalocean.com/startups?utm_source=luma
DigitalOcean Startups is designed to help founders build and scale faster than ever on the inference cloud. With fully customized core and GPU credit packages, support, community, and more, the Startups program empowers you to scale your AI ambitions, not your expenses.
Empat 🔗 https://www.empat.tech/home
Empat is a startup studio that turns great ideas into successful tech products. Their skilled, enthusiastic team helps founders go from idea to working product, covering design, development and launch. Empat has been a long-time partner of the Catalyst Bay.
By registering for this event, you agree to release Catalyst Bay from any liability related to your participation. You also consent to photography and video recording during the event, with the resulting media potentially used for marketing and promotional purposes. By registering, you agree to be added to the Catalyst Bay newsletter for updates on future events and community news. You may unsubscribe at any time.
This event is a part of #SFTechWeek—a week of events hosted by VCs and startups to bring together the tech ecosystem. Learn more at www.tech-week.com
