Blackstone's Jas Khaira to Headline TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Builders Stage on Next-Gen AI
The Blackstone dealmaker will discuss how the next wave of AI giants gets built at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, with early registration open at half price for a second pass.
TechCrunch has booked Blackstone's Jas Khaira for the Builders Stage at Disrupt 2026, where the investor is set to talk through what it takes to build the next generation of AI companies. The session puts one of the largest private capital firms in the room with the founders and operators the conference draws. It also signals where Disrupt's programming is leaning as AI absorbs more of the startup economy.
Khaira works within Blackstone, the New York-based asset manager whose holdings span private equity, real estate and credit. The firm's growth and venture arms have been active in enterprise software and data infrastructure, the layers that AI companies depend on before they ever ship a product. His appearance puts a capital allocator, not a founder, at the center of a conversation usually dominated by builders.
That framing matters because the AI startups now scaling look different from the 2023 cohort. Model training costs have pushed early checks into the hundreds of millions, and later rounds are increasingly structured with debt, secondaries and strategic partners rather than plain equity. Investors who can move across the capital stack, as Blackstone can, are becoming gatekeepers for which labs and applications reach commercial scale.
Disrupt 2026 runs as the conference circuit reshuffles around AI. TechCrunch is offering a 50% discount on a second pass for attendees who register early, a standard lever to lock in attendance before the full speaker list lands. The Builders Stage has historically hosted operators walking through company-building mechanics rather than product demos, which fits a session about how AI giants get assembled.
What Khaira says will be read as a signal about where institutional money expects returns to concentrate: foundation models, applications, or the compute and data plumbing underneath both. The open question is whether the next AI giants are built like traditional venture-backed startups or financed more like infrastructure, with longer horizons and heavier balance sheets. His answer, and the founders who respond to it, will shape the deals that follow.
Disrupt 2026's full agenda and speaker roster are still filling out. Registration details, including the two-pass discount, are live on TechCrunch's events page.