Benchmark’s full partnership joins the main stage at Disrupt 2026

Rather than another conversation about where venture capital has been, the focus is on where it goes next: where the next generation of startups will come from, which assumptions founders should reconsider, and which opportunities the partners believe are still hiding in plain sight. And 2026 is an especially interesting year to ask them. Benchmark has spent decades building a reputation around concentrated early-stage investing. This year, it made one of the biggest changes in its own playbook – raising approximately $2 billion across a $750 million flagship fund and its first $1.25 billion growth fund. The market changed. Benchmark changed with it. Now we want to know what the firm thinks will happen next. AI has reshaped the venture market with extraordinary speed. According to the OECD, AI companies captured 61% of global venture capital investment in 2025 – $258.7 billion of $427.1 billion invested overall. Yet that capital was far from evenly distributed: deals worth more than $100 million represented roughly 73% of total AI investment value. That creates a strange environment for founders. There is huge appetite for technology businesses, alongside growing competition for a relatively small number of companies investors believe can become category leaders. Is the next billion-dollar company another AI application, or is the application layer already overcrowded? Does defensibility sit in models, infrastructure, proprietary data or distribution? Are some of the best businesses being overlooked because everyone is chasing the same themes? And when founders can build products faster than ever, what actually makes one company investable? Benchmark’s partnership brings together experience from founding companies, backing enterprise software, investing in frontier technology, and helping businesses navigate IPOs and acquisitions. Jack Altmanjoined Benchmark this year after founding Lattice and subsequently building his own venture firm, Alt Capital. Before joining Benchmark, Alt Capital had raised $425 million across its early-stage investing activities. His path gives the discussion an unusually direct founder-to-investor perspective. Peter Fentonbrings one of venture’s longest track records. His investments span consumer and enterprise companies, including current AI bets such as Sierra, Digits and Sema4.ai. He has served as a director through seven successful IPOs, including Twitter, Elastic, New Relic, Zendesk and Yelp. Chetan Puttaguntafocuses on early-stage enterprise software and has backed companies including MongoDB, MuleSoft, Elastic, Modern Treasury, Legora and Stytch. Everett Randlebrings experience investing across stages and categories, with investments that include Anthropic, SpaceX, Rippling, Flock Safety, Gumloop and Chainguard. AndEric Vishriafocuses on early-stage infrastructure and enterprise software, with investments including Amplitude, Confluent, Fireworks.ai and Cerebras Systems. Before becoming an investor, he was himself a startup CEO, co-founding RockMelt before its acquisition by Yahoo. Put those perspectives together andthis session, “What We Believe Now,”becomes less about a single Benchmark thesis and more about how experienced investors disagree, update their assumptions, and decide where conviction is warranted. Cerebras is a useful example.Vishria recently told TechCrunchthat he almost didn’t take his first meeting with the AI chip startup in 2016. Hardware was outside Benchmark’s comfort zone, and what Cerebras wanted to build looked extraordinarily difficult. By the third slide, he had changed his mind. Benchmark went on to co-lead the company’s $25 million Series A. A decade later, Cerebras went public, with Benchmark holding a 9.5% stake at the IPO. That story encapsulates something important about venture investing. The best opportunity does not always arrive looking like the consensus winner. Sometimes it challenges the investor’s existing thesis. Sometimes the technology is too early. Sometimes the market does not obviously exist yet. And sometimes knowing when to change your mind is more valuable than being right from the beginning. Expect that kind of thinking to surface on the Disrupt Stage. For founders, there may be no more useful part of the session than hearing what Benchmark believes entrepreneurs are currently misreading. Not because Benchmark is automatically right, but because understanding how sophisticated investors assess markets, teams, and opportunities gives founders another way to interrogate their own assumptions. Investors can compare those frameworks with their own. LoB leaders can see which shifts venture firms believe are durable enough to shape the companies they work for – and where capital may flow next. For students, aspiring founders, and anyone simply trying to understand where technology is heading, it’s a rare opportunity to hear five investors with very different experiences work through their ideas in the same room. And those ideas matter well beyond the venture industry. Investment decisions are ultimately bets about which technologies, business models, and founders have the potential to shape the next decade. A lot can change in the world of tech in twelve months. AI capabilities move. Markets emerge. Categories disappear. Companies that looked inevitable suddenly don’t, while businesses few people were watching break through. Having a thesis matters. Knowing when to update it matters more. Join Jack Altman, Peter Fenton, Chetan Puttagunta, Everett Randle and Eric Vishria on the Disrupt Stage and hear what Benchmark believes now – and what might convince them to change their minds next. Disrupt 2026returns to San Francisco’s Moscone West, October 13–15, bringing together more than 10,000 founders, investors, operators and innovators across six stages, roundtables, breakouts, Startup Battlefield, theExpo Hall, and more.