SF Bay Area Events: September 21–27, 2026
A ranked shortlist of 18 verified Bay Area AI, startup, robotics, and builder events for September 21–27, with direct registration links, quality signals, and access friction stated up front.
San Francisco's week of September 21 to 27 runs in two gears: a Tuesday and Wednesday of conferences and capped dinners, then a Saturday carrying four separate hackathons at once. Two rooms had already closed by the time registrations were checked on Sunday, September 20 — DevGuild's Long Horizon Stack and The AI Collective's founders roundtable with Avahi — and the week's largest gatherings, Fellows Forum in Menlo Park and the Rows & Columns Summit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, both cap the room and ask applicants to describe what they work on. Applications are now the norm on the strongest nights, so the practical move this week is to file the ones that need review on Sunday or Monday, and treat Thursday and Saturday as the days where showing up is enough.
The week at a glance
Ranking weighs topic relevance first, then evidence of quality: who is hosting, whether an agenda or speaker list is published, how selective the room is, and whether registration is still open. Every date, time and venue below comes from the event's own page. Times are Pacific Daylight Time, and registration status is what each event page reported on September 20.
| Rank | Event | When | Where | Category | Entry | Status and access |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Long Horizon Agents Hackathon with OpenAI | Fri, Sep 25, 9:30 AM–7:30 PM | San Francisco; address released after approval | Hackathon | Free / Application and approval | Registration open. Apply in advance: unapproved and pending applicants are turned away at the door. Teams of up to four, 18 and over. Backed by AWS, Liquid AI and Nimble. 1 |
| 2 | Healthcare AI Hackathon | Sat, Sep 26, 10:00 AM–5:00 PM | AWS Builder Loft, San Francisco | Hackathon | Free / Two registrations required | Registration open. A Luma RSVP alone gets you nothing: the AWS Builder Loft registration is also mandatory, and check-in requires a government-issued photo ID. Up to $5,000 in prizes; OpenAI, AWS, J.P. Morgan, Pear VC, NEA and Cathay Innovation are named partners. 2 |
| 3 | Rows & Columns Summit | Tue, Sep 22, 9:30 AM–7:00 PM | Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission St, San Francisco | Data infrastructure conference | Free / Application only | Registration open. ClickHouse runs one track for roughly 400 practitioners, with Andy Pavlo of ClickHouse and Google's Fatma Ozcan on the keynotes and Nikita Shamgunov of Databricks, Hannes Mühleisen of DuckDB, Bonnie Xu of OpenAI and Snowflake's Russell Spitzer on the program. 3 |
| 4 | Fellows Forum 2026: From Models to Matter | Wed, Sep 23–Thu, Sep 24, 9:00 AM–5:00 PM | Menlo Park | AI summit | Ticketed, US$399–US$999 | Onsite registration open. Day one covers the LLM stack; day two moves to physical AI, robotics foundation models and autonomous labs. Co-hosted with Nebius and partnering with NVIDIA. 4 |
| 5 | Battle of the Personal Brains Hackathon | Mon, Sep 21, 4:00–9:00 PM | Bright Data, 625 2nd St, San Francisco | Hackathon | Free / Registration open | Registration open, spots limited. Five hours to build a personal agent on Cognee's memory layer, AWS Strands Agents, Docker sandboxes and Bright Data's web access. Every attendee gets $100 in credits; $1,000 goes to the top three teams. 5 |
| 6 | The Agent Arena Hackathon | Sat, Sep 26, 9:00 AM–Sun, Sep 27, 5:00 PM | San Francisco; location released after approval | Hackathon | Free / Application and approval | Registration open. Vultr runs a two-day build on production agent infrastructure with more than $10,000 across cash and credits. Teams of up to four; approval is required and applying does not guarantee a seat. 6 |
| 7 | Twilio Assemble SF: The Future of Comms + AI | Wed, Sep 23, 5:00–9:30 PM | Studio by Tishman Speyer, San Francisco | Developer showcase | Free / Registration | Registration open. Twilio brings its communications and AI toolkit to developers with hands-on build challenges and product demos. Featured on Cerebral Valley's San Francisco calendar. 7 |
| 8 | -1 to Waymo with Dmitri Dolgov | Mon, Sep 21, doors 2:30 PM, talk 3:00–4:00 PM | South Park Commons, 380 Brannan St, San Francisco | Fireside | Free / Approval required | Registration open. Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov talks with South Park Commons. Doors close at the start time, and pending, waitlisted and late arrivals are turned away. 8 |
| 9 | DevGuild: The Long Horizon Stack | Thu, Sep 24, 9:00 AM–6:00 PM | San Francisco | AI infrastructure conference | Ticketed, US$399 | Sold out when checked on Sep 20. Heavybit gathers AI infrastructure founders and distributed systems leaders around what happens as agents own outcomes rather than single tasks. 9 |
| 10 | Agents in Production | Wed, Sep 23, 5:45–8:00 PM | Realm Labs at JJ Lake Business Center, Mountain View | Panel and demos | Free / Application | Registration open. Carnegie Mellon's Vyas Sekar, DoorDash's Baolu Shen and Oracle's Kartik Talamadupula on enterprise adoption and trust, plus demos from Scalekit, Headroom, Prodigal, Realm Labs and Tenki Cloud. Note the venue: the event's own page lists Mountain View. 10 |
| 11 | A Private Omakase Penthouse Dinner · The AI Buildout | Thu, Sep 24, 6:30 PM | Downtown San Francisco; address shared with confirmed guests | Founder dinner | Free / Curated, 24 seats | Registration open by application. The Frontier Syndicate and Norwest Venture Partners seat one table across silicon, clouds, data centers and labs. Dinner is hosted and complimentary. 11 |
| 12 | ITCHATHON - Solve actual problems | Sun, Sep 27, 10:00 AM–7:00 PM | European Startup Embassy, San Francisco | Hackathon | Free / Registration open | Registration open. ITCH built the brief from problems its panel of business owners and industry experts actually described, and hands those problems to teams for a day. Individuals and teams both welcome. 12 |
| 13 | Building in the New Spatial Intelligence Era | Wed, Sep 23, 6:00–9:00 PM | Mission Robotics, San Francisco | Robotics and spatial AI meetup | Free / Curated application | Registration open; capacity limited. Spatial Frontier Club and Mission Robotics convene researchers, founders and investors on world models, robotics, 3D and simulation. Priority goes to applicants whose work matches the themes. 13 |
| 14 | Showerhacks | Sat, Sep 26, 10:00 AM–11:00 PM | Entrepreneurs First, San Francisco | Hackathon and afterparty | Free / Registration open | Registration open. A twelve-hour build for absurd ideas with no economic case required: $1,000 and a shower to the winner, $500 and $225 to second and third, and the top 30% of teams get into the afterparty. 14 |
| 15 | Post Training (for Humans): Chess Night | Thu, Sep 24, 5:30–8:00 PM | 1841 Market St, San Francisco | Themed social | Free / Registration open | Registration open. Dosu hosts food, introductions and a friendly speed chess tournament for AI engineers, founders and builders. Beginners who know how the pieces move will find a game. 15 |
| 16 | AI Founders Roundtable with The AI Collective SF x Avahi | Tue, Sep 22, 6:00–9:00 PM | San Francisco; venue shared with accepted applicants | Founder dinner | Free / Application | Full when checked on Sep 20. The AI Collective, Avahi and AWS seat a small group of founders for roundtables, with selected participants eligible for up to $100,000 in AWS development credits. 16 |
| 17 | Human vs. AI Film Premiere | Sat, Sep 26, 11:00 AM–7:00 PM | Delancey Street Screening Room, San Francisco | Screening | Ticketed / Buy through Sparknify | Tickets on sale. Four screening sessions of nominated short films from the 2026 Human vs. AI Film Festival, with the audience told only at the end which films a human made and which a model did. Registering on Luma alone does not admit you. 17 |
| 18 | AI & Tech Networking Event in San Francisco by Ascent Valley | Wed, Sep 23, 7:00–10:00 PM | Rick & Roxy's, San Francisco | Founder networking and pitch | Free / Registration open | Registration open. A recurring Wednesday night for founders, angels and operators, with a pitch session where selected founders get five minutes in front of investors and a written evaluation. Host credibility rests on the organizer rather than a named speaker list. 18 |
Monday, September 21
A five-hour agent build, then Waymo's co-CEO
Battle of the Personal Brains Hackathon runs 4:00 to 9:00 PM at the Bright Data office, 625 2nd St in SoMa. Cognee hosts with Bright Data, AWS Strands Agents and Docker. The brief is a personal agent that reads your own material — local files, Google Drive, email, meeting notes — and then acts on it, whether that means scheduling, filing expenses or turning a meeting into a to-do list. Everyone who attends leaves with $100 in credits, $50 from Cognee and $50 from Bright Data; the top three teams split $1,000. Registration is open and the room is capped. Status: confirmed listing; registration open, spots limited. Register for Battle of the Personal Brains. 5
-1 to Waymo with Dmitri Dolgov opens its doors at 2:30 PM and runs the conversation from 3:00 to 4:00 PM at South Park Commons, 380 Brannan St. Dolgov is Waymo's co-CEO and one of the founders of the Google self-driving car project that began in 2009. He covers company strategy and deployment of the Waymo Driver. South Park Commons events are open to members, alumni and their guests, and the house rule is unforgiving: doors close at the start time and pending, waitlisted or late arrivals cannot be accommodated. Status: confirmed listing; host approval required. Request entry to the SPC fireside. 8
Tuesday, September 22
The database split, argued in one room
Rows & Columns Summit opens the doors at 9:00 AM and runs to 7:00 PM at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission St. ClickHouse frames the day around the collision of transactional and analytical systems, and brings the people shipping them into one track: Andy Pavlo of ClickHouse Labs opens with a keynote, Fatma Ozcan of Google closes it, and the middle carries a debate panel with Nikita Shamgunov of Databricks, a talk from DuckDB creator Hannes Mühleisen, an Iceberg talk from Snowflake's Russell Spitzer and a session from OpenAI's Bonnie Xu. Attendance is free, application-only, and capped near 400 practitioners, with a happy hour at 5:30 PM. Status: confirmed listing; registration open, application required. Apply for the Rows & Columns Summit. 3
AI Founders Roundtable with The AI Collective SF x Avahi was scheduled for 6:00 to 9:00 PM. The AI Collective and Avahi run it with AWS for a small group of founders and operators, and selected participants are eligible for up to $100,000 in AWS development credits, with credits allocated after the event. The agenda is dinner, welcome remarks and then small-group roundtables to 9:00 PM. Status: confirmed listing; full when checked on September 20, so treat this as a room to watch rather than one to book. Open the roundtable page. 16
Wednesday, September 23
The week's densest evening
Fellows Forum 2026: From Models to Matter runs both Wednesday and Thursday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, in Menlo Park. It is the fourth edition of an invitation-style summit, this year co-hosted with Nebius and partnered with NVIDIA. Day one stays on the LLM stack — frontier models, reasoning, inference economics, agent platforms and enterprise deployment. Day two turns to the physical world: physical AI, world models, robotics foundation models, simulation, humanoid and non-humanoid robots, autonomous labs and materials science. The speaker list spans Google DeepMind, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Replit, Waymo, Intuit and Confluent. Onsite registration is priced at US$399 to US$999. Status: confirmed listing; onsite registration open. Register for Fellows Forum 2026. 4
Twilio Assemble SF: The Future of Comms + AI runs 5:00 to 9:30 PM at Studio by Tishman Speyer. Twilio brings its communications and AI toolkit to developers, with Conversational Intelligence and Claude Code skills on the agenda, hands-on build challenges and product demos aimed at getting agents working across real customer channels. Cerebral Valley features it on its San Francisco calendar, which is how most people will find it. Status: confirmed listing; registration open. Register for Twilio Assemble SF. 7
Agents in Production runs 5:45 to 8:00 PM at Realm Labs inside JJ Lake Business Center, Mountain View — a Peninsula trip, and the event's own Luma page is where the Mountain View address comes from. Realm Labs hosts a panel on what it takes to deploy customer-facing agents and keep them running, with Vyas Sekar of Carnegie Mellon's CyLab, Baolu Shen of DoorDash and Kartik Talamadupula of Oracle, moderated by Realm Labs' Arvind Murali Mohan. Five demos follow, covering authorization infrastructure from Scalekit, token economics from Headroom, loan servicing agents from Prodigal, runtime guardrails from Realm Labs and compute from Tenki Cloud. Status: confirmed listing; registration open, application required. Register for Agents in Production. 10
Building in the New Spatial Intelligence Era runs 6:00 to 9:00 PM at Mission Robotics. Spatial Frontier Club co-hosts a curated gathering for researchers, founders, investors and builders working on world models, robotics, embodied AI, simulation and 3D, and the organizers are still inviting speakers, so the program settles late. Registration asks for your current affiliation and a short note on your work, and priority goes to applicants whose backgrounds match the discussion. Status: confirmed listing; registration open, curated approval. Register for the Spatial Frontier Club night. 13
AI & Tech Networking Event in San Francisco by Ascent Valley runs 7:00 to 10:00 PM at Rick & Roxy's. This is the week's Eventbrite listing that clears the bar: free entry, a named organizer, and a pitch session in which selected founders get five minutes in front of investors and tech leaders, plus a written evaluation. There is no published speaker lineup, and the series runs on most weeks, so the value here is the pitch slot and the room rather than a program. Status: confirmed listing; registration open. Register on Eventbrite. 18
Thursday, September 24
Infrastructure by day, two long tables by night
DevGuild: The Long Horizon Stack runs 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM in San Francisco, hosted by Heavybit. The day is built around what breaks as agents take on longer runtimes and wider reach: cost, quality and trust all start to slip the further an agent's reach extends, and the sessions work through the stack changes that follow. A Software Factories show-and-tell closes the day, with one-minute introductions and presenters choosing the next presenter. Tickets were US$399, and the event was sold out when checked on Sunday. Status: sold out at check; watch the organizer's page for a next session. Open the DevGuild page. 9
A Private Omakase Penthouse Dinner · The AI Buildout sits down at 6:30 PM at a penthouse above downtown San Francisco, with the address released to confirmed guests. The Frontier Syndicate and Norwest Venture Partners curate 24 seats across the layers of the AI buildout — the silicon, the clouds, the data centers, the labs, and the companies built on top of them — and the theme for the evening is what gets built on all of it and by whom. Dinner is hosted and complimentary, with a chef preparing a seated omakase. Status: confirmed listing; curated application, 24 seats. Open The Frontier Syndicate calendar. 11
Post Training (for Humans): Chess Night runs 5:30 to 8:00 PM at 1841 Market St. Dosu hosts an evening for AI engineers, founders and builders: food and introductions from 6:00 PM and a friendly speed chess tournament from 7:00 PM, with the rest of the evening left open for meeting other people building with AI. The format suits anyone who knows how the pieces move. Status: confirmed listing; registration open. Register for Chess Night. 15
Friday, September 25
The one day built for shipping
Long Horizon Agents Hackathon with OpenAI runs 9:30 AM to 7:30 PM in San Francisco, with the address released after approval. The problem it sets is specific: long-horizon agents accumulate observations, actions and stale context until the growing history slows them down, costs more and makes their own state less reliable. Teams build the architecture that fixes it — explicit mutable state instead of ever-growing histories, agents that edit their own working context, and a clear split between what persists and what gets discarded. AWS supplies models and cloud infrastructure, Liquid AI and Nimble back the room, and the day closes with finalist demos at 5:00 PM and awards at 7:00 PM. Capacity is strictly limited, every attendee is approved in advance, teams cap at four, and the event is 18 and over. Status: confirmed listing; registration open, application and approval required. Apply for the Long Horizon Agents Hackathon. 1
Saturday, September 26
Four hackathons and a premiere, all on one day
Healthcare AI Hackathon runs 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM at the AWS Builder Loft. Pear VC, NEA and Cathay Innovation present, with OpenAI, AWS, J.P. Morgan and Troutman Pepper powering a one-day build for engineers, clinicians, researchers, designers and founders. The organizers name three areas they want: care delivery and clinical innovation, healthcare infrastructure and financing, and AI applied to life sciences such as predicting toxicity, delivery and efficacy rather than molecular binding alone. Up to $5,000 goes to the top three teams, with advisory meetings with healthcare AI operators and 1:1 pitch slots with PearX, NEA and Cathay. Two registrations are mandatory — Luma and the AWS Builder Loft — and check-in requires a government-issued photo ID. Status: confirmed listing; registration open, two registrations and photo ID required. Register for the Healthcare AI Hackathon. 2
The Agent Arena Hackathon starts at 9:00 AM Saturday and runs to 5:00 PM Sunday in San Francisco, hosted by Vultr. The brief is production agent infrastructure: VM backends, serverless inference and the compute layer agents run on once they start acting rather than answering. More than $10,000 is on the table across cash and credits. Teams cap at four, every attendee applies and is approved, and the organizers say applying does not guarantee a seat — approved applicants have to confirm. Status: confirmed listing; registration open, application and approval required. Apply for The Agent Arena Hackathon. 6
Showerhacks runs 10:00 AM to 11:00 PM at Entrepreneurs First. The prize structure is honest about the brief: $1,000 and a shower to first place, $500 and $225 to second and third, food provided, and the top 30% of teams invited to an afterparty. Twelve hours, absurd ideas welcomed, economic viability explicitly optional. Zo Computer leads sponsorship, and every participant gets $25 in Featherless AI credits. Status: confirmed listing; registration open. Register for Showerhacks. 14
Human vs. AI Film Premiere runs 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM at the Delancey Street Screening Room. Sparknify screens nominated shorts from the 2026 Human vs. AI Film Festival across four sessions — Joy & Sorrow, Intensity & Serenity, Love & Hate, and Desire & Disgust — and withholds until the end of each film whether a human made it or a model did. Selected screenings are followed by filmmaker conversations and panels. Tickets and seat selection happen on Sparknify's own site; a Luma registration gets you nothing at the door. Status: confirmed listing; tickets on sale through Sparknify. Open the premiere page. 17
Sunday, September 27
ITCHATHON - Solve actual problems runs 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM at the European Startup Embassy. ITCH built the day around a panel it ran on September 24, where business owners and industry experts described problems worth solving, and the hackathon hands those problems to the room. Individuals and teams both register, and the organizers frame the outcome as a solution for a real problem rather than a startup idea. Status: confirmed listing; registration open. Register for ITCHATHON. 12
How to choose
- If you want to ship something in one day. Saturday carries four separate builds: Healthcare AI Hackathon at the AWS Builder Loft with up to $5,000 and a mandatory second registration, The Agent Arena Hackathon running through to Sunday at 5:00 PM for more than $10,000, Showerhacks at Entrepreneurs First for $1,000 and an afterparty, and Friday's Long Horizon Agents Hackathon with OpenAI if you can get approved in time.
- If you want the infrastructure argument rather than the code. Rows & Columns Summit on Tuesday is the one room this week where ClickHouse, Google, Databricks, DuckDB, Snowflake and OpenAI argue about the same problem in a single track, and it is free to apply to. DevGuild on Thursday was the other, and it sold out.
- If you want founders and capital in a small room. The Omakase Penthouse Dinner on Thursday seats 24 people across the AI buildout for free, and Fellows Forum in Menlo Park runs two days of the same crowd at US$399 and up. Both want an application or a purchase rather than an RSVP.
- If you want a technical evening without a build. Wednesday alone offers Twilio's developer showcase, a production-agent panel with demos in Mountain View, and Spatial Frontier Club's robotics night at Mission Robotics.
- If you want the room and not the agenda. Chess Night at 1841 Market St on Thursday, and the Ascent Valley pitch night at Rick & Roxy's on Wednesday, both trade a program for a table you can actually talk at.
- If you are planning around a trip. Only one listed event sits outside San Francisco: Fellows Forum in Menlo Park on Wednesday and Thursday. Agents in Production is in Mountain View, which is a Caltrain ride rather than a walk.
Source boundaries and disclosures
This is a curated shortlist of 18 verified Bay Area tech, AI and founder events for September 21 to 27, 2026. Every date, time and venue was taken from the event's own page, and registration status is what those pages reported on September 20, 2026.
Partiful produced nothing in window: its San Francisco listings were San Francisco Tech Week events, and Tech Week runs October 5 to 11, 2026. The official SF Tech Week calendar was behind a bot check on this run, so those October dates come from Tech Week's own site and its Luma calendar, which agree with each other. Eventbrite's San Francisco AI-developer listings were dominated by recurring networking nights and dates beyond this week; the one in-window listing carrying a named organizer, a venue and a pitch format is included above. Cerebral Valley, which returned no Bay Area listings for the two previous weeks, surfaced two in-window events this week — Twilio Assemble SF and The Agent Arena Hackathon — and both are listed.
For events that appeared on an aggregator calendar as well as their own page, the own page decided. That is where the Mountain View venue for Agents in Production came from: the listing that surfaced it implied San Francisco. Where a venue is withheld it is because the host releases it only to approved or confirmed guests, and that is stated in the entry.
References
- 1
- 2Healthcare AI Hackathon
luma.com
- 3Rows & Columns Summit
luma.com
- 4
- 5
- 6The Agent Arena Hackathon
cerebralvalley.ai
- 7
- 8-1 to Waymo with Dmitri Dolgov
luma.com
- 9DevGuild: The Long Horizon Stack
luma.com
- 10Agents in Production
luma.com
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14Showerhacks
luma.com
- 15
- 16
- 17Human vs. AI Film Premiere
luma.com
- 18
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