San Francisco Data and AI Summit 2026
October 29, 2026
AltDating
AltDating Hub - Coastal Gallery & Hub South
Our AltDating sessions facilitate interactions between data buyers and sellers via a program of personalized matchmaking based on your needs.
Slot 1 - 11:50
Slot 2 - 12:05
Slot 3 - 12:20
Slot 4 - 12:35
Slot 5 - 12:50
Slot 6 - 2:30
Slot 7 - 2:45
Slot 8 - 3:00

Registration & networking breakfast
8:00 - 8:50
Exhibition Area
Welcome & opening remarks
8:50 - 9:00
Golden Gate Stage - Coastal Hub North

Dean Murphy
Commercial Director - Data Provider Products, Neudata
Choices that shape our future
9:00 - 9:20
Golden Gate Stage - Coastal Hub North
AI's ultimate impact will be a function of human decisions, not technical capabilities. This keynote explores the critical choices that will shape progress and opportunity as we enter an Age of Intelligence, with implications for industry and beyond.

Josh Lawson
Head of Civic & Strategic Risk, OpenAI
From niche to necessity: Alternative data's decade of change
9:20 - 10:00
Golden Gate Stage - Coastal Hub North
Marking Neudata's 10-year anniversary, this panel looks at how buying alternative data has gone from a strategic edge reserved for the largest players to an operational necessity for funds of every size. Panelists will explore how sourcing and licensing have evolved as AI has lowered the barriers to entry, letting smaller funds compete for the same signal that was once the preserve of the biggest desks. The discussion will examine how data is refined and filtered today, what AI has changed about that process, and how buyers now separate real edge from noise. It will also consider what this shift means for the vendor ecosystem, and where the next advantage is likely to come from as adoption keeps widening.

Michael Hejtmanek
Vice President, Corporate Solutions, Neudata (Moderator)

Rado Lipuš
Founder & CEO, Neudata

Artemiza Woodgate
CIO & Founding Partner, Integrated Quantitative Investments

Tiago Caruso
CTO, Bond Capital & CEO and Co-Founder, Neural Sourcing
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Claire Saint-Donat
Independent AI & Data Science Advisor, Private Market Funds
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Mukund Mukund
Senior Director, BlackRock
The data edge in agentic investing
10:00 - 10:20
Golden Gate Stage - Coastal Hub North
Investment windows close fast. Firms that delay adopting agentic workflows risk arriving after the opportunity has passed. Yet agents are only as effective as the context they receive. High-quality research requires fresh, accurate data, relevant market context and a clear investment thesis. In this session, Ketaki Rao will explore the urgency of agentic adoption and the data choices that make it work. From identifying meaningful signals to delivering context where agents operate, attendees will discover how to build a foundation for faster, deeper research and act while the window is still open, with investment judgment firmly in their hands.

Ketaki Rao
Chief Product Officer, Crunchbase
The era of model choice
10:20 - 10:40
Golden Gate Stage - Coastal Hub North
AI used to be a simple question: which model should we use? Now the more interesting question is what happens when you can use the best intelligence for the job. A live web search for what changed today. Multiple models when the stakes are high. Local or hybrid AI when the work needs to stay close to your data. This session looks at what that shift means for research. We will explore how teams can get better answers, move faster, and stay in control as AI becomes less about picking one platform and more about combining the right capabilities at the right moment.

Jared Barker
Head of Enterprise Strategy, Perplexity
Data monetization seminar and networking (Invite only)
10:10 - 11:00
Lombard Library - Vista Studio East
Join a select group of data owners and buyers for a closed-door session built around one question: how do you turn data into revenue? A panel of Neudata and external experts will unpack the strategies shaping the market today, followed by open Q&A and invite-only networking with the people who matter most in this space.

Michael Hejtmanek
Vice President, Corporate Solutions, Neudata

Robert Britt
Managing Director & Head of Data Science, GP Strategic Capital, Blue Owl

Ben Cohen
Head of Data Strategy, Final
Coffee & networking break
10:40 - 11:00
Exhibition Area
The next frontier: Private market data from benchmarking to decision intelligence
11:00 - 11:30
Golden Gate Stage - Coastal Hub North
Private markets data has moved beyond quarterly benchmarking. The team from State Street Data Intelligence explains how granular fund and portfolio data now feeds pricing, risk and allocation decisions, and what investors need to put it to work.

Jamie Stewart
Managing Director - Data Intelligence, State Street Data Intelligence

Nan Zhang, CFA, PhD
Managing Director, Head of Product Development, State Street Data Intelligence

Ryan Hanratty
Associate Vice President, State Street Data Intelligence
Private markets track sponsored by

Workshop: AI for fund managers
11:10 - 11:50
Union Square Forum - Vista Studio West
This intensive, interactive workshop is designed specifically for private fund managers navigating the rapidly evolving AI landscape. Participants will receive actionable insights on the key issues shaping AI adoption in investment management from crafting robust AI policies and governance frameworks, to updating fund documentation, leveraging transcription and analysis tools, and preparing for regulatory scrutiny.

Kelly Koscuiszka
Partner, Schulte Roth & Zabel
Investing in AI: Alternative data across the private equity deal cycle
11:30 - 11:50
Golden Gate Stage - Coastal Hub North
AI is reshaping how PE investors source, evaluate, and grow their deals and alternative data is central to that shift, from screening and due diligence through to post-deal value creation. Drawing on live case studies, the session shows these use cases in practice, from spotting AI targets to measuring real usage inside portfolio companies. In AI investing, the edge no longer comes from access to deals - it comes from access to data.

Reyna Eapen
Senior Analyst (Team Lead), Neudata
Private markets track sponsored by

Widening the net: AI tools for sourcing in private equity and beyond
11:50 - 12:25
Golden Gate Stage - Coastal Hub North
AI tools are changing what PE firms can find, not just how fast they work. Panellists will discuss which tools are helping deal teams surface companies that networks and standard databases miss. They will look at where these tools perform well and where they struggle, since some sectors leave a rich data trail and others barely register. The conversation will then turn to build versus buy: when to develop sourcing tools in house, and when a third-party provider makes more sense. Finally, the panel will ask what makes a tool genuinely useful to an investment team, from output quality to how well it fits the way deal teams already work.

Petr Merkuryev
Founder, Medusa Investment Partners (Moderator)
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Tenley Foran
Senior Director, Private Equity Innovation, Bain & Company

Nico Goldberg
Founder, NS Partners

Carlos Castro
Head of Engineering, ICONIQ Capital

Jerry Ye
Partner, BITKRAFT Ventures

Marguerite Morgan
Senior Data Scientist, ICONIQ Capital
Private markets track sponsored by

Beyond the spreadsheets: Turning portfolio data into growth
12:25 - 1:00
Golden Gate Stage - Coastal Hub North
With operational performance now the primary driver of returns, portfolio company data can no longer stay an afterthought. This panel explores how portfolio companies move from fragmented, backward-looking reporting to viewing data as a genuine growth lever. Panelists will discuss what it actually takes to standardize KPIs across finance, sales, and operations and where adoption typically breaks down. The conversation will also weigh how far general partners should push standardization across a portfolio versus tailoring the approach to each business because getting that foundation right is the groundwork for everything that follows.

Peter Eichelberger
Director of Information Technology, Altamont Capital Partners (Moderator)

Cathy Tanimura
Principal, Analytics and Data Science, Summit Partners

Ian Picache
Co-Chairman & Co-Founder, AtomicPE, Inc.
Private markets track sponsored by


AltDating
11:50 - 1:05
AltDating Hub - Coastal Gallery & Coastal Hub South
Our AltDating sessions facilitate interactions between data buyers and sellers via a programme of personalized matchmaking based on your needs.
Slot 1 - 11:50 - 12:05
Slot 2 - 12:05 - 12:20
Slot 3 - 12:20 - 12:35
Slot 4 - 12:35 - 12:50
Slot 5 - 12:50 - 1:05
Slot 1 - 11:50 - 12:05
Slot 2 - 12:05 - 12:20
Slot 3 - 12:20 - 12:35
Slot 4 - 12:35 - 12:50
Slot 5 - 12:50 - 1:05
Lunch break
1:00 - 2:00
Exhibition Area
Lunch & Learn - The financialization of compute
1:10 - 1:50
Union Square Forum - Vista Studio West
Compute is becoming a financial asset, but the market pricing it still trades largely in the dark. This session covers the infrastructure making it tradable: GPU forward curves, residual value models that replace straight-line depreciation with discounted rental income, independent performance benchmarking, and the indices soon settling CME's compute futures. Silicon Data CEO Carmen Li walks through what a reference price layer for AI compute looks like and how it is built.

Carmen Li
Founder & CEO, Silicon Data
Lunch & Learn - From data chaos to deal flow: How identity intelligence unlocks value for providers and buyers
1:10 - 1:50
Lombard Library - Vista Studio East
Whether you're selling alternative data or buying it, the biggest barrier to value isn't the dataset itself, it's the identity chaos that prevents quick integration and confident decision-making. For data providers, messy entities mean stalled trials and lost deals. For hedge funds and asset managers, fragmented identities across vendors create integration nightmares that delay alpha extraction and increase operational risk.
This workshop will guide participants through:
• How modern Entity Resolution (ER) removes friction on both sides of the alternative data transaction
• Why identity problems stall vendor sales cycles and prevent buyers from rapidly integrating and extracting signal from new datasets
• A demonstration showing real-time entity resolution across ticker symbols, corporate hierarchies, and people records using Senzing ER
This workshop will guide participants through:
• How modern Entity Resolution (ER) removes friction on both sides of the alternative data transaction
• Why identity problems stall vendor sales cycles and prevent buyers from rapidly integrating and extracting signal from new datasets
• A demonstration showing real-time entity resolution across ticker symbols, corporate hierarchies, and people records using Senzing ER

Gurpinder Dhillon
Head of Data Partner Strategy & Ecosystem, Senzing

Jamie Foss
Head of Data Partner GTM, Senzing
Tracking AI adoption: What digital data shows about Anthropic and Muse
2:00 - 2:20
Golden Gate Stage - Coastal Hub North
The customer journey has changed. Consumers increasingly begin purchase research in AI assistants, then move across search, apps and websites before converting. This session follows Anthropic end to end, exploring what digital data reveals about one of the most closely watched private companies in AI. KPIs include Claude sign-ups, enterprise logins, user retention over time, active users across web and app, and more. The session closes with an early read on Muse: what its first months of digital adoption show, and how investors can track newly launched products. If you want a data-driven view of how frontier AI labs are competing for users, beyond the headlines, this is the session to attend.

Omri Shtayer
VP, GM of Investor Solutions, Similarweb
AI solutions showcase
2:20 - 2:50
Golden Gate Stage - Coastal Hub North
This session showcases the newest AI vendors, datasets and product launches shaking up the alternative data industry. Stay on top of the latest tools and case studies to sharpen your AI data acquisition strategy.

Shanu Aggarwal
CEO, AlphaRoc
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Myunghee Cho Paik, PhD
Founder & CEO, FHound Insights, Inc.

Pranav Madhukar
Founder & CEO, Meteor Labs
Investment loading: Data for tracking data centres
2:50 - 3:10
Golden Gate Stage - Coastal Hub North
As data centre development accelerates, investors have more ways than ever to understand the sector across every stage of its lifecycle, from construction and grid access to ownership and components. This session maps the alternative data available across each touchpoint and examines what each category can reveal, which signals matter most to investors, and where opportunities are emerging across the space.

Kaitlyn Majkoski
Research Analyst, Neudata
Textual data for AI inputs
3:10 - 3:50
Golden Gate Stage - Coastal Hub North
Social media and audio data have become rich sources of data for AI input, valuable not just for training models but also for powering them in real time. This panel will explore the full lifecycle of social data in AI systems: how it's sourced and licensed for training, and how emerging protocols like Model Context Protocol (MCP) are enabling AI agents to query social platforms in real-time, pulling sentiment, trends, and context directly into workflows. We'll discuss the shifting legal and commercial landscape around data access, the infrastructure (e.g. MCPs) being built to serve both training and querying use cases, and what investors should look for.

Drew Davies
Senior Analyst - Market Data Lead, Neudata (Moderator)

Ben Cohen
Head of Data Strategy, Final

Monika Aggarwal
Data & AI Technical GTM Product Leader, IBM

Christopher Ruiz Chu
Head of Data and Product, NFX

Anirudh Nair
Head of Engineering, Base10

Anubha Thapliyal
Data Scientist, Equity Research, Wellington Management

AltDating
2:30 - 3:15
AltDating Hub - Coastal Gallery & Coastal Hub South
Our AltDating sessions facilitate interactions between data buyers and sellers via a programme of personalized matchmaking based on your needs.
Slot 6 - 2:30 - 2:45
Slot 7 - 2:45 - 3:00
Slot 8 - 3:00 - 3:15
Slot 6 - 2:30 - 2:45
Slot 7 - 2:45 - 3:00
Slot 8 - 3:00 - 3:15
Coffee & networking break
3:50 - 4:10
Exhibition Area
How LLMs work with alternative data in 2026
4:10 - 4:30
Golden Gate Stage - Coastal Hub North
LLMs can't read large financial datasets; they're word machines. Instead, an emergent pattern we call rubrication has appeared: the AI agent writes code containing pre-registered sentences, and the code analyses the data and reports back using those sentences. This talk demos the approach, shares lessons from real prediction-market research, and covers what it means for investors and data vendors.

Ed Parsons
Director of AI, N47
Smarter deals, smarter data: AI's next chapter for investment firms
4:30 - 5:00
Golden Gate Stage - Coastal Hub North
AI is rewriting the investment playbook through faster sourcing, sharper diligence, and real-time portfolio monitoring. This panel cuts through the hype to explore what's actually working, from public market screening to private deal sourcing. We'll look at what AI tools are boosting productivity, the infrastructure firms need to scale, and how investment and data teams are adapting in the way of roles, skills, and processes. We'll also tackle the governance question every investor is asking: can you trust the data behind the decision? And where does this all go next?

Fabian Namgalies
Managing Director, Technology & AI, FTI Consulting (Moderator)

Annamarie Kelly
Founding Product Engineer, Tidemark

Brian Murphy
Head of Data Science and Technology, Salesforce Ventures

Limin Xiao
Senior Portfolio Manager, Allspring Global Investments

Owens Huang
Partner, Portfolio Manager, Dalton Investments

Kevin Chen
Co-Founder, CoinBridge, Adjunct Faculty, New York University
Networking drinks reception
5:00 - 6:00
Exhibition Area
Ask the oracle: Tarot card reading experience
3:00 - 6:00
Third Bay Boardroom
Every LLM has a system prompt. This one has a deck of cards. Take a break from the agenda and sit down with our resident tarot reader for a personal reading. Put your questions to a model that has been in production for 600 years. Hallucinations not guaranteed, but likely.