With immense gratitude and excitement, we’re announcing the sponsors of BRXND NYC 2026 below .
We still have room for one, mayyyybe two more partners to help make the show come to life. If you’re interested, drop a line here or email me ASAP at mike@brxnd.ai
And if you’d like to meet these outstanding companies on Nov. 5 at the Times Center, there’s still space but we’re filling fast.
We’re incredibly grateful to the sponsors who make BRXND NYC 2026 possible. In lieu of any additional preamble, let’s get to know each of the companies a little better.
Apex Sponsor
Runway: Runway is an applied AI research company building frontier video generation models. Runway’s tools are helping 95% of the Fortune 100, global advertising firms and thousands of brands scale their creative output and ambition.
It’s been a true honor to get to know the Runway team over the past two months and as a lifer in New York tech, it is incredibly inspiring to have a company that is building true frontier models right in our backyard. In February, Runway closed a $315 million Series E led by General Atlantic, with NVIDIA and AMD Ventures participating, roughly doubling the company’s valuation to $5.3 billion and just this month, they crossed $200M in ARR.
TechCrunch framed Runway’s scale of ambition well: “Every major AI lab is betting on language. Runway is betting they’re wrong.” Its three founders met in an NYU art-and-tech program and are building world models that learn how reality works from video rather than text, an audacious and contrarian bet on what co-founder Anastasis Germanidis calls “the most transformative technology of our time.”
Hollywood has leaned into Runway’s technology for years. Lionsgate had Runway train a custom model on its library of more than 20,000 titles, Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All at Once used its tools, and AMC Networks uses it for previsualization and promotional imagery. Last December, Runway shipped Gen-4.5, which debuted at #1 on Artificial Analysis's blind-voted Video Arena, ahead of Google and OpenAI. I’m infatuated watching any of their demos around how objects move with weight and characters and products hold their look from shot to shot, constantly resetting my priors of what I think AI can do in creative production.
We’ll have Runway’s Chief Creative Officer, Jamie Umpherson, on stage at BRXND and we’ll introduce you all to him properly with a profile in the newsletter before the show. Finally, for any readers based in SF, Runway also has their own summit coming up next Wednesday with leaders from Deepmind, NVIDIA, Gamma and many more taking the stage.
Presenting Sponsors
Emberos: Emberos is the operating system for AI Brand Management. The platform enables brands to understand how AI systems perceive them, predict where their narrative is heading, shape that narrative at the source, and prove what changed. Powered by the emberos Brand Knowledge Graph and a suite of specialized AI agents, emberos gives organizations the intelligence, execution, measurement and governance infrastructure required to manage their brands across AI systems
Knowing what ChatGPT says about your brand is useful. Knowing why it says it is more valuable. Knowing what is likely to change next, what you can do about it and whether that action worked is where this becomes an enterprise operating function.
This was the opening sentence when we introduced Emberos founder and CEO Justin Inman in BRXND 138 and from the moment I met him, I’ve always thought, “this is a guy that gets the craft of brand management in the age of AI.” In a world too often dominated by short-term GEO arbitrage hacks that the next model release renders counterproductive, Emberos is purpose-built for enterprise brands to truly shape their destiny in AI search. Fresh off a new round of funding, we’re excited to welcome Emberos to talk about how online discoverability has shifted in an AI/LLM driven search world and what brands can do to manage it proactively.
VantagePoint: VantagePoint™ is the advertiser-facing measurement and economic governance layer that quantifies partner influence across outcome-driving journeys where traditional click-based tracking no longer exists, and converts that verified influence into enforceable, auditable commission logic. It captures influence from AI summaries, AI search results, and other machine-mediated discovery paths, and operationalizes that influence through Partnerize’s attribution, commissioning, and payment infrastructure to ensure contributors to conversion are identifiable and compensable.
For the last 25 years, a massive marketing-industrial complex has been maniacally focused on perfecting deterministic attribution for marketing based on clicks. And then boom, AI becomes the internet and the very notion of a click begins to become quaint. And so the old Wanamakerism returns with a slight twist: “I know half my marketing spend influences ChatGPT, I just don’t know which half.”
Alongside some fascinating work Cloudflare and Stripe are doing, VantagePoint is the truest first-principles thinking I’ve seen around what attribution, analytics and economic governance for marketing should look like in the LLM-era. After Chief Product Officer Andy Crossen takes the stage, I suspect many of the marketing leaders in the crowd will start thinking differently about how to allocate media budgets in this new age.
Supporting Sponsors
Dstillery: Dstillery is the predictive audience company, helping marketers reach exactly the right audience for every digital campaign. Powered by multimodal AI and its agentic platform, DS-1, Dstillery enables precise audience targeting at scale, simplifying workflows and driving superior campaign outcomes.
Dstillery’s predictive models learn across data modalities – including web journeys, CTV signals, search signals, purchase intent signals, and more – to build a robust understanding of a brand’s best customers and activate high-performing audiences across programmatic and social channels.
We’re extra grateful to Dstillery as a returning sponsor of BRXND and can’t wait to welcome them back to the show. I first met Dstillery CEO Michael Beebe back in April and the next day, published “the machines eat media buying” based on our jam session. Everything that has happened since makes me think so much marketing work will move to the harness gradually…then suddenly, making DS-1 an even more powerful tool for the moment.
Writer: WRITER is the enterprise AI agent platform that helps marketing teams build an AI-native marketing engine grounded in their data, workflows, and team. Marketing demands keep growing, but teams don’t — compliance reviews become massive bottlenecks, and without proper guardrails, brand drift creeps in across every channel. WRITER rapidly accelerates the content-to-campaign lifecycle, increases AI visibility, and achieves customer personalization at scale, delivering 333% ROI in six months on average. Every output is on-brand and compliant the first time, giving you the strategic growth and competitive velocity to stay ahead of the market.
Another company that builds models here in New York! I love a good example of counterpositioning and Writer’s “we didn’t train it on trivia, we trained it on the work” is chef’s kiss copy for Palmyra X6, their flagship model for agentic work at scale. We’ll have more from Writer when we introduce our next round of speakers so stay tuned.
A huge round of thanks again to all of our sponsors for supporting the show— we truly could not do this without you. For folks reading who would like to meet these companies, tickets are still available but will sell out.
Thanks for all of the support, and I look forward to seeing you in November.