Second Annual Consumer Tech Summit: Event Recap
April 29, 2026
This year's Summit returned with a sharper edge. More than 300 founders, investors, and operators spent the day debating where consumer technology is heading. Three ideas kept surfacing:
Software and services are merging. AI now lets companies deliver personalized services at software margins, rewriting what a good consumer business looks like.
Human taste is becoming more valuable, not less. As AI content floods every channel, consumers pay a premium for genuine curation and point of view.
Lean teams are building big companies. A billion-dollar business built by fewer than 100 people is becoming the new standard for capital efficiency.
Session One: How Decisions Get Made in Venture Right Now
Deven Parekh, Managing Partner, Insight Partners · Moderated by Scott Birnbaum, Managing Partner, Red Sea Ventures
Deven's 25-year view: hard markets force discipline that abundance destroys: Stripe was built in a downturn. Today's AI climate hasn't yet produced that discipline, and the first companies disrupted by foundation models were other AI companies. Deep workflow embedding is the only real protection.
"People feel they made a sacrifice and did what they were supposed to do, and yet the wealth gap keeps widening. We have to find a way to make sure the public gets access to the wealth creation of this AI era." — Deven Parekh
We're looking for: Consumer companies with deep workflow embedding that's hard to displace, and founders who can articulate their moat clearly when capital is abundant.
Session Two: Rebuilding Hospitality from the Ground Up
Ben Leventhal, Founder, Blackbird · Moderated by Scott Birnbaum, Red Sea Ventures
40% of restaurants were unprofitable last year; the rest averaged 2.7% margins, squeezed by card fees and delivery commissions. Ben's answer: a coalition loyalty program built like an airline miles network, giving independent restaurants scale and leverage they've never had. He frames the future of dining around two AI layers: a "Taste Layer" that knows your preferences and an "Execution Layer" that secures the table.
"The bar for consumer products is magic. You have to deliver magic, and deliver value exactly as you say you're going to." — Ben Leventhal
We're looking for: Loyalty, identity, and payments infrastructure that re-engineers the P&L for fragmented, low-margin categories (dining, fitness, indie retail), and tools that give independent operators institutional-scale leverage. RSV's Dorsia and Accrue sit at this intersection.
Session Three: The New Commerce Layer of the Internet
Christopher Tinsley, Co-Founder, ShopMy & Lindsay Brooke Weiss, Coco in Cashmere · Moderated by Dan Reich, Co-Founder, Tula Skincare & RSV Venture Partner
The follower count is dead: Lindsay has driven seven figures in revenue with just 83,000 followers, and the data shows a surprisingly low correlation between reach and sales. Winning creators are the ones whose judgment consumers trust, and talent is already shifting from sponsored posts to equity and advisory roles. Community is no longer a marketing tactic; it's a foundational business moat.
"It's increasingly important to think about your role as a chief community builder who understands how consumer markets and culture are shifting." — Dan Reich
We're looking for: Consumer brands with hyper-engaged, high-converting communities, and tools that let creators capture equity-like upside, the inverse of the affiliate model.
Session Four: Building the OS for AI-Native Storytelling
Cristóbal Valenzuela, Co-Founder, Runway · Moderated by Pouya Shahbazian, Founder, Staircase Studios AI (RSV portfolio)
We're moving from editing reality to generating it. World models trained on pixels understand physics, not just abstraction, which is why Runway is already selling models to robotics companies, and why Hollywood adoption is moving faster behind closed doors than headlines suggest. Runway's stance: users own their outputs; AI is the next evolution of the tool, not the author.
"We are getting to a point where you can simulate anything: software, science, storytelling. Being able to extrapolate that has become a superpower." — Cristóbal Valenzuela
We're looking for: IP-native businesses built ground-up around generative pipelines, and consumer applications of world models beyond entertainment: fitness, education, design, commerce.
Session Five: The Financial Layer Behind Modern Consumer Companies
Everett Cook, Co-Founder, Rho & Leif Abraham, Co-Founder, Public · Moderated by Dror Ayalon, Head of AI Product, JPMorgan Chase
Leif's framework: separate AI reasoning (strategy) from deterministic execution (fixed rules), the architecture that keeps AI from moving real money without human guardrails. Everett's corollary: never compete with the underlying models; build so your product improves automatically as they do. Traditional institutions are "increasingly afraid" of digital-native platforms that understand customer workflows better.
"The center of your financial life is not your checking account; it's your investment portfolio. We design for that audience." — Leif Abraham
We're looking for: Consumer fintech that improves as foundation models improve, and vertical tools for underserved high-income segments: creators, operators, athletes, founders. RSV portfolio: Novo Bank and Accrue.
Session Six: The Reality of AI — Obliterate, Don't Automate
Alex Haskell, ElevenLabs, Dan Mishin, Founder, ManifestOS, Rebecca Kaden, General Partner, Union Square Ventures · Moderated by Gabe Fleet, Partner, Latham & Watkins
Rebecca's framing: every tech cycle produces two waves: the first helps the middleman, the second removes them entirely. The firms defining this era are building the second wave. Dan's conclusion: in an age of infinite leverage, a great engineer is 100x more valuable than a good one, and billion-dollar businesses should be built with fewer than 100 people.
"SaaS was the golden standard of revenue. Today, we can productize services that used to be completely unscalable." — Dan Mishin
We're looking for: Companies that replace a service category rather than optimize the incumbent. Productized services in consumer health, legal, financial advice, and personal admin. RSV portfolio: Granted Health and Range.
Session Seven: OpenAI Keynote — Patterns of Startup Success at the Frontier
Mike Wilner, GTM, Startups, OpenAI
The biggest opportunity in AI is the "capability overhang", the gap between what models can do and what non-technical industries actually use them for. Founders who close that gap with last-mile scaffolding, and move fast when OpenAI closes it natively, write category-defining stories. Agent 2.0 is here: stateful autonomous agents running for hours or days on complex goals.
"Obsess over people, not the task. Help them understand how to do better and do more with AI. That is the most positive position you can be in." — Mike Wilner
We're looking for: Consumer AI products targeting industries where AI adoption is still near zero, and stateful agents that take real-world action over hours and days, not chatbots that just answer questions.
What We're Backing
We're actively deploying capital across three thesis areas:
Consumer AI Apps — products that own the customer workflow and improve automatically as models improve, especially at the intersection of privacy, regulation, and AI lowering costs to widen access.
Consumer Health & Longevity — productized services that replace category middlemen and flip labor-bound economics to software-bound.
Digital Luxury — brands, marketplaces, and platforms where curation, taste, and community are the moat.
We write $500K–$2M initial checks at pre-seed and seed, lead or co-lead roughly half our investments, and invest in consumer brands as well as consumer tech.
Building in any of these areas? Send your deck to hello@redseaventures.com. Warm intros are always the fastest path in.
Coming This October: Second Annual Consumer Brand Summit
A focused day in New York for founders, operators, and investors building the next generation of consumer brands. Our first annual sold out, and invites are limited.
Thank you to our Headline Sponsor, Latham & Watkins, and our Event Partners: Stifel, Graphite Financial, Aduro Advisors, True Search, and Hawke Media.
Red Sea Ventures · Early-Stage Consumer Venture Capital · New York, NY