AI Engineer brings the people building AI in production to New York. They spend their days in sessions, workshops and hallway debates about agents, infrastructure and what it takes to ship AI that works. This year, Infinum, Daytona and SurrealDB offered them a different kind of room.
The AI Leaders Happy Hour took place in Chelsea as a side event of AI Engineer 2026. The format was deliberately simple: no agenda, slides, or pitches. Founders, CTOs, senior engineers and GTM leaders came together over drinks and food, and the conversations ran on their own.
Why a room with no agenda
Conferences are good at showing what’s possible. They’re less good at showing what’s actually happening inside teams: what broke last week, which approach turned out to be a dead end, what nobody admits on stage. Those conversations happen in smaller, informal settings, between people facing the same problems.
That’s the idea behind this series. The people building with AI are learning in real time, and the fastest way to learn is from each other.
“When technology changes this quickly, no one figures it out alone,” said James Cole, CEO, Infinum North America. “Sharing what’s working, and what isn’t, helps the whole industry move forward faster and more safely.”
A crowd full of builders
The crowd was deep into AI. Many guests were building startups of their own, at every stage from first product to scaling up, and the conversations reflected that. People wanted to talk about what they were building, what was slowing them down and what they’d learned the hard way.
Accents changed every few steps. Guests had come from Croatia, France, the UK, Canada, Pakistan, Russia and beyond, all drawn to the same city for the same week, all working on some version of the same question: how to make AI work in the real world.
For Infinum, the Croatian presence was a nice touch. Infinum was founded in Croatia over 20 years ago, and Daytona’s founders are Croatian too. Two companies with Croatian roots hosting AI leaders in Manhattan felt like a small sign of how far the region’s tech scene has come.
Why these evenings matter to us
Infinum helps companies move from AI experiments to AI that delivers results.
That work depends on knowing what’s happening at the edge: which tools teams are adopting, which architectures hold up in production and where the real friction is. Events like this keep us close to the people answering those questions every day, and the insights find their way back into the work we do with clients.
Shortly after the event, Daytona, which builds secure, elastic cloud infrastructure for AI agents, announced a $60M Series B at a $1B valuation, led by FirstMark Growth. Investors include Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung Next and Okta Ventures, along with founders such as Patrick Collison of Stripe, Tobi Lutke of Shopify and Aravind Srinivas of Perplexity.
The round is a strong signal that agent infrastructure is becoming core to how software gets built. Congratulations to the whole Daytona team.
Thanks also to SurrealDB, the context and memory layer for AI agents, for co-hosting and bringing a great group of AI and data leaders to the room.
Next stop: London
New York was the second event in our series with Daytona, after San Francisco, and it won’t be the last. Next up is London in November – details and registration.