Frontier Media's Rohan Savla organized the inaugural AUTONOMOUS conference at The Midway in San Francisco on July 16, drawing 500–600 attendees from the physical AI and robotics world — no funding announcements were tied to the event.

Frontier Media, the private events company founded by Rohan Savla, held the first edition of its AUTONOMOUS conference at The Midway in San Francisco on July 16 — a single-day gathering aimed squarely at the commercialization end of the physical AI and robotics market.

Attendance figures differ by source: the conference FAQ puts the number at 500 "founders, engineers, investors, and operators"; ABC7 News, which covered the event, reported roughly 600. Sixty speakers took two stages across four content tracks. Named speakers included Deepak Pathak, CEO of Skild AI; Jamie Shotton, Chief Scientist at Wayve, the autonomous-driving company with U.S. headquarters in Sunnyvale; and Kanu Gulati, a partner at Khosla Ventures. Sessions covered foundation models for physical systems, the race to commercial humanoids, and how robotics companies survive an 18-month enterprise sales cycle.

No product launches or funding announcements tied to the conference appeared in publicly available materials. Frontier Media is a private company with no public financial disclosures; the autonomousfuture.co domain was first archived in April 2026, per the Wayback Machine, giving the event a three-month public runway.

Savla framed the event in the official press release as purpose-built for a market that has moved past the lab: "Robotics has crossed the threshold from research project to commercial reality, and the people building and funding that transition deserve a room built specifically for them." A 2027 edition is in planning; waitlist registration is open at autonomousfuture.co.