September 2, 2026
RenderATL Draws Over 6,000 Tech Leaders, Founders, And Innovators To Atlanta
The two-day conference put a spotlight on Atlanta’s booming Black tech community.
RenderATL united more than 6,000 tech founders, executives, entrepreneurs, and creators in the heart of Atlanta last month, solidifying the city as a premier technology destination.
Code, Culture, And Community
Held Aug. 12-13 during Atlanta Tech Week, RenderATL has ballooned into one of the fastest-growing tech conferences in the country. This year, the two-day event featured more than 150 speakers and industry leaders discussing AI, open source, developer tools, cloud infrastructure, and the future of work. Among the featured speakers were former Google distinguished engineer and noted technologist Kelsey Hightower, Grammy-winning rapper, entrepreneur, and activist Killer Mike, and Google Chrome engineer Sarah Drasner. Other speakers included engineering executive Angie Jones; Robin Ginn, executive director of the OpenJS Foundation and a former Microsoft executive; and Matteo Collina, the co-founder and CTO of Platformatic.dev.
Beyond the stage discussions, RenderATL included an interactive expo and career fair, giving attendees opportunities to connect with companies and explore professional opportunities. Event organizers also partnered with OpenJS Foundation to host the first-ever OpenJS Summit, a dedicated space for developers and maintainers who power the JavaScript ecosystem. Attendees were also granted access to programming that took place during Atlanta Tech Week, including events hosted by Major League Hacking.
Outside of panels, workshops, and mixers, the two-day conference included a Render Haus concert presented by Vercel and Sanity, featuring performances by D4L and Dem Franchize Boyz, as well as RenderFEST, featuring performances by Atlanta artists Lloyd and Yung Joc.
Launched in 2019, RenderATL was founded by Justin E. Samuels, a former senior software engineer at Intuit, to bridge the gap between the tech community and Black culture in Atlanta.
“What makes RenderATL special is our ability to bring code, culture, and community together in a way that feels uniquely Atlanta,” he said in a statement sent to BLACK ENTERPRISE. “At RenderATL, we say that we convert culture into pipeline by turning the energy, talent, and connections that make Atlanta special into real opportunities for people, businesses, and the broader tech ecosystem.”
Beyond the 6,000 in-person attendees and 3,000 virtual attendees, Samuels says more than 35,000 people participated in Atlanta Tech Week, which he launched in 2023. It included over 300 tech-focused events across the metro region, such as the Silicon South Summit and Atlanta AI Expo. According to Samuels, 20% of attendees traveled from outside Atlanta, positioning the city as a growing hub for tech founders, investors, operators, and talent.
“That scale speaks to the strength of Atlanta’s tech ecosystem and the growing recognition that this is a city where people come to build, connect, and shape what’s next,” said the BLACK ENTERPRISE 40 Under 40 honoree.
The AI Revolution
AI and its role in the workplace and business took center stage at this year’s RenderATL. New Relic, a cloud-based full-stack observability platform that helps engineers monitor, debug, and improve application and infrastructure performance, sponsored several sessions designed to equip attendees with information and AI tools shaping the future of product innovation. In addition to speaking at the opening and closing keynote panels, Jemiah Sias, vice president of Market Strategy and Developer Relations at New Relic, and his team held workshops designed to equip engineers with tools that can help them automate and optimize their workflows.
“You have [thousands of] engineers from some of the best companies in the world in a room, and that’s our core user,” he told BE. “They build the tools that we care about,” he continued. “We need to understand their pain points. We need to empathize with them and make sure that our software can support their journey as they’re changing through adopting AI, but also being responsible for shipping enterprise-level software and keeping those systems online.”
For the first time, RenderATL included a track focused on the congruence of legality and technology. Rebecca P. Beliard, Esq., the founder and managing partner of RPB Law Firm, delivered a presentation on intellectual property ownership in the age of AI. Her talk took place during Render’s inaugural Law & Tech Summit, spearheaded by Render Group’s Chief Legal Officer Reba Noel and Render Group’s in-house counsel, Lloyd Jean.
“I shared my legal and business perspective with entrepreneurs and technology leaders on the importance of ownership and protecting the value they are building,” Beliard told BE in an email. “Participants learned how to protect, build, and monetize their intellectual property through licensing agreements and other strategic channels in the age of AI.”
According to Beliard — who formerly worked for big corporations like Amazon Music and Sony before representing Render Group and other small businesses — founders must understand the current limitations that their AI-focused IP may be subject to under US copyright law.
“Under the current position of the US Copyright Office, material that is solely generated by AI is not eligible for copyright protection, while works that contain sufficient human authorship may be protected,” she said. “That distinction is important for founders who are building businesses around AI. It is not enough to use the technology. Entrepreneurs need to understand what they can actually own and protect so that they can fully benefit from the commercial opportunities they are creating.”
Empowering People Beyond Tech
For the past six years, RenderATL has played a pivotal role in the growth of technology and entrepreneurship in Atlanta. It has also fostered a community that allows tech professionals to feel seen outside of their race, nationality, and gender.
“It’s important to cultivate spaces like Render because it allows for [companies] to see us as more than ‘Black techies,’ ‘Black female engineers,’ [or] ‘Black marketers,’ and instead refocus the attention on our impact,” said Ava Toro, a global market researcher formerly at Reddit, who spoke at the event.
She added that it’s crucial for diverse tech workers to be recognized for their work rather than boxed into a label.
“I’m not a ‘Black marketer,'” she said. “I’m the global researcher who has helped brands shift sentiment, brought one of the newest conversational AI tools to market, and a leader in my field.”
RELATED CONTENT: Tech companies are expanding rapidly, but supply chain bottlenecks threaten progress