TechCrunch announced the next five venture capitalists who will judge Startup Battlefield 200 at Disrupt 2026, taking place October 13–15 at Moscone West in San Francisco. Each hand-picked founder gets six minutes to present, followed by judge questioning that surfaces the same concerns investors will care about: execution, market size, timing, and defensibility. The newly revealed judges join ten previously announced investors on the panel, and the winner receives a $100,000 prize.

The new judges are Vaibhav ‘Dr.V’ Agrawal, co-founder and general partner of ODDBIRD VC, a pre-seed fund founded in 2024 to back AI companies reindustrializing the West, focused on health and bio, critical supply chains, and real-world automation. Agrawal is a trained physician with an MBBS, holds an MBA from Stanford, and was previously a general partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners India; his portfolio includes Anterior, a healthcare AI company that raised $64 million from NEA and Sequoia.

Anu Bharadwaj, a partner at ICONIQ, focuses on enterprise software and AI. She spent nearly 12 years at Atlassian as president and COO, leading product, engineering, and enterprise business across Jira, Confluence, and Atlassian Cloud while the company scaled to billions in annual revenue, and previously held leadership roles at Microsoft.

Sho Sho Leigha Ho is a partner on General Catalyst’s seed team and a board observer at Together AI. She joined General Catalyst in 2024 as its youngest partner; her public investments include Graylark, Autoscience, Standard Kernel, and Poke, which Cognition acquired in July 2026.

Miloni Madan Presler, a partner at IVP, partners with first-time founders building inflection-stage companies in enterprise software, healthcare, and security from Series B through pre-IPO. She brings a growth equity and private equity perspective shaped by earlier roles at Summit Partners and Warburg Pincus.

Aidan Madigan-Curtis, a partner at Eclipse Ventures, invests in AI, IoT, computer vision, and software for manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, and climate transition. She leads Eclipse’s Carbon Optimization framework to track emissions reductions across the portfolio, and previously was a senior executive at Apple scaling Apple Watch manufacturing from zero to millions of units per week, plus VP and general manager at Samsara, where she helped grow the company from pre-revenue to over $1 billion in ARR.

Disrupt 2026 will bring together 10,000+ tech leaders, VCs, and founders in San Francisco. Ticket prices increase on September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT, and group registration saves an additional 30%.