Next five VCs judging Startup Battlefield 200 contenders at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026

Thousands of applications. Multiple rounds of review. Hundreds of hours spent evaluating startups from astir the world. Now comes the portion everyone has been waiting for.

Startup Battlefield 200 is astir here, and with today’s announcement, the judging sheet is astir complete. In conscionable a mates of weeks, 200 cautiously selected startups volition stitchery astatine TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 to exhibit, conscionable investors, and vie for 1 of the astir coveted opportunities successful the startup world. Only a prime radical volition beforehand to the unrecorded competition, wherever they’ll transportation successful beforehand of thousands of founders, investors, media, and customers and look questions from immoderate of the sharpest minds successful technology.

Image Credits:Kimberly White / Getty Images

Today’s judges bring decades of acquisition gathering companies, backing founders, and spotting transformative ideas earlier they go obvious. They’ll assistance determine which startups proceed their travel toward the Startup Battlefield finals and, ultimately, who has a accidental to assistance this year’s trophy. If you privation to spot tomorrow’s manufacture leaders earlier the remainder of the satellite does, there’s nary amended spot to beryllium than TechCrunch Disrupt.

The lone mode to beryllium beforehand and halfway astatine the Disrupt Stage and witnesser the eventual transportation contention of the twelvemonth is to register for TechCrunch Disrupt. Grab your walk and bring your co-founder, partner, oregon adjacent for 50% off. Bringing a assemblage of 4 oregon more? Save up to 30% connected passes.

Meet the adjacent question of Startup Battlefield judges

Get to cognize each 20 judges revealed truthful acold by visiting the Disrupt agenda. Stay tuned for the last announcement, wherever we’ll unveil the 5 judges who volition measure the finalists and find who takes location the $100,000 equity-free prize and coveted Disrupt Cup.

Image Credits:TechCrunch

Caleb Appleton, Partner, Bison Ventures

Caleb Appleton is simply a spouse astatine Bison Ventures, wherever helium invests successful carnal AI crossed techbio, robotics, and real-world intelligence. A biomedical technologist by training, his investments see Cobot, Vivodyne, Passkey, Sleuth, Inner Logic, Cosmon, and Grid Aero. Previously, Appleton invested successful frontier technologies astatine Innovation Endeavors and spent respective years arsenic an relation astatine TuneIn, giving him acquisition spanning early-stage science, task investing, and scaling a exertion business.

Sara Deshpande, General Partner, Maven Ventures

Sara Deshpande is simply a wide spouse astatine Maven Ventures, wherever she invests successful seed-stage companies built astir emerging user behaviors and trends. She focuses connected user bundle spanning integer wellness and user applications of AI. Deshpande joined Maven arsenic its archetypal worker successful 2014 and has spent a decennary successful task capital. She received her MBA from Stanford, wherever she present teaches a people connected startups and entrepreneurship.

Aatish Nayak, Partner, Kleiner Perkins

Aatish Nayak joined Kleiner Perkins arsenic a spouse successful May 2026, wherever helium focuses connected partnering with AI autochthonal founders with heavy vertical expertise crossed each domains.
 
Prior to joining Kleiner Perkins, Narak was the archetypal PM and VP of Product astatine Harvey, wherever helium helped physique the aboriginal product, design, marketing, analytics, and enactment teams. Before that, helium was an aboriginal merchandise person astatine Scale AI moving connected information infrastructure for ecommerce, aboriginal NLP (GPT-2), and autonomous vehicles. And earlier that, helium was astatine Shield AI moving connected the halfway cognition stack for robotic defence systems that prevention lives.
 
Jason Risch, Partner, Greylock

Jason Risch is simply a spouse astatine Greylock, wherever helium invests successful endeavor security, AI and ML infrastructure, information platforms, and developer tools. His portfolio includes Onehouse, a cloud-native managed lakehouse platform, and Baseten, an ML exemplary serving toolkit for information subject teams. Before joining Greylock, Risch worked successful concern operations astatine Opendoor, arsenic a absorption advisor astatine McKinsey’s Bay Area practice, and arsenic a startup builder astatine the AI Fund. He studied Mathematical and Computational Science astatine Stanford University.

Mark Xu, Partner, Index Ventures

Mark Xu is simply a spouse astatine Index Ventures, wherever helium invests crossed stages successful cybersecurity, infrastructure, and AI. He has backed companies gathering astatine the frontier of AI, including Fireworks, Parallel, 7AI, Simile, and Flapping Airplanes, and antecedently worked arsenic a maturation capitalist astatine Lightspeed, supporting companies including Wiz, Glean, and Grafana. Xu looks for profoundly method founders who harvester domain expertise with hustle and an obsession with their customers.

Grab your Disrupt walk and don’t miss Startup Battlefield

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 is happening October 13-15 astatine San Francisco’s Moscone West, bringing 10,000+ tech leaders, VCs, and founders unneurotic to conscionable the adjacent procreation of breakout startups, link with leaders who could alteration their startup’s trajectory, and get a front-row spot to wherever the manufacture is headed.

Register now to prevention up to $100 earlier Disrupt doors open, and bring your co-founder, colleague, oregon adjacent with a 2nd walk for 50% off. Experience each that Disrupt has to connection together, from six manufacture stages, roundtables, and breakout sessions to the startups and connections shaping what’s adjacent successful tech.

Image Credits:Noam Galai / Getty Images