Meet the next wave of VCs judging Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 — SkimNews
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- Startup Battlefield 200 runs October 13-15 at San Francisco's Moscone West, giving hand-picked founders six minutes to pitch before facing the VC panel — the winner takes $100,000 and joins a separate group of 10 previously announced judges.
- Vaibhav 'Dr.V' Agrawal, co-founder of ODDBIRD VC (founded 2024 to back AI reindustrializing the West), previously served as a general partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners India beginning in 2016 and holds an MBA from Stanford alongside a physician's MBBS.
- Anu Bharadwaj, partner at ICONIQ, served as president and COO of Atlassian for nearly 12 years, leading product and engineering across Jira, Confluence, and the Atlassian Cloud platform as the company scaled to billions in annual revenue.
- Sho Sho Leigha Ho joined General Catalyst's seed team in 2024 as its youngest partner, serves as a board observer at Together AI, and publicly backed The Interaction Company of California (Poke), which Cognition acquired in July 2026.
- Aidan Madigan-Curtis, partner at Eclipse Ventures, was a senior executive at Apple where she scaled Apple Watch manufacturing from zero to millions of units per week; before venture she was a VP and general manager at Samsara, helping grow it from pre-revenue to over $1 billion in ARR.
- Disrupt 2026 ticket prices rise after September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT, with group registration offering an additional 30% off the standard pass.
- Miloni Madan Presler, partner at IVP, focuses on Series B through pre-IPO inflection-stage companies in enterprise software, healthcare, and security, bringing growth-equity and private-equity perspective from prior roles at Summit Partners and Warburg Pincus.
Why it matters: TechCrunch is loading Startup Battlefield 200's judging bench with operator-VCs — four of the five new judges scaled real products at Apple, Atlassian, and Microsoft before writing checks. For the founders who clear the Battlefield cut, six minutes in front of operators who actually built (and shipped at scale) is more valuable signal than the $100,000 prize itself, especially at a moment when execution credibility increasingly outweighs financial-model polish in early-stage evaluation.
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