Meet the next wave of VCs judging Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 — SkimNews
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- Vaibhav 'Dr.V' Agrawal co-founded ODDBIRD VC in 2024 to back AI companies reindustrializing the West across health/bio, supply chains, and real-world automation, after serving as a General Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners India from 2016; his portfolio includes Anterior, which has raised $64 million from NEA and Sequoia.
- Anu Bharadwaj, new partner at ICONIQ Growth focusing on enterprise software and AI, previously served as President and COO of Atlassian for nearly 12 years — scaling Jira, Confluence, and the Atlassian Cloud platform to billions in annual revenue — and earlier held leadership roles at Microsoft.
- Sho Sho Leigha Ho joined General Catalyst's seed team in 2024 as its youngest partner and serves as a board observer at Together AI; her public investments include The Interaction Company of California (Poke), which Cognition acquired in July 2026.
- Miloni Madan Presler, partner at IVP, works with first-time founders on inflection-stage enterprise software, healthcare, and security companies from Series B through pre-IPO, bringing prior experience from Summit Partners and Warburg Pincus.
- Aidan Madigan-Curtis invests at Eclipse Ventures in AI, IoT, computer vision, and software for manufacturing, logistics, and supply chain; she previously was a senior executive at Apple — scaling Apple Watch manufacturing from zero to millions of units per week — and VP/GM at Samsara, which she helped grow from pre-revenue to over $1 billion in ARR.
- Startup Battlefield 200 at Disrupt 2026 runs October 13–15 at San Francisco's Moscone West, with every hand-picked founder getting six minutes to pitch followed by judge questioning; the winning early-stage company walks away with a $100,000 prize.
- TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 expects 10,000+ tech leaders, with ticket prices set to increase on September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT; groups can save an additional 30% on registration.
Why it matters: For the early-stage founders pitching at Disrupt 2026, this judge batch carries unusual operating pedigree — Atlassian's former President/COO Anu Bharadwaj, Apple veteran Aidan Madigan-Curtis (Apple Watch scale-up), and ex-Microsoft and ex-Lightspeed India leaders — meaning the panel evaluating the $100,000 prize combines investor capital with firsthand experience scaling category-defining software companies from zero to billions in revenue.
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