Meet the Final 5 Startup Battlefield 200 Judges at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026

TL;DR

• TechCrunch has revealed the final five judges for Startup Battlefield 200 at Disrupt 2026, rounding out an all-star panel of VCs and operators who will pick this year's $100,000 equity-free winner.
• The new judges bring deep expertise across AI infrastructure, enterprise SaaS, fintech, consumer, and deep tech, with a shared focus on outlier founders, real traction, and defensible tech.
• Disrupt 2026 runs October 13-15 at Moscone West in San Francisco — register now to save up to $100 and get a second pass at 50% off before prices increase.

The Countdown to the Cup Is On

Startup Battlefield is back and bigger than ever. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, 200 hand-picked early-stage startups will take the stage, but only one will lift the Disrupt Cup and take home the $100,000 equity-free prize.

After weeks of reveals, TechCrunch has just locked in the final five judges who will decide who makes it from the semifinals to the finals and ultimately who wins it all. If you are a founder, investor, or just obsessed with where tech goes next, this is the panel to watch.

Meet the Final Five Deciding Votes

These five join an already stacked roster of earlier-announced judges, completing the team that will grill founders live on stage about product, market, moat, and monetization.

Erica Brescia, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures

Brescia brings a rare founder-operator-investor triple threat. As former COO of GitHub and co-founder of Bitnami (acquired by VMware), she knows what developer love looks like at scale. At Redpoint, she leads investments in AI infrastructure, open source, and next-gen SaaS. Her superpower for Battlefield: spotting technical teams that can turn community traction into enterprise revenue.

Byron Deeter, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners

A legend in cloud investing, Deeter has been on the Forbes Midas List for over a decade with bets on Twilio, Shopify, Toast, and Anthropic. He co-authors Bessemer's State of the Cloud and 10 Laws of Cloud. He brings two decades of pattern recognition in SaaS metrics, consumption pricing, and platform shifts — exactly what founders need to prove they can go from $1M to $100M ARR.

Katie Stanton, Founder and General Partner at Moxxie Ventures

Stanton has sat on every side of the table — exec at Google, Twitter, and Color, former White House and State Department appointee, and now founder of Moxxie Ventures backing underestimated founders. Her focus is consumer, future of work, health, and fintech with a human impact lens. She looks for magnetic storytelling, thoughtful growth loops, and products people genuinely love.

Santi Subotovsky, General Partner at Emergence Capital

Subotovsky led Emergence's investments in Zoom, Salesforce, Veeva, and Bill.com, making him one of the sharpest eyes in enterprise and AI agents. Originally from Argentina, he champions global founders building for the U.S. enterprise from day one. Expect him to push hard on questions around workflow ownership, AI defensibility, and net revenue retention.

Jill Chase, Partner at CapitalG

Chase leads CapitalG's AI and data investments, with prior operating roles at Stripe and Google. She backs late-seed to growth companies building foundational models, vertical AI, and data infrastructure. She brings a growth-stage lens to an early-stage competition, asking: Can this become a decacorn, and what unfair data or distribution advantage will get it there?

What They Actually Look For in a Winner

We asked what separates a good pitch from a Battlefield-winning one, and the final five were strikingly aligned.

First, outlier founder-market fit. Brescia and Stanton both say they bet on obsession — founders who have lived the problem and cannot be out-hustled.

Second, real traction over hype. Deeter and Subotovsky want to see design partners turning into paid pilots, usage graphs that go up and to the right, and a crisp answer to why now and why you win versus incumbents and OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google.

Third, a credible path to massive scale. Chase puts it bluntly: team, TAM, and tech moat. Is this a feature, a product, or a company that can define a category? The best Battlefield winners — like Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, and Cloudflare before them — showed all three in under six minutes, then survived six more minutes of brutal Q&A.

Why Disrupt 2026 Is Can't-Miss

Disrupt 2026 takes over Moscone West in San Francisco on October 13-15 for three packed days of Battlefield pitches, 1:1 meetings, expert-led breakout sessions, and late-night networking. Beyond Battlefield 200, expect the AI Stage, SaaS Stage, Space Stage, and Fintech Stage, plus 300+ exhibitors and 10,000+ founders, VCs, and operators.

This year's Battlefield class was narrowed from thousands of applications worldwide, spanning generative AI copilots, robotics, climate tech, biotech, space infrastructure, and next-gen dev tools. The final five judges will preside over the semifinals on Day 2 and the grand finale on Day 3.

How to Be in the Room and Save Big

You do not want to watch the next unicorn crowned on livestream. Be there live to network with the judges, meet the 200 founders, and pitch your own idea in hallway conversations that have launched term sheets.

Right now, attendees can save up to $100 on Disrupt 2026 passes, plus get a second pass for your co-founder, colleague, or friend at 50% off. That is two tickets for front-row access to Battlefield, all stages, expo floor, and Braindate networking for less than the price of one late-stage ticket.

Pass prices increase soon and the expo floor sells out every year. Lock in your spot now, bring your plus-one, and witness who these final five judges anoint as the startup that defines 2026.

AndroGuider Team

Articles written by the AndroGuider team. We try to make them thorough and informational while being easy to read.