Five VCs Who Will Grill Startups at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 and What They Actually Want to See

Key points

• TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 runs October 13 to 15 at Moscone West in San Francisco, with early-bird tickets discounted by up to $200 until September 25, 2026.
• Five newly announced judges will evaluate startups in Startup Battlefield 200, the conference's main pitch competition.
• Three of the five judges list AI infrastructure or AI applications as a core focus area.
• Judges include a former Hollywood talent agent, a former psychotherapist and an investor who led a Series A in Chime, the digital bank.

Who are the five judges?

The panel spans investment styles, so startups across sectors have a real shot at connecting with someone who's done this in their space before.

Aditi Maliwal is a general partner at Upfront Ventures, focused on pre-seed and seed deals in fintech, enterprise SaaS (business software sold by subscription), AI applications and developer tools. Her portfolio includes Writer and Clair. She led the Series A in Chime, the digital bank now valued in the billions, while at a previous firm, and she's Upfront's first San Francisco-based partner. Before venture, she worked at Google and Deutsche Bank.

Michael Palank is a general partner at MaC Ventures, a majority Black-owned firm backing seed-stage startups through what it calls a culturally driven thesis, with focus areas spanning AI, fintech, healthcare, media and aerospace. His pre-VC career was in Hollywood: talent representation at William Morris, then Overbrook Entertainment, the production company Will Smith co-founded.

Nell Daly co-founded Revenge Capital, an evergreen fund (one that raises capital on a rolling basis rather than in fixed cycles) built to back founders who are routinely passed over, including women, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled and neurodiverse entrepreneurs, across the US and UK. She trained as a psychotherapist before investing, and she's said that background shapes how she works with founders.

Grace Ge is a partner at Amplify Partners. Her focus sits in the layer between large AI foundation models, the underlying systems powering tools like ChatGPT, and the enterprise software built on top of them. Her portfolio includes Pinecone, a database purpose-built for AI applications, and Eppo, a product experimentation tool. She was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for venture capital.

Crystal Huang is a general partner at GV, the venture arm of Alphabet, Google's parent company. She backs enterprise software, AI infrastructure and fintech, with a particular eye on product-led and developer-led growth, meaning products that spread inside a company from individual users upward before leadership ever signs a contract. Her portfolio includes Roboflow, a computer vision platform that helps software read and interpret images. Before GV, she invested at NEA and GGV Capital and worked in technology M&A at Blackstone.

What does this mean for founders watching from the outside?

Three of five judges calling out AI infrastructure as a priority isn't a coincidence. It's where institutional capital is concentrating right now, and that's been a consistent thread across our nine Disrupt 2026 stories since we first covered the conference on 27 July.

The more interesting signal is Daly and Palank. Funds built around underrepresented founders aren't fringe; they're in the judging seats at one of the highest-profile competitions in the country.

One thing worth holding onto: Startup Battlefield produces visible winners, and those winners get enormous press. The companies that pitched on the same stage and didn't place are just as real. One result is a data point, not a verdict.

Here's my honest read on this: study what these five investors have actually backed, not just their stated thesis. Portfolio pages tell you far more about what a firm will write a cheque for than any bio does.