Announcing more judges for Startup Battlefield at Disrupt 2024

Startup Battlefield 200 is a major highlight at every Disrupt, and we’re thrilled to find out which of the thousands of startup applicants will get the chance to pitch to top-tier VCs at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. Join us at Moscone West in San Francisco from October 28–30 to witness the epic showdown where every contender is set to make a significant impact.

Get an insider’s view of what the judges look for in a viable company as they provide detailed feedback on their evaluation criteria. Don’t miss the chance to learn from their expert insights and discover the crucial traits that lead to startup success, only at Disrupt 2024.

We’re excited to introduce our next set of investors who will evaluate the startups and dive into each pitch with a thorough and probing Q&A session. Stay tuned for our last group of judges to be announced soon!

Galym Imanbayev, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners

Galym Imanbayev is a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners where he focuses on health tech and services investments. Galym’s interest in health is rooted in his childhood experiences growing up in Kazakhstan following his father on rural medical trips. Galym serves as a board member or board observer on Abridge, Aledade, Ancora, Fathom, Soda Health, and Wheel. Galym also spent time as an investor at Martis Capital. He completed his BA, MD, and MBA degrees at Stanford University, where he served as the graduate representative on the Stanford University Board of Trustees.

Rohan Ganesh, Partner, Obvious Ventures

Rohan is a partner at Obvious Ventures, where he invests in companies at the intersection of science, technology, and healthcare. He supports several companies as a board director or observer, including Inceptive, Inato, Pi Health, Gandeeva Therapeutics, Anagenex, and LabGenius. Prior to joining Obvious, he led venture investments in healthcare technology, biotech, and diagnostics at Verily Life Sciences, a Google spinout, and at Northpond Ventures, a multi-billion-dollar science-driven venture firm. He worked as product manager for CompuGroup Medical (leading EMR company in Europe) and in Verily’s computer-aided disease detection and machine learning team.

Lisa Morales-Hellebo, Founder and Managing GP, REFASHIOND Ventures

Lisa has 28 years experience in tech, design and systems thinking, entrepreneurship, and community building, and has recently added VC to her list of titles as founder and co-managing GP at REFASHIOND Ventures: the Industrial Transformation Fund — a New York-based venture fund that invests as the first institutional check in early-stage startups refashioning industrial value chains across data and AI, advanced materials, advanced manufacturing, and next-generation logistics; defensible through economic moats. Lisa is catalyzing the paradigm shift to localized demand chains as CEO and founder of REFASHIOND OS (rOS), which is deploying a unified data layer and control tower across manufacturing value chains. She is also a founder of the Worldwide Supply Chain Federation, an organization that is changing how supply chain professionals learn about, collaborate, and adopt early-stage supply chain innovation around the world.

Andrew Schoen, Partner, NEA

Andrew Schoen joined NEA in 2014 and is currently a partner on the Technology Investing Team focused on AI/ML, fintech, frontier tech, infrastructure software, technically differentiated SaaS, and security. Andrew serves on the board of directors for Aigen, Clarifai, Dandelion, Super, ThreatQ, and Wispr; he also works closely with several other NEA portfolio companies and plays an integral role in the firm’s Asia investing practice. Prior to NEA, he was a member of Blackstone’s M&A Group. Prior to Blackstone, he founded Flicstart, a digital media startup that provided on-demand movie screenings.

Christopher Wan, Vice President, Bessemer Venture Partners

Christopher Wan is a vice president in the San Francisco office, where he focuses primarily on early-stage deep technologies. Before joining Bessemer, Chris was at In-Q-Tel and Tusk Ventures, investing in companies at the intersection of technology and government. Chris was also part of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, where he researched and wrote policy proposals on artificial intelligence. He began his career as a software engineer on Facebook’s News Credibility team.

Don’t miss the battle at Disrupt 2024!

The Startup Battlefield winner, who will walk away with a $100,000 equity-free prize, will be announced at Disrupt 2024 — the startup epicenter. Join 10,000 attendees to witness this groundbreaking moment and see the next wave of tech innovation.

Register here and secure your seat to witness this epic startup battle.