Who Will Win Startup Battlefield 200 This Year

TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield 200 is back and the spotlight is hotter than ever. From thousands of applicants, 20 startups will take the Disrupt stage in San Francisco (October 27–29, 2025) to pitch to top VCs and a live audience for a $100,000 equity-free prize. Past winners and alumni like Dropbox and Cloudflare show how a single stage can change a company’s trajectory.

Why this year matters

Disrupt isn’t just theater — it’s a pressure cooker for product-market clarity. Judges put founders through rigorous, no-holds-barred Q&A to test vision, traction, team strength, and defensibility. For founders, the stage is an investor-class exam; for the audience, it’s a masterclass in what makes a pitch land.

First wave of judges

• Philip Clark, Thrive Capital — invests in AI, robotics, and hardware; previously at Bridgewater and a Stanford CS grad.
• Madison Faulkner, NEA — early-stage data, infrastructure and AI investor with a background leading data science teams at scale.
• Leslie Feinzaig, Graham & Walker — founder GP backing founders who break the mold, with operator experience and disruptive innovation roots.
• Ilya Kirnos, SignalFire — co-founder and CTO of a data-driven VC that builds Beacon AI to surface high-potential founders and companies.
• Doug Pepper, ICONIQ Growth — growth investor with a track record across market-leading SaaS and consumer-tech companies.

These judges signal what matters now: AI and data-driven products, developer and infrastructure plays, and founders who can show measurable adoption. Their questions will reveal how each startup measures traction, scalability, and defensibility — and which teams can rapidly iterate under pressure.

For attendees and founders, Disrupt is both spectacle and education. Expect product demos, tough investor feedback, strategic networking, and the occasional surprise pivot. Whether you’re a founder hoping to catch a VC’s eye or an investor hunting the next category leader, this is where narratives are tested and winners are born.

At QuarkyByte we watch these moments for patterns: what metrics tip investor sentiment, how demo narratives map to adoption, and which go-to-market moves accelerate scale. We help teams translate data into crisp pitch signals and give investors structured lenses to evaluate founder claims. If you want to sharpen investor conversations before the Disrupt stage, now’s the time to align story, metrics, and roadmap.