Thousands of applications. Multiple rounds of review. Hundreds of hours spent evaluating startups from around the world. Now comes the part everyone has been waiting for. Get to know all 20 judges revealed so far by visiting the Disrupt agenda . Stay tuned for the final announcement, where we’ll unveil the five judges who will evaluate the finalists and determine who takes home the $100,000 equity-free prize and coveted Disrupt Cup. Caleb Appleton is a partner at Bison Ventures , where he invests in physical AI across techbio, robotics, and real-world intelligence.
A biomedical engineer by training, his investments include Cobot, Vivodyne, Passkey, Sleuth, Inner Logic, Cosmon, and Grid Aero. Previously, Appleton invested in frontier technologies at Innovation Endeavors and spent several years as an operator at TuneIn, giving him experience spanning early-stage science, venture investing, and scaling a technology business. Sara Deshpande is a general partner at Maven Ventures , where she invests in seed-stage companies built around emerging consumer behaviors and trends. She focuses on consumer software spanning digital health and consumer applications of AI.
Deshpande joined Maven as its first employee in 2014 and has spent a decade in venture capital. She received her MBA from Stanford, where she now teaches a course on startups and entrepreneurship. Aatish Nayak joined Kleiner Perkins as a partner in May 2026, where he focuses on partnering with AI native founders with deep vertical expertise across all domains. Prior to joining Kleiner Perkins, Narak was the first PM and VP of Product at Harvey, where he helped build the early product, design, marketing, analytics, and support teams.
Before that, he was an early product leader at Scale AI working on data infrastructure for ecommerce, early NLP (GPT-2), and autonomous vehicles. And before that, he was at Shield AI working on the core knowledge stack for robotic defense systems that save lives. Jason Risch, Partner, Greylock Jason Risch is a partner at Greylock , where he invests in enterprise security, AI and ML infrastructure, data platforms, and developer tools. His portfolio includes Onehouse, a cloud-native managed lakehouse platform, and Baseten, an ML model serving toolkit for data science teams.