TechCrunch Disrupt London Is Next Week — Here Are Our Battlefield Finals Judges

TechCrunch Disrupt London is next week! (December 7th-8th, Agenda, Tickets). The conference will include our traditional set-up of a single stage and a Startup Alley. We like to keep things simple!

We’ll start each day with panels and one-on-one discussions featuring TechCrunch writers and editors, special guest speakers, leading venture capitalists and entrepreneurs addressing the issues of the day. In the afternoon, we host the Startup Battlefield competition which culminates in six finalists taking the stage at the end of the event for a shot at winning the Disrupt Cup, and taking away a £30,000 check.

Here are our Battlefield Judges:


Eileen Burbidge (Passion Capital)
Eileen Burbidge (@eileentso) is a Partner at Passion Capital, the pre-eminent early-stage VC fund based in London. She brings extensive operational experience to her investment activities gleaned from business and product roles at Yahoo!, Skype, Apple and elsewhere. In addition to Passion Capital, Eileen is also Chair of Tech City UK, the government-backed organisation supporting digital business across the UK. She also serves on the Prime Minister David Cameron’s Business Advisory Group; as HM Treasury’s Special Envoy for FinTech, appointed by the Chancellor George Osborne; and Tech Ambassador for the Mayor of London Boris Johnson. She was made an MBE for services to UK Business in June 2015 and holds a BSc Engineering degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


Suranga Chandratillake (Balderton Capital)
Suranga Chandratillake joined Balderton as a Partner in 2014. He was previously an entrepreneur and engineer. Suranga founded blinkx, the intelligent search engine for video and audio content in Cambridge in 2004. He then lead the company for eight years as CEO through its journey of moving to San Francisco, building a profitable business and going public in London where it achieved a peak market capitalisation in excess of $1Bn. Before founding blinkx, Suranga was an early employee at Autonomy Corporation – joining as an engineer in the Cambridge R&D team and ultimately serving as the company’s US CTO in San Francisco. Suranga has a MA in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. He holds patents in the area of video discovery and online video advertising, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2012 and was chosen as one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders in 2009.


Alex Depledge (Hassle)
Alex Depledge is the straight talking British businesswoman best known for being the driving force behind Hassle.com. Alex launched the well-known startup, Hassle.com, in 2013 and is a passionate believer in the power of the sharing economy to improve people’s lives – enabling individuals to take control of their working life and become micro entrepreneurs. In 2014 TechCity Insider named Alex ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’, following on the heels of her appearance on the ‘Silicon Valley Comes to the UK Scale-up Top 100’ – a list highlighting British entrepreneurs expected to lead their firms to £100m in revenue in three to five years. Alex’s forthright views has seen her become a trusted source for commentary on the future of the sharing economy, women in tech, VC funding and the UK startup sector. Alex worked with the UK Department of Trade and Investment as part of the Afterburner scheme, helping to identify the next 25 startups ready for growth investment. Most recently she contributed to the UK government’s independently commissioned review into the sharing economy. Alex launched her career in the US after completing her masters degree at the University of Chicago; working on the campaign team of a major US politician. In 2006 Alex returned to the UK to become a consultant for Accenture, advising FTSE 100 clients on their customer and channel execution before leaving in 2012 to enter the world of entrepreneurship.


Fred Destin (Accel Partners)
Fred Destin joined Accel in 2014 and focuses on consumer and software investments. He is the lead investor and board member at Deliveroo, Pillpack and KNC. Prior to Accel, he was a partner at Atlas Ventures, where he worked with companies like Zoopla (public), Secret Escapes, Dailymotion (acquired by Orange), PriceMinister (acquired by Rakuten) and others. Fred grew up in Belgium and graduated from the Solvay Business School (University of Brussels). Find his blog [here] (http://freddestin.com/)


Cristina Fonseca (Talkdesk)
Cristina is a female software engineer and entrepreneur. She holds a Master’s degree in Telecommunications and Software Engineering from the Technical University of Lisbon and before founding Talkdesk she worked as a researcher and built two other online businesses. Talkdesk is a platform that allows you to you create your call center in minutes and integrate it with a variety of top business tools, including Salesforce, Desk.com and Zendesk. Talkdesk raised more than $24M in the last 2 years from Salesforce Ventures, DFJ, Storm Ventures and 500Startups. Cristina leads the Talkdesk Lisbon office and her areas of focus include engineering, product and knowledge management. Cristina is proud of the role woman play in technology and society today. She is a Global Shaper and part of the Global Agenda Council on Europe, a World Economic Forum initiative.


Matthew Panzarino (TechCrunch)
Matthew Panzarino has been a retail jockey, professional photographer, independent blogger, Managing Editor at The Next Web and now Editor-In-Chief at TechCrunch. He has made a name for himself in the tech media world as a writer relentlessly covering Apple and Twitter, in addition to a broad range of startups. Contact Matthew at matthew@beta.techcrunch.com PGP Key: https://keybase.io/panzer

Startup Alley offers another way for early-stage companies to gain exposure with a setup that encourages both exhibiting and networking, and provides high visibility. Roughly 200 startups comprise Startup Alley with around 100 new companies demoing on Monday and 100 demoing on Tuesday.

You can grab tickets to the conference or tickets to Startup Alley here, where you can showcase your startup.

And if you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact sponsors@beta.techcrunch.com.