// The Judges
Judged by builders who ship.
13 founders, operators, and investors scoring projects across all three tracks — many joining remotely from around the world.
// Head-Judge Panel
The Finals Panel
Our head judges score in Round 1 and pick the winners in the finals.
John Whaley
Founder, Inception Studio
Stanford CS PhD who founded UnifyID (acq. Prove) and now builds AI-first founder communities.
Quincy Larson
Founder, freeCodeCamp
Built the open-source community that has helped millions of people learn to code for free.
Roland Yau
Investor, CoCoon Ignite Ventures
Venture investor who has judged demo days, pitch nights, and corporate innovation competitions.
// Judging Panel
Round-1 Judges
Aurora Feng
Founder, Neural Motion
Building generative world models for robotics; founder of the 1,000-member Saturday Robotics community. Stanford.
Vikranth Kumar Shivaa
AI Engineer, Attilio
Full-stack AI engineer; previously Fig and FamPay. Techstars mentor.
Anmol Jain
Product Manager, Microsoft
Leads Azure object-storage initiatives; previously technical PM at Pure Storage.
Sunil Agarwal
Technical Leader, Cisco
19+ years in SRE, observability, and AIOps; judge for the Globee and BIG Innovation Awards.
Xiang (Sean) Ji
Angel Investor
Former high-frequency-trading engineer investing in AI, robotics, and cybersecurity.
Helena Zhang
AI Product Leader, OpenArt
Hire #2 at OpenArt and previously co-founder at Fish Audio; builds tools in creative AI.
Syed Mustafa
AI Engineer
AI engineer at a cybersecurity startup; 3× founder and 7× hackathon winner.
Arvind Nedumaran
Founder & Engineer
A decade building production data pipelines and durable systems across startups he's joined and founded.
Kelvin Christian
AI Engineer
AI engineer at a U.S. construction startup and a GarudaHacks winner.
Swastik Ghosh
Firmware Engineer
Embedded-systems and firmware engineer; MS in Computer Engineering from NC State.