Two of the American technology landscape’s most accomplished entrepreneurs — Venky Harinarayan and Sanjay Parthasarathy — have been announced as judges for the inaugural cricexec Innovation Challenge, taking place on Friday, October 24, 2025, at the cricexec Forum during the Cricket Impact Summit & Expo in Santa Clara, California.
The competition — a centerpiece of cricexec’s first-ever live event — will feature ten companies pitching innovative ideas to shape the future of cricket.
Harinarayan and Parthasarathy, both investors and co-owners in Major League Cricket (MLC) franchises, will bring their deep experience across technology, entrepreneurship, and sports to the judging panel.
Venky Harinarayan: from Stanford to Amazon to the San Francisco Unicorns
Few figures bridge the worlds of technology and cricket as seamlessly as Venky Harinarayan, Principal Owner of the San Francisco Unicorns and one of Silicon Valley’s most respected founders and investors.
A PhD in computer science from Stanford University, Harinarayan co-founded Junglee – with his lifelong business partner and Unicorns co-owner Anand Rajaraman – a pioneering shopping search engine acquired by Amazon in 1998 for $250 million, where he went on to help create the Amazon Marketplace and conceptualized Amazon Mechanical Turk.
He later co-founded Kosmix, acquired by Walmart, where he launched and led @WalmartLabs, the retail giant’s innovation division. Through his previous venture firm Cambrian Ventures, Harinarayan has invested in early-stage successes later acquired by Google and Adobe, and was an early investor in Facebook, Lyft, and TutorVista.
In 2015, along with Rajaraman, Harinarayan co-founded rocketship.vc, a data-driven Venture Firm with $250M+ under management, currently in deploying its third fund. Rocketship invests in the fastest growing companies in the world, many of them outside the US.
“The beauty of innovation is that it connects imagination with execution,” said Harinarayan. “In cricket, as in technology, new ideas can completely change the game. The cricexec Innovation Challenge is an opportunity to spotlight the people and companies thinking differently about how to make that happen.”
Sanjay Parthasarathy: from Microsoft and MIT to the Seattle Orcas
Joining Harinarayan on the judging panel is Sanjay Parthasarathy, Operating Partner and Co-Owner of the Seattle Orcas, and one of the technology industry’s most dynamic leaders.
A two-time MIT graduate, Parthasarathy spent 19 years at Microsoft, where he launched the .NET platform, built its developer tools division into a $1 billion business, and later led Microsoft’s Startup Business Accelerator — a division he founded to scale new technologies. He also directed Bill Gates’ first trip to India in 1997, a pivotal moment for the country’s software industry.
As founder and CEO of Indix, an AI-driven product intelligence company acquired by Avalara, he helped pioneer machine learning applications for commerce, later serving as Avalara’s Chief Product Officer, where he scaled revenue from $300 million to $1 billion.
A lifelong cricketer, Parthasarathy represented Tamil Nadu and South Zone in India at junior levels and captained the Anna University team before turning to business leadership.
“Entrepreneurship and cricket share a mindset — creativity, resilience, teamwork, and belief in long-term building,” said Parthasarathy. “It’s exciting to see innovation in this sport accelerating, especially here in the U.S. The cricexec Innovation Challenge is about nurturing that energy and giving founders a platform to showcase ideas that can grow the game globally.”
Bridging innovation, investment, and impact
Between them, Harinarayan and Parthasarathy embody the evolution of cricket’s next chapter — where innovation meets entrepreneurship, and sport meets scalable opportunity.
“To have two visionaries of this caliber on our inaugural judging panel sets the tone for what the cricexec Innovation Challenge is all about,” said Zee Zaidi, owner of cricexec. “They’ve built billion-dollar businesses, they’ve invested in future-defining companies, and they deeply understand cricket’s potential as an industry.”
The cricexec Innovation Challenge will feature a preliminary round and a deeper main-stage final, with the winner receiving a $10,000 multi-channel advertising campaign on cricexec.
The competition takes place during the Cricexec Forum — the business-focused capstone of the Cricket Impact Summit & Expo — alongside high-level panels on sponsorship, growth, and governance in cricket.
The ten finalists
The ten companies presenting at the challenge are:
CRICBABY
CricFlex
cricheroes
Crickbuster
Champhunt
HITZ Cricket
JusPredict Inc.
Ludimos
Playar
ProVelocity Cricket
Sportsnection
More information on every company is available here.
