Five companies will compete for $100,000, equity-free, in the Startup Battlefield finals at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. They were selected after 20 startups spent two days on stage, demonstrating their products live and fielding tough questions from expert judges.
This year’s competition covered four categories: space and physical AI; energy and manufacturing; health tech and life sciences; and enterprise and security. The finalists’ projects range from miniature human organs to scam prevention and computing in space.
The announcement set the finals for tomorrow (Thursday) at 11:30 am Pacific. You can watch on stage at Disrupt or via livestream. Another panel of expert judges will hear the founders’ presentations and select the winner, who receives the Startup Battlefield Cup along with the $100,000 equity-free prize.
Table of Contents
Apate.ai
Thousands of AI agents pose as innocent victims for Apate.ai, engaging fraudsters rather than avoiding them. Their capabilities include answering scam calls, replying to suspicious messages and emails, following phishing links, and entering social media groups to bait scammers.
To gather useful information, the agents try to prolong those interactions. They pose as people of different ages, genders, and accents, and communicate in various languages.
Flox Intelligence
Rather than relying on traditional wildlife deterrents such as sirens, lights, fences, falcons, and culling, Flox Intelligence uses edge devices to identify animals and respond to them. The system’s perception technology is trained on wildlife behavior.
Movement detected by a motion sensor wakes a device and activates its camera. Models running on the device identify the nearby animal, then the system plays a sound suited to that species to scare it away.
Intero Biosystems
Before drugs and other compounds reach human testing, Intero Biosystems wants to provide another way to investigate their possible effects on the body. It’s developing human intestinal organoids: tissue grown in a lab to mimic the gut.
Simpler models reproduce only part of the gut. Intero’s organoids instead include multiple types of cells and tissues found in the human intestine. The company believes that combination provides a more human-relevant model for testing drugs and other compounds.
Industrial Next
Industrial Next builds self-contained, AI-driven robotic stations powered by its proprietary foundation models, which bring vision, task context, and motion together. The company says manufacturers can use the technology to retool a production line in minutes instead of weeks, without traditional programming.
The aim is to automate the complex, delicate work that has traditionally needed human labor. Some of the startup’s stations already help manufacture one of the world’s most popular smartphones.
Satlyt
Satlyt is developing software designed to let many satellites share the work of large computing jobs in space. Two demonstration missions have already carried its software, with the initial work focused on improving spacecraft operating efficiency.
When problems arise, spacecraft typically need to communicate with ground-based flight controllers for a solution. Making decisions aboard the spacecraft with AI could therefore produce real savings.
Satlyt’s next goal is to show that it can create a computing cloud shared by two satellites.
