Over the past two days, 20 startups have been pitching on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, presenting live demos and answering tough questions from our expert judges. Now it’s time to unveil the five companies that will be competing in the Startup Battlefield finals. This year’s Battlefield spanned four categories — space and physical AI, energy and manufacturing, health tech and life sciences, and enterprise and security — and our finalists are working on everything from miniature human organs to fighting scams to computing in space.
The finals will kick off tomorrow (Thursday) at 11:30 am Pacific — you can watch them on stage at Disrupt or on the livestream here. The founders will be presenting for another panel of expert judges who will pick the winner; that winner gets to take home the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000, equity-free. Apate deploys thousands of AI agents that masquerade as innocent victims.
The agents can answer scam calls, respond to shady messages and emails, follow phishing links, and join social media groups to bait fraudsters. They pretend to be people of all stripes, with different ages, genders, and accents, speaking various languages as they try to keep scammers engaged long enough to learn something useful. Flox Intelligence has built a wildlife-deterrent system that works differently than the sirens, lights, fences, falcons, and culling traditionally used to keep animals away.
Instead, it uses edge devices with perception systems trained on wildlife behavior. A motion sensor wakes the device when it detects movement, triggering a camera that uses on-device models to identify nearby animals. The device then emits a species-appropriate sound to scare them away.
Intero Biosystems is developing human intestinal organoids — lab-grown tissue that mimics the gut, as another way to study how drugs and other compounds might affect the human body before they are tested in people. Its organoids differ from simpler models that replicate only part of the gut. They contain multiple cell and tissue types found in the human intestine, which the company believes makes them a more human-relevant model for testing drugs and other compounds.
Industrial Next builds AI-driven, self-contained robotic stations powered by proprietary foundation models that connect vision, task context, and motion. The company says this lets a production line be retooled in minutes rather than weeks, without traditional programming. The goal is to let manufacturers automate complex and delicate tasks that traditionally require human labor.
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