For three days this week in San Francisco, 20 eager startups participated in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. The top 20 were chosen to represent the best of the Startup Battlefield 200, and they competed for a chance to take home the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000. With that intense pitching now complete, we have a winner.
These startups were handpicked to compete in Startup Battlefield, and all of them presented a live demo in front of the VCs and tech leaders who judged the competition.
After hours of deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to five finalists: Apate, Flox Intelligence, Intero Biosystems, Industrial Next, and Satlyt.
The final five made their way to the finale to demo in front of our final panel of judges: Alexa von Tobel of Inspired Capital, Chi-Hua Chien of Goodwater Capital, Dayna Grayson of Construct Capital, Karl Alomar of M13, and Stacy Brown-Philpot of Cherryrock Capital.
We’re now ready to announce that the winner of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 2026 is:
Winner: Intero Biosystems
Intero Biosystems is a Denver-based startup founded by Charlie Childs and Madeline Eiken that spun out of the University of Michigan. It’s developing 1mm human intestinal “organoids,” lab-grown tissue that mimics the gut, offering another way to study how drugs and other compounds might affect the human body before they are tested in people. The startup sells its flagship product, GastroScreen, to pharmaceutical, biotech, food, and chemical companies for testing drugs and other compounds.
Read more about Intero Biosystems in our separate post here.
Runner-up: Apate
Apate is an Australian startup founded by Dali Kaafar, who came up with the idea while doing research at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. It deploys thousands of AI agents that masquerade as innocent victims, answering scam calls, responding to shady messages and emails, following phishing links, and joining social media groups to bait fraudsters. In addition to access to Apate’s fleet of agents, customers get an insights portal that offers intelligence and analytics on scams targeting their end users or employees, brands, products, and more.
Read more about Apate in our separate post here.
These two companies now join the ranks of Startup Battlefield winners and finalists like Trello, Discord, Cloudflare, and Mint on the Disrupt Stage. With more than 1,700 alumni having participated in the program, Startup Battlefield Alumni have collectively raised over $30 billion in funding with more than 200 successful exits.
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Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.