Meet the five companies competing in the Startup Battlefield finals at Disrupt 2026
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REGISTER NOW Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW. 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.
