After two days of live pitches, demos and tough questioning from a panel of expert judges, TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 has narrowed its Startup Battlefield field from 20 companies to five finalists. Their work ranges from lab-grown miniature human organs to AI agents that bait fraudsters and software that shares computing work between satellites.
How the Finals Will Work?
The Startup Battlefield finals begin on Thursday, October 15, at 11:30 am Pacific. Anyone can watch on the Disrupt stage or through the livestream. Each founder will pitch to a fresh panel of expert judges, who will choose the winner. The winning startup receives the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000 in equity-free funding.
This year’s Battlefield covered four categories: space and physical AI, energy and manufacturing, health tech and life sciences, and enterprise and security. The finalists below come from across that range.
The Five Finalists
Apate.ai: AI agents that pose as scam victims
Apate runs thousands of AI agents that pose as ordinary people, with different ages, genders, accents and languages. They answer scam calls, reply to suspicious emails and messages, click phishing links and join social media groups where fraudsters operate. The idea is to keep scammers engaged long enough for the company to gather useful intelligence about how they work.
Flox Intelligence: A smarter way to keep wildlife away
Traditional wildlife deterrents include sirens, lights, fences, falcons and culling. Flox takes a different approach, using edge devices with perception systems trained on animal behavior. A motion sensor wakes the device, and a camera with on-device models identifies the animal. The device then plays a sound suited to that species to drive it away.
Intero Biosystems: Mini human intestines for drug testing
Intero is developing human intestinal organoids, which are lab-grown tissues that mimic the gut. They let researchers study how drugs and other compounds might affect the human body before testing in people. Unlike simpler models that copy only part of the gut, Intero’s organoids contain multiple cell and tissue types found in the human intestine. The company believes this makes them a more human-relevant testing model.
Industrial Next: Robotic stations that retool in minutes
Industrial Next builds self-contained robotic workstations driven by proprietary foundation models that link vision, task context and motion. According to the company, this allows a production line to be retooled in minutes rather than weeks, with no traditional programming. The aim is to automate delicate, complex tasks that usually need human labor. Some of its workstations are already used in manufacturing one of the world’s most popular smartphones.
Satlyt: Shared computing power in orbit
Satlyt is building software that lets many satellites split the work of large computing jobs in space. It has already flown the software on two demonstration missions, starting with efficiency gains for spacecraft operations. Spacecraft usually rely on ground-based flight controllers to solve problems, which depends on communication links. Letting AI make those decisions onboard could mean real savings. Its next goal is to build a shared computing cloud between two satellites.
What Stands Out?
The finalists show how wide Startup Battlefield’s range has become. Fraud prevention and gut-on-a-chip testing sit in the same final five as factory robotics and orbital computing. Several of them also aim to replace slower or more costly methods, such as animal testing or weeks of manual line retooling. The judges’ decision on Thursday will show which of those pitches is the most convincing.
