The Startup Battlefield finals at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 will be held Thursday at 11:30 am Pacific, streamed live and on stage. The five finalists were selected after two days of live demos and judge questions across four categories: space and physical AI, energy and manufacturing, health tech and life sciences, and enterprise and security.
Apate.ai deploys thousands of AI agents that masquerade as innocent victims to bait fraudsters. The agents answer scam calls, respond to shady messages and emails, follow phishing links, and join social media groups. They adopt a range of ages, genders, accents and languages to keep scammers engaged long enough to gather fraud intelligence.
Flox Intelligence has built a wildlife-deterrent system that avoids the sirens, lights, fences, falcons and culling used traditionally. Its edge devices use perception systems trained on wildlife behaviour: a motion sensor wakes the device, a camera identifies nearby animals with on-device models, and the device emits a species-appropriate sound to scare them away.
Intero Biosystems is developing human intestinal organoids, lab-grown tissue that mimics the gut, as a way to study how drugs and compounds affect the human body before trials in people. Unlike simpler models that replicate only part of the gut, these organoids contain multiple cell and tissue types found in the human intestine, which the company says makes them a more human-relevant testing model.
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 allows a production line to be retooled in minutes rather than weeks, without traditional programming, letting manufacturers automate complex and delicate tasks that normally require human labour.
A fifth finalist is focused on computing in space, rounding out the competition. The founders will present to a new panel of judges, who will name the winner.