And the winner of Startup Battlefield at Disrupt 2026 is: Intero Biosystems

For 3 days this week successful San Francisco, 20 anxious startups participated successful the Startup Battlefield astatine TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. The apical 20 were chosen to correspond the champion of the Startup Battlefield 200, and they competed for a accidental to instrumentality location the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000. With that aggravated pitching present complete, we person a winner.

These startups were handpicked to vie successful Startup Battlefield, and each of them presented a unrecorded demo successful beforehand of the VCs and tech leaders who judged the competition.

After hours of deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored implicit the judges’ notes and narrowed the database down to 5 finalists: Apate, Flox Intelligence, Intero Biosystems, Industrial Next, and Satlyt.

The last 5 made their mode to the finale to demo successful beforehand of our last sheet 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 present acceptable to denote that the victor of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 2026 is:

Winner: Intero Biosystems

Intero Biosystems is simply a Denver-based startup founded by Charlie Childs and Madeline Eiken that spun retired of the University of Michigan. It’s processing 1mm quality intestinal “organoids,” lab-grown insubstantial that mimics the gut, offering different mode to survey however drugs and different compounds mightiness impact the quality assemblage earlier they are tested successful people. The startup sells its flagship product, GastroScreen, to pharmaceutical, biotech, food, and chemic companies for investigating drugs and different compounds.

Read much astir Intero Biosystems in our abstracted station here.

Runner-up: Apate

Apate is an Australian startup founded by Dali Kaafar, who came up with the thought portion doing probe astatine Macquarie University successful Sydney, Australia. It deploys thousands of AI agents that masquerade arsenic guiltless victims, answering scam calls, responding to shady messages and emails, pursuing phishing links, and joining societal media groups to bait fraudsters. In summation to entree to Apate’s fleet of agents, customers get an insights portal that offers quality and analytics connected scams targeting their extremity users oregon employees, brands, products, and more.

Read much astir Apate successful our separate station here.

These 2 companies present articulation the ranks of Startup Battlefield winners and finalists similar Trello, Discord, Cloudflare, and Mint connected the Disrupt Stage. With much than 1,700 alumni having participated successful the program, Startup Battlefield Alumni person collectively raised implicit $30 cardinal successful backing with much than 200 palmy exits.