Meet the five companies competing in the Startup Battlefield finals at Disrupt 2026

Key points

• Twenty startups pitched at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 across four categories, and five finalists were selected.
• The finals take place Thursday at 11:30 am Pacific, with the winner receiving the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000 equity-free.
• The finalists are Apate, Flox Intelligence, Intero Biosystems, Industrial Next, and Satlyt.
• Apate uses AI agents to bait scammers, while Flox Intelligence uses edge devices to deter wildlife.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 has announced the five startups advancing to the Startup Battlefield finals. Over the past two days, 20 companies pitched on stage, presenting live demos and answering questions from expert judges.

The competition covered four categories: space and physical AI, energy and manufacturing, health tech and life sciences, and enterprise and security. The finalists' projects range from miniature human organs to fighting scams and computing in space.

The five finalists

Apate deploys thousands of AI agents that pose as innocent victims to engage scammers. The agents answer scam calls, respond to shady messages and emails, follow phishing links, and join social media groups to bait fraudsters, pretending to be people of different ages, genders, and accents in various languages.

Flox Intelligence has built a wildlife-deterrent system using edge devices with perception systems trained on wildlife behavior. A motion sensor wakes the device, a camera identifies nearby animals, 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—to study how drugs and compounds affect the human body before testing in people. Its organoids contain multiple cell and tissue types found in the human intestine, which the company believes makes them a more human-relevant 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 lets a production line be retooled in minutes rather than weeks, without traditional programming. Some of its workstations are already used in making one of the world's most popular smartphones. Satlyt is building software to allow many satellites to share large computing jobs in space. It has flown its software on two demonstration missions, focusing on operational efficiencies for spacecraft, and aims to create a shared computing cloud between two satellites.

How to watch the finals

The finals will kick off tomorrow (Thursday) at 11:30 am Pacific. Viewers can watch on stage at Disrupt or via the livestream. A panel of expert judges will select the winner, who will receive the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000, equity-free.