Five Startup Battlefield finalists revealed for Disrupt 2026
Apate, Flox Intelligence, Intero Biosystems, Industrial Next and Satlyt will compete for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000 in equity-free funding.
TechCrunch has named the five companies heading into the Startup Battlefield finals at Disrupt 2026: Apate, Flox Intelligence, Intero Biosystems, Industrial Next and Satlyt. The finalists emerged from a field of 20 startups that pitched during the event’s first two days.
Five very different bets
Apate is using AI agents to fight scams by making them look like ordinary victims. Its agents can answer scam calls, follow phishing links, respond to suspicious messages and spend time inside social groups, with the aim of keeping fraudsters occupied while gathering intelligence. Flox Intelligence is tackling wildlife safety with edge devices that use motion sensors and on-device perception models to identify animals, then play a species-appropriate sound instead of relying on sirens, fences, falcons or culling.
Intero Biosystems is working on human intestinal organoids, lab-grown tissue designed to imitate the gut. Industrial Next is building robotic workstations driven by foundation models that connect vision, task context and movement; the company says factories can be reconfigured in minutes rather than weeks. Satlyt is focused on computing in space, with software that allows satellites to share large computing jobs. It has already flown the software on two demonstration missions.
What happens next
The finals are scheduled for 11:30am Pacific on Thursday, with the presentations taking place on stage at Disrupt and through the event livestream. A further panel of judges will select the winner, who receives the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000 in equity-free funding. The range of finalists reflects how broad the competition has become: scam intelligence, wildlife safety, drug research, industrial robotics and satellite computing are different attempts to apply software and machine learning to difficult real-world constraints.
Our opinion
The most interesting thing here is the spread of problems rather than the AI label attached to several companies. Apate and Flox are trying to make models useful in messy environments, while Intero’s pitch is about improving the physical basis of biomedical testing. Industrial Next and Satlyt have the clearest infrastructure angle, but their claims will depend heavily on how convincingly they demonstrate reliability outside a controlled pitch. The final should be judged on evidence and deployment, not just the neatness of each company’s story.