Twenty founders have just secured their shot at Disrupt glory. They're heading to the Disrupt Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to compete for the $100,000 prize and the coveted Disrupt Cup.
Every year, thousands of founders from around the world pitch us on what they believe the future should look like. This year's Top 20 are building it from organs to orbit and everywhere in between.
Across this cohort, one theme kept emerging: making the previously invisible measurable.
These founders are finding ways to capture signals we could never previously detect, model systems too complex to predict, and turn the physical world into data that machines can actually act on. They're measuring the biological clocks inside our bodies and growing miniature human organs in labs. They're teaching robots to take on increasingly complex physical work and modeling the real world closely enough to predict what might happen next—even the behavior of wild animals. They're extracting intelligence from scam calls and finding new ways to use the computing power already orbiting above our heads.
And then, of course, there's the company trying to launch cargo into space with a giant hydrogen-powered cannon.
Subtle, this group is not.
What connects these 20 companies isn't a single technology or industry. It's an ambition to understand more of the world around us—biological, physical, industrial, and digital—and use that understanding to make better decisions, automate what once required human intervention, and tackle problems that previously seemed too complex to solve.
Now they have six minutes on the Disrupt Stage to prove it.
Here are the 2026 Startup Battlefield Top 20.
Tuesday, October 13
Startup Battlefield Semifinals Session 1 (10:00 a.m. – 11:15 a.m.)
Space and Physical AI
Longshot Space: Reinventing the economics of space by launching cargo to orbit at $50/kg using hydrogen-powered kinetic launchers.
Veritas: Protecting luxury brands with custom microchips that verify authenticity and enable connected post-purchase experiences.
Laplace Intelligence: Building agentic world models that help cities, ports, and airports simulate counterfactual futures of the real world before they act.
Flox Intelligence: Preventing deadly wildlife collisions at airports and railways with real-time AI that detects animal behavior and safely redirects them.
Satlyt: Helping satellite operators unlock and monetize idle compute by transforming their spacecraft into virtual AI data centers with a single line of code.
Battlefield Semifinal Session 2 (1:00 p.m. – 2:15 p.m.)
Biotech and Human Systems
The second semifinal session shifts focus to the human body itself, where founders are turning biology into actionable data and lab-grown tissue into scalable platforms.
Details on the remaining semifinalists will be announced as the Disrupt Stage schedule is finalized. Check back for the full list of the 2026 Startup Battlefield Top 20, including companies working across biotech, robotics, and industrial AI.
via TechCrunch