After two days full of live demos and pitches, it’s time to announce the five finalists at this year’s Startup Battlefield. These finalists were selected from an initial pool of thousands of applicants, with TechCrunch’s editorial team narrowing the field down to the 200 companies that all joined us here at Disrupt, with the Top […]
Here are the 5 Startup Battlefield finalists at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 Read More »
If every good startup begins with a problem, this one may have begun with a bad Slack conversation. As CEO and co-founder Tom Bachant tells it, he remembers seeing the chaos of Slack-based support — the haphazard ticketing, the jumble of DMs, and little chance for insight into the underlying problems. “The first point was
Tutoring is one of the most effective tools for improving a child’s education, yet very few kids in the U.S. receive it. A 2023 survey of the nation’s largest school districts found that fewer than 10% of students received tutoring. One factor is that tutoring is too expensive for many families, often costing hundreds or
Super Teacher is building an AI tutor for elementary schools — catch it at Disrupt 2025 Read More »
Katie Hill’s dream home isn’t on the market — but one day, it will be, and she wants dibs. That, and a bit of neighborly envy, is how she got the idea for her startup, Unlisted Homes, which is a Top 20 Startup Battlefield finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. “I’ve always imagined myself as an
Brynn Putnam, the founder behind the connected fitness startup Mirror, is back with a new startup: a tech-powered gaming console that combines the best of board games and video games, called Board. After selling Mirror to Lululemon for $500 million in 2020, Putnam returned to entrepreneurship to create an entirely new product, which she unveiled
Owen Sakawa, the founder of Elloe AI, wants his platform to be the “immune system for AI” and the “antivirus for any AI agent.” The idea, Sakawa said in an interview days before the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, where Elloe AI is a Top 20 finalist in the Startup Battlefield competition, is to add a
Elloe AI wants to be the ‘immune system’ for AI — check it out at Disrupt 2025 Read More »
It happened one day. Jannae Gammage was working with the Small Business Administration as a technology consultant, helping companies get access to capital through traditional lenders, like banks and credit unions. She couldn’t stop thinking, however, that there was a problem: The ways in which lenders and businesses connected were woefully outdated, especially on the technological front. “I was inside the mess, watching good businesses die,
Auston Bunsen had a lot of free time after his company QuickNode reached a certain size. That company, a blockchain developer platform, was founded in 2017 and subsequently raised more than $100 million in funding, according to PitchBook. Then Bunsen started thinking about the fact that people would perhaps like to unlock their doors with their iPhone. “I eventually
AccessGrid raises $4.4M to help turn phones into key fobs Read More »
Plastic recycling has fallen short. Only about 9% of all plastic is recycled globally, which sounds pretty bad until you compare it with textiles. Only 0.5% of those are recycled. One of the biggest challenges is that textiles are seldom one material. Buttons and zippers complicate matters, but spandex is even worse. Novel synthetic blends
MacroCycle found a shortcut for plastic recycling — catch it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 Read More »
Pytho AI is coming out of stealth with an ambitious pitch to the Department of Defense: turn mission planning that takes warfighters days into a process measured in minutes. The startup was founded by Michael Mearn, a former Marine human-intelligence officer whose teams located insurgents, IEDs, weapons, and other intel. The idea for the company
