The 2026 Startup Battlefield Top 20: From organs to orbit and everything in between

Twenty founders have earned their shot at Disrupt glory, heading to the Disrupt Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to compete for the $100,000 prize and the coveted Disrupt Cup. Each year, thousands of founders from around the world pitch their visions for the future. This year’s Top 20 are building innovations that span from organs to orbit and everywhere in between.

Across this cohort, one theme emerged: making the previously invisible measurable. These founders are discovering ways to understand signals that were once beyond our reach, modeling complex systems, and transforming the physical world into actionable data. They are:

• Measuring biological clocks within our bodies and growing miniature human organs in labs.
• Teaching robots to perform increasingly complex physical tasks.
• Modeling the real world closely enough to predict future events, including the behavior of wild animals.
• Extracting intelligence from scam calls and utilizing existing computing power in orbit.
• Attempting to launch cargo into space using a giant hydrogen-powered cannon.

What connects these 20 companies isn’t a single technology or industry, but their ambition to understand more about the biological, physical, industrial, and digital worlds. They aim to leverage this understanding to make better decisions, automate processes that once required human intervention, and tackle previously insurmountable challenges. Each company will have six minutes on the Disrupt Stage to prove their innovations.

Here are the companies competing: