Disrupt 2026 Showcase Winners: Uhura Bionics, Lumai and 5 More

TechCrunch has named seven more award winners from Disrupt 2026, beyond the Startup Battlefield final that Intero Biosystems won. Six startups took the best Showcase Stage pitch in their industry group and a seventh won Best Booth, picked from the 200 companies that exhibited at the San Francisco conference from October 13 to 15, 2026. Together they show where early-stage founders were putting their energy this year: AI security, new kinds of computing, health hardware and lab-grown ingredients.

What happened

The Startup Battlefield 200 is TechCrunch’s yearly cohort of early-stage startups. The 2026 group was announced on August 20. During Disrupt, every company had a booth, and many pitched on the Showcase Stage. Twenty were chosen for the main Battlefield competition, and the final five pitched for the $100,000 equity-free prize on October 15.

In a wrap-up post on October 22, Startup Battlefield head Isabelle Johannessen and operations manager Michael Schick listed the other honours. Each industry group got a best Showcase Stage pitch, and one company won Best Booth. The Spirit of Disrupt award, which went to Ardook Data founder Shogher Atanesyan, was announced in the same post.

Who won the Showcase Stage awards?

Industry group	Winner	What it builds
Built World	Lola Vision Systems	A full-stack AI platform combining sensor fusion, secure communications and real-time inference, with its own chips planned
Sustainability	Krokos Bio	Lower-cost, more reliable production of valuable natural ingredients, starting with saffron
Enterprise Group 1	Rein Security	A security layer for enterprise AI agents that companies build themselves
Enterprise Group 2	Lumai	Optical computing for running AI models
Health	Uhura Bionics	A bionic voice device that lets users sing, laugh and convey emotion
Consumer	Maka	AI-powered children’s shows curated around child development

Key details on the winners

Uhura Bionics: a voice device for people who lost their larynx

Uhura Bionics was founded in 2023 by Konrad Zieliński, who lost his voice to cancer while studying at the University of Warsaw. He later completed a PhD on bionic systems for laryngectomees, people whose larynx has been removed.

According to a TechCrunch profile published in September, the company makes wearable devices that need no surgery. A basic model costs $500, and a higher-end version called Whitney, named after Whitney Houston, costs $1,500. Both are sold as wellness products for now. Uhura is seeking Class I medical device status in Europe and then the US, which could make the devices partly reimbursable by health insurers. Zieliński told TechCrunch he wants Whitney to be as ordinary to wear as glasses.

Rein Security: money in the bank before the show

Rein Security arrived at Disrupt with fresh funding. On October 8, 2026, the company announced a $25 million Series A led by Glilot Capital and Sienna Venture Capital, with Corner Ventures, Atlacle and RNP Capital Advisors also taking part. That brought its total funding to $35 million, according to Pulse 2.0.

Founded in 2024 and based in New York and Tel Aviv, Rein builds runtime security for AI agents. Its platform uses patented “sidecar” technology to show security teams what code an agent runs and what resources it touches, and to block risky actions in real time without routing data through a gateway or proxy. Matan Bar-Efrat is co-founder and CEO.

Lumai: computing with light

Oxford-based Lumai uses light instead of only silicon to do the heavy maths behind AI. In April 2026 it launched Iris, a family of three inference servers called Nova, Aura and Tetra. The company says Iris Nova can run Meta’s Llama 8B and 70B models and claims up to 90% lower energy use than conventional systems. Iris Nova is available for evaluation. Dr Xianxin Guo is co-founder and CEO.

Krokos Bio: saffron without the fields

California-based Krokos Bio grows plant cells in bioreactors rather than farming crops. AgFunderNews reported in 2025 that founder and CEO Jacob Lang is working on a food-grade saffron powder containing all three of the spice’s key compounds, with funding from Big Idea Ventures. The process turns samples from source plants into cell cultures grown in liquid, which are then coaxed into becoming the stigma cells that saffron comes from. Dr Emma Skoog, formerly of California Cultured, is co-founder and chief scientific officer.

Best Booth: Legali AI

Legali AI builds a trauma-informed AI legal companion for middle-class users and AI-native law firms, with a focus on women who have faced abuse. Its stand was entirely pink, attendees left encouraging sticky notes on it, and founder Ira Puteri wore a different pink outfit each day. The organisers called it a show of real commitment.

Why it matters

The Battlefield final only shows five companies. The industry-group awards give a wider view of the 2026 cohort. Two of the six winners, Rein Security and Lumai, are working on the infrastructure behind AI: one on keeping agents safe inside companies, the other on cutting the energy cost of running models. AI chips and agents were also big topics on the main stage, as our Day 1 recap showed.

The health and consumer winners point the other way, towards personal products where AI or hardware changes daily life for a specific group of people.

What happens next

TechCrunch has opened a waitlist for Disrupt 2027 in San Francisco but has not yet announced dates. For the full list of finalists, see our guide to the Startup Battlefield Top 20.