Intero Biosystems Wins Startup Battlefield at Disrupt 2026

Intero Biosystems, a startup that grows human gut tissue in the lab for drug testing, has won the 2026 Startup Battlefield at Disrupt 2026. The company took home the $100,000 equity-free prize and the Disrupt Cup, TechCrunch announced, with scam-fighting AI startup Apate finishing as runner-up.

How the competition worked

Disrupt 2026 ran from October 13 to 15 at Moscone West in San Francisco. TechCrunch selected 200 startups from thousands of applications for its Startup Battlefield 200 cohort, and those companies pitched and demoed their products over three days.

From that group, 20 companies made the Top 20 and pitched on the main Disrupt Stage, with six minutes each to make their case. They competed in four tracks: space and physical AI, energy and manufacturing, health tech and life sciences, and enterprise and security.

After four semifinal sessions across two days, TechCrunch’s editors picked five finalists to compete on Thursday, October 15. The winner was named that afternoon.

The winner: Intero Biosystems

Intero Biosystems develops human intestinal organoids, which are small pieces of lab-grown tissue that behave like the human gut. Drug developers can use them to see how medicines and other compounds might affect the body before running trials in people.

The company says its organoids are more realistic than simpler gut models because they contain several of the different cell and tissue types found in the human intestine, rather than replicating only one part of it.

The runner-up: Apate

Apate deploys thousands of AI agents that pose as potential victims to keep scammers busy. The agents answer scam calls, reply to suspicious messages and emails, follow phishing links and join social media groups. They vary in age, gender and accent and speak multiple languages, with the aim of keeping fraudsters on the line long enough to collect useful information about their tactics.

The other finalists

• Flox Intelligence makes a wildlife deterrent that runs on edge devices. A motion sensor wakes the device, an on-device camera model identifies the animal, and it plays a sound tailored to that species to scare it away, as an alternative to fences, sirens or culling.
• Industrial Next builds self-contained robotic workstations powered by its own foundation models, which connect vision, task context and motion. It says manufacturers can retool a production line in minutes instead of weeks, and some of its stations already help make one of the world’s most popular smartphones.
• Satlyt builds software that lets several satellites share large computing jobs in orbit. It has flown on two demonstration missions and is working toward a shared computing cloud between satellites.

Spirit of Disrupt award

TechCrunch also gave its Spirit of Disrupt award to Shogher Atanesyan, founder and CEO of Ardook Data. TechCrunch noted that her first experience of Disrupt was as a volunteer in 2023.

Why it matters

Startup Battlefield is one of the best-known startup competitions in tech. Over more than 15 years, its alumni have collectively raised more than $32 billion, according to TechCrunch, and past participants include Dropbox, Cloudflare, Discord, Trello and Mint.

This year’s finalists reflect where early-stage founders are focusing: lab biology, AI agents for security, robotics in manufacturing and computing in space. A life sciences company taking the top prize also shows that the competition is not only about software and AI apps.

What happens next

For the winner and finalists, the main value is often the attention that follows: investor meetings, customers and press. You can read more about this year’s Startup Battlefield finalists and Top 20.