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Here are the 5 Startup Battlefield finalists at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024

Posted on by L. Dreeye
Here are the 5 Startup Battlefield finalists at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024

It’s finally time to announce the five finalists of Startup Battlefield. It all started earlier this year, when TechCrunch’s editors selected 200 companies from the thousands that applied. The team then selected 20 finalists to perform on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 this week in front of investor judges and a packed crowd.

This year’s finalists follow in the footsteps of Startup Battlefield legends Dropbox, Discord, Cloudflare and Mint on the Disrupt Stage. More than 1,500 alumni have participated in the program, and Startup Battlefield alumni have collectively raised more than $29 billion in funding with more than 200 successful exits.

The five finalists will perform again on the Disrupt stage on Wednesday, October 30 at 11:30 a.m. PT, in front of Naveen Chadda (Mayfield), Chris Farmer (SignalFire), Dayna Grayson (Construct Capital), Ann Miura-Ko (Floodgate) and Hans Tung (Famous Capital).

Now, without further ado, here are the five TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 2024 finalists:

It looks fake, or at least like a good illusion: Gecko Materials founder Capella Kerst dangles a full bottle of wine from her pinky finger, the only thing keeping it from breaking into pieces is the heavy-duty dry glue her startup brought to market. But this is not a trick. This is the result of years of academic research in which Kerst developed a method for mass production of glue. Inspired by the way the feet of real geckos grip surfaces, the adhesive is similar to new Velcro—except it only needs one side, leaves no residue, and can come off as quickly as it attaches. It can do this at least 120,000 times and, as Kerst noted in a recent TechCrunch interview, can stay connected for seconds, minutes, or even years.

Luna is a health and wellness app for teen girls designed to help them navigate adolescence. The app allows teens to ask questions about their health and well-being and get answers from experts. It also allows them to track menstruation, mood and skin conditions. The London-based startup detailed its mission to educate and support teenage girls on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 today. Luna is the brainchild of best friend duo Jas Schembri-Stothart and Jo Goodall, who came up with the idea for the startup as part of an assignment during their MBA at Oxford.

For anyone who throws parties or goes to dances, the risk of accidentally taking counterfeit drugs is real. MabLab has created a test strip that detects five of the most common and dangerous additives in minutes. Co-founders Vienna Sparks and Sky Lam met in high school, and while in college, the couple lost a friend to an overdose. Unfortunately, this is a story many people (including myself) can relate to. Fortunately, test strips are now commonplace on sports fields and medical centers, with hundreds of millions of them shipped each year.

Six years ago, while preparing for a college entrepreneurship competition, Valentina Agudelo identified an alarming gap in breast cancer survival rates between Latin America and the developed world: Women in her native Colombia and the rest of the continent were dying at higher rates from late-onset cancer. detection. She realized that breast cancer is highly treatable if diagnosed early, but in many Latin American countries large rural populations lack access to mammography and other diagnostic tools. So Agudelo and her two best friends decided to create a theoretical, portable device that could detect breast cancer at an early stage.

In the summer of 2020, a fire broke out aboard a military ship moored in San Diego Bay. The aircraft carrier USS Bonhomme Richard burned for more than four days as helicopters dropped buckets of water from above, boats spewed water from below and firefighters rushed on board to douse the flames. Before the embers even cooled, lidar (light detection and ranging) scans were carried out to assess how severe the damage was and to figure out how the fire started in the first place. But the investigation has stalled, in part because of the difficulty of sending lidar scans.