It's finally time to announce the five finalists of Startup Battlefield. It all started earlier this year, when the TechCrunch editorial team selected 200 companies from thousands of companies that applied. From there, the team selected 20 finalists who took to the stage this week at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in front of a jury of investors and a packed audience.
This year's finalists will follow in the footsteps of Startup Battlefield legends like Dropbox, Discord, Cloudflare, Mint, and more on the Disrupt Stage. With more than 1,500 alumni participating in the program, Startup Battlefield Alumni has collectively raised more than $29 billion and achieved more than 200 successes.
The five finalists will be Navin Chaddha (Mayfield), Chris Farmer (SignalFire), Dayna Grayson (Construct Capital), and Ann Mirai-Ko (Floodgate) on Disrupt Stage on Wednesday, October 30th at 11:30am PT. , and Hans Thun (notable capital).
Now, without further ado, we would like to introduce the five finalists of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 2024.
It looks fake, or at least like a good illusion. Gecko Materials founder Capella Karst has a bottle of wine dangling from her little finger, but the only thing keeping it from shattering is her startup's super-strong dry adhesive. It is. market. But it's not a trick. This is the result of years of academic research that Kerst built on by inventing a way to mass-produce the adhesive. Inspired by the way real-life gecko feet grip surfaces, this adhesive only needs to be on one side, leaves no residue, and can be removed just as quickly as it was applied. , it's like the new Velcro. It runs at least 120,000 times and can remain connected for seconds, minutes, or even years, as Kerst said in a recent interview with TechCrunch.
Luna is a health and wellness app for teenage girls, designed to help teenage girls navigate their teenage years. This app allows adolescents to ask questions about their health and get answers from experts. You can also track your period, mood, and skin condition. The London-based startup presented today on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, detailing its mission to educate and support teenage girls. 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 program at Oxford.
For people who party or go dancing, the risk of ingesting accidentally laced 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 Skye Lamb met in high school and lost a friend to an overdose while in college. Sadly, this is a story that many people (including myself) can relate to. Thankfully, test strips are now a common sight at venues and health centers, with hundreds of millions shipped each year.
Six years ago, Valentina Agudelo discovered the alarming disparity in breast cancer survival rates between Latin America and developed countries while doing research for a university startup competition. In her native Colombia and other parts of the continent, women die at higher rates from cancer later in life. detection. She found that although breast cancer is highly treatable when diagnosed early, many Latin American countries have large rural populations and lack access to mammography and other diagnostic tools. So Agudelo and two of her best friends decided to create a theoretical portable device that could detect breast cancer early.
In the summer of 2020, a fire broke out on a Navy ship docked in San Diego Bay. For more than four days, the aircraft carrier Bonhomme Richard was in flames as helicopters dropped buckets of water from above, boats spewed water from below and firefighters rushed aboard to extinguish the blaze. Before the embers cooled, lidar (light detection and ranging) scans were taken to assess the extent of the damage and determine how the fire started. However, the investigation stalled because it was extremely difficult to send lidar scans.