Intero Biosystems Wins TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 2026

For three days in San Francisco, 20 startups presented at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026’s Startup Battlefield, a program that gives teams a chance to win the Startup Battlefield Cup and a $100,000 prize. Each company gave a live demo before venture capitalists and tech leaders who served as judges. After the pitches, TechCrunch editors narrowed the field to five finalists who then moved on to the final round on the Disrupt stage.

The five finalists

The five finalists were Apate, Flox Intelligence, Intero Biosystems, Industrial Next, and Satlyt. They faced a panel of seasoned investors—Alexa von Tobel of Inspired Capital, Chi‑Hua Chien of Goodwater Capital, Dayna Grayson of Construct Capital, Karl Alomar of M13, and Stacy Brown‑Philpot of Cherryrock Capital—who reviewed each live demo and evaluated the companies’ potential for growth and impact. TechCrunch editors and the panel deliberated for several hours to decide the winner.

Intero Biosystems, founded by Charlie Childs and Madeline Eiken in Denver, spun out of the University of Michigan and builds 1mm human intestinal organoids—lab‑grown tissues that mimic the gut for drug testing. Its flagship product, GastroScreen, is sold to pharmaceutical, biotech, food, and chemical firms to study how compounds affect the human body before human trials. Runner‑up Apate uses AI agents to expose fraud, offering an analytics portal to track scams.