Grab your ticket savings before prices go up on September 25 at 11:59 p. Plus, get a second of the same ticket type at 50% off. Part of the value of Disrupt has always been finding breakouts early. The startup you haven’t heard of yet. The technology moving from experiment to real product. The founder attacking a problem in a way you hadn’t considered. Or an emerging category that suddenly looks much bigger once you see several companies building around it.
Startup Battlefield 200 puts 200 TechCrunch-selected early-stage companies in one place, giving you three days to see what a new generation of founders thinks is worth building, and what investors are looking to add to their portfolio. Early-stage startups can be useful signals. Look across enough of them, and you start to see where founders are finding opportunity, which technologies are becoming accessible, which old problems are being attacked in new ways, and where completely new markets might be taking shape.
At Disrupt, all 200 Startup Battlefield startups exhibit, so you can go beyond the company description. Ask why they’re building it. Find out who they’re building it for. Understand what they think the rest of the market is missing. For investors, that can mean new deal flow and emerging categories to watch. For founders, it’s a chance to see what other early-stage teams are building and how they’re approaching the market. For operators and tech leaders, it can mean discovering a future supplier, partner, or solution before it reaches the wider market. Sometimes discovery is about finding a company.
Sometimes it’s about spotting the pattern behind several of them. From the top 200 companies, 20 will take the Disrupt Stage to pitch live in front of leading investors and the TechCrunch community. One will ultimately take home the Disrupt Cup and $100,000 in equity-free funding. Explore all the Startup Battlefield onstage sessions on the Disrupt agenda . But the value of watching goes beyond who wins — you get to see emerging companies explain why their problem matters, why their approach is different, and why they believe they can build something much bigger.