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Startup Battlefield 200: Celebrating outstanding achievements

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Startup Battlefield 200 reception

This year, TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 showcased the incredible talent and groundbreaking ideas of our 2024 Startup Battlefield 200 cohort.

Out of thousands of applications, we selected 200 of the most promising startups, each bringing unique innovations to their respective industries. The competition culminated in an electrifying event where these startups had the opportunity to pitch and demonstrate their solutions live over three days.

From the Top 20 Finalists, TechCrunch editorial selected the top five companies who battled it out for the $100,000 equity-free prize money and the coveted Disrupt Cup. The well-deserved win went to Salva Health, with a strong runner up, Gecko Materials

Among the Startup Battlefield 200 companies were many industry-defining companies exhibiting and pitching on the Showcase Stage; here are the standouts: 

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Best Showcase Stage pitch by industry group 

Hardware, Robotics + IoT

Avol uses autonomous drones to deliver lab samples, speeding processing up to 11x faster at lower costs.

Health Tech + Biotech

Ovum Health merges molecular diagnostics, medicine, and behavioral science for healthier moms and babies.

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Security, Privacy + Social Networking  

Factiverse aids finance and media in verifying information, acting like Grammarly for fact-checking.

Fintech + Edtech  

Untapped Solutions connects justice-impacted individuals with jobs and services via an AI-driven CRM.

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Sustainability, Mobility + Logistics  

Prosal helps business development teams at federal government contractors automate capture research to save time predicting contract opportunities using AI.

SaaS, Enterprise + Productivity – Session 1

Eticas.ai identifies black box algorithmic vulnerabilities and retrains AI-powered technology with better source data and content.

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SaaS, Enterprise + Productivity – Session 2  

OMADEUS is a dynamic network of self-aware AI agents to replace outdated productivity software for SMEs.

Best Booth — It’s a tie! 

The Best Booth award ended in a tie.

Cloneable.ai hand-built and painted a utility pole out of Styrofoam to demonstrate their innovations in safety inspection for utility workers. Wave Therapeutics used the clever sign “In the Business of Saving Your Ass” as a nod to their tech designed to prevent bedsores.

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Spirit of Disrupt Award

The Spirit of Disrupt award goes to Yasin Abbak from GroupUps, who went above and beyond to create connections and opportunities for fellow founders. The Startup Battlefield is more than a pitch competition; it’s an opportunity to build relationships with investors, potential customers, and fellow founders to support each other on their entrepreneurial journeys. 

As we celebrate the achievements of this year’s winners, we are excited to see how they will shape their industries and drive innovation in the months and years to come. Congratulations to all the participants of the Startup Battlefield 200, and a special thank you to our judges and sponsors for their support in making TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 a resounding success.

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Ulysses is using robots to restore seagrass populations

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The founders of Ulysses: Colm O’Brien (far left), Jamie Wedderburn (left middle), Will O’Brien (left right), Akhil Voorakkara (right).

Seagrass punches above its weight. The marine plant only occupies 0.1% of the ocean floor but can be credited with supporting marine ecosystems of plants and fish, filtering ocean water, and capturing quite a bit of carbon. Seagrass is also being destroyed, due to climate change and other factors, with meadows reducing 7% globally each year. Ulysses Ecosystem Engineering wants to restore it.

Ulysses’ autonomous robot can be loaded with seeds and programmed to go to specific areas of the ocean floor to plant seagrass. Akhil Voorakkara, a co-founder and CEO at San Francisco-based Ulysses, told TechCrunch that the robot they’ve built has been able to speed up restoration by 100x compared to having volunteers plant the grass seeds by hand and at a fraction of the cost of other robots.

Jamie Wedderburn, now CTO, got the idea for the company while on a surf trip with friends on the West Coast of Scotland in early 2023. One of his friends mentioned a recent awful volunteering experience they had that involved planting seagrass on a particularly harsh day of Scottish weather. More than 40 volunteers painfully planted seagrass that ended up just getting wiped away by rough conditions.

Wedderburn hadn’t known about the importance of seagrass, and hearing this story sent him down a rabbit hole. He thought there must be a way to use technology to make processes like that better. Wedderburn pitched the idea to Voorakkara, who proceeded to also fall down the same rabbit hole. The company’s other two co-founders, Colm O’Brien and Will O’Brien, had similar reactions.

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“I knew that would be fun immediately,” Will O’Brien told TechCrunch. “Also getting the opportunity to build a mission-driven company that works primarily in the oceans, and is really focused on nature and biodiversity, is just like, you know, it was that was extremely compelling to me as well. Growing up as a kid, my hero was Steve Irwin.”

Voorakkara said that the team decided to pursue this problem by building a robot because, while none of them had marine biology experience, they did have experience building robots. They quickly made a 3D prototype which wasn’t waterproof and leaked when they used it, but it worked well enough at injecting sesame seeds, to show them there was something there. Once they had conviction they turned to experts for help.

“None of us are marine biologists,” Voorakkara said. “You won’t get anything unless you ask and we did ask for help and advice very early on in our journey to the top people working in seagrass restoration and making sure it wasn’t crazy. These people were super excited about what we are doing and were super willing to work with us.”

Ulysses launched in early 2024 and has since earned nearly $1 million in revenue from both private companies and government organizations. The startup has partnerships with multiple government agencies in places like Florida and Australia for large-scale restoration projects too.

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The startup is now emerging from stealth and announcing a $2 million pre-seed funding round led by Lowercarbon Capital with participation from VCs Superorganism and ReGen Ventures, in addition to angel investors. Voorakkara said the startup will use the funds to bolster its team of five by adding engineers and people focused on go-to-market strategies.

Timing is on Ulysses’ side, as many governments are putting more emphasis and urgency on restoring seagrass meadows. Earlier this year the European Union passed a new regulation focused on restoring different habitats by 2030 and 2050, with seagrass specifically named.

Voorakkara said that this month the company will be testing a new capability for the robot: being able to harvest seeds from approved seagrass beds and then planting those seeds where they are needed.

While seagrass is currently the company’s main focus, they think of it as the beginning. Will O’Brien said that the tech is really autonomous drones connected to a main platform so it can expand into other areas like coastal management, coastal security and other types of restoration.

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“The oceans really are this frontier in humanity that is extremely under explored,” O’Brien said. “There is not a lot of novel technological solutions and it’s because it’s an extremely difficult domain, dealing with currents, [it’s] very unforgiving when you have all these things. [We want to] bring SpaceX levels of innovation to this new domain here on earth.”

There are other companies looking to build underwater robots too. Terradepth is one that has raised more than $30 million in VC to focus on mapping the ocean floor for both commercial and government goals. Eelume is another out of Norway that is focused on ocean discovery.

“In five years, we don’t want to just be doing seagrass restoration, we want to be managing hundreds of kilometers of coastline,” Voorakkara said. “We want to supercharge groups like NOAA the [United States] Coast Guard and everyone working on serving the ocean and protecting it in a much more efficient manor.”

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Audi launches a new brand in China without the four-ring logo

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Audi launches a new brand in China without the four-ring logo

Audi is making a big change to its branding for the Chinese market with a new logo that lacks the automaker’s famous four-ring emblem. Today in Shanghai, the company showed off the new “AUDI” logo — yes, it’s just Audi in all caps — on the front of a new E concept electric Sportback that notably lacks its broadly used “E-Tron” branding.

In a press release, Audi’s CEO Gernot Döllner said it’s hoping to tap into China’s “more tech-savvy” customers who “expect leading connectivity as well as automated driving.” Reuters reported in August that Audi was planning a rebrand for China, where the automaker sold less than 10,000 vehicles in the country in the first half of 2024.

Audi says the AUDI E concept represents a preview of three upcoming mid- and full-sized models it will introduce starting in mid-2025. Audi formed a partnership with Chinese state-owned SAIC Motors and placed its former electric models head, Fermín Soneira, as the new team’s CEO. A new Advanced Digitized Platform was developed through the partnership, featuring an 800-volt architecture that underpins the E concept.

Soneir, who has been with Audi parent company Volkswagen for 25 years, says the partnership is set up to “jointly organize development, purchasing, production, and sales.”

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Top 3 things you have to try with the new ChatGPT search

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ChatGPT search extension in Chrome.

ChatGPT search (the new search engine built into ChatGPT that combines conversational AI with real-time information straight from the web) has recently launched for everybody who was signed up to the waitlist, or is a ChatGPT Plus subscriber.

What’s more, OpenAI recently leveled up ChatGPT search with a shiny new Google Chrome extension that means you can use it from the address bar. If you’re already using Google Chrome, this makes for a much more useful way to find and gather up-to-date information while simultaneously giving you more personalized filters and a way to leverage that information for new and fun activities.

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The real reason VAR infuriates football fans and how to fix it

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Liverpool fans jostle for a look at the on-field VAR screen at Anfield stadium
Liverpool fans jostle for a look at the on-field VAR screen at Anfield stadium

Liverpool fans jostle for a look at the on-field VAR screen at Anfield stadium

Alex Dodd – CameraSport via Getty Images

If you have watched any football – or soccer – over the past few years, you will know that the game has been consumed by controversies over its new refereeing technology. The video assistant referee (VAR) system was introduced to the English Premier League in 2019 to reduce refereeing errors and get more decisions right. Instead, it has created new kinds of uncertainty and undermined our understanding of fundamental rules like offside and handball. It has also infuriated fans, who can often be heard chanting “it’s not football any more” after a long-winded VAR check.

It is fair to say that football fans like to get irate, especially when refereeing decisions go against their team. But as I argue in my new book, I Can’t Stop Thinking About VAR, there’s more to this than meets the eye. As someone whose job involves developing new methods of measuring educational attainment, I have thought long and hard about the reasons why VAR has been so frustrating. I believe its problems relate to the challenge of pinning down objective reality, the difficulty of precise measurement and the human dislike of uncertainty.

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What I have also come to realise, however, is that VAR exemplifies the limits of rationality in many walks of life far beyond the football field. As such, a brief exploration of the history of measurement more broadly – from attempts to pin down the boiling point of water in the 18th century to the struggle to accurately assess the…

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inZOI finally gets release date, but it’s a delay to 2025

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inZOI finally gets release date, but it's a delay to 2025
A woman built in the Inzoi character creator. She has short brown hair and big eyes looking off to the left.
Krafton

The developers behind inZOI announced a 2025 early access release date on Thursday despite assurances that the hyper-realistic life sim would still launch sometime this year.

Game producer and director Hyungjun “Kjun” Kim posted an open letter to the community on the inZOI Discord saying that the game will be coming out on March 28, 2025, instead of in late 2024 so that the developers can give the game “the best possible start.”

While inZOI never received a concrete release date until Thursday, a spokesperson for the team at Krafton told PC Gamer just last month that the plan was to release it in 2024. In August, the studio released inZOI: Character Studio on Steam, a demo of its character creator. It was only up for five days, but immediately drew the attention of players who wanted to re-create fictional characters and real-life people with ridiculous amounts of detail.

inZOI: Character Studio Official Announcement

Following feedback from that demo, along with various playtests, Kim said the team needed to work more to give players “the most complete experience possible.”

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“It is said that among primates, raising a human child to adulthood takes the longest time because humans must be prepared to endure and adapt to their ever-changing surroundings,” Kim wrote. “The extra love and care that is required to properly nurture a child is how I see our journey with inZOI—a game that we will be nurturing together from its Early Access birth. This change in our release date represents our dedication to giving inZOI a stronger foundation, so we can embark on this journey together in the best way possible.”

InZOI is poised to be a real The Sims competitor, and is one of the few still due for release after Paradox Interactive canceled its entry in the genre, Life by You, before it could even reach early accessAt the time of this writing, it’s the 12th most wishlisted game on Steam.



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FTX’s Caroline Ellison reports to prison to begin 2-year sentence

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FTX's Caroline Ellison reports to prison to begin 2-year sentence


Caroline Ellison, former chief executive officer of Alameda Research LLC, arrives at court in New York, US, on Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

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Caroline Ellison, the star witness in the prosecution of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, reported to a low-security federal prison in Connecticut on Thursday, according to a spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons.

In September, Ellison was sentenced to two years in prison and ordered to forfeit $11 billion for her role in the massive fraud and conspiracy that doomed the cryptocurrency exchange once valued at $32 billion.

The federal Probation Department had recommended that Judge Lewis Kaplan sentence Ellison to three years of supervised release, with no time behind bars. Defense lawyers also had requested a punishment that didn’t include prison time.

While Kaplan praised Ellison for her extensive cooperation with prosecutors — which led to the conviction of Bankman-Fried — the judge said her criminal sentence needed to deter other potential bad actors from committing fraud.

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Ellison ran Alameda Research, which was a sister hedge fund of FTX. She was also romantically involved with Bankman-Fried.

Alameda received much of the $8 billion in customer funds looted by Bankman-Fried from FTX. The stolen money was used for Alameda’s trading operation and other purposes.

Ellison reached a plea deal with prosecutors in December 2022, a month after FTX spiraled into bankruptcy. She pleaded guilty to conspiracy and financial fraud charges.

Kaplan called FTX the greatest financial fraud perpetrated in the history of the U.S., and told the court in Manhattan during the sentencing that a “literal get-out-of-jail-free card I can’t agree to.”

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“I’ve seen a lot of cooperators over the years and I’ve never seen one quite like Miss Ellison,” said Kaplan, who also said he believed that Ellison was genuinely remorseful for her crimes and that her cooperation carried a steep price for her emotionally.

Late last month, Former FTX executive Nishad Singh was sentenced to time served and three years of supervised release, becoming the fourth ex-employee of the collapsed crypto exchange to be punished. 

At her sentencing, Ellison read from a statement in a shaky voice while crying at times as she apologized to the people she had hurt and said she was deeply ashamed. She also said she was sorry for not being brave enough to walk away from FTX and Bankman-Fried.

Kaplan allowed Ellison to remain free on bail until surrendering to prison either on or after Nov. 7.

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Bankman-Fried chose to stand trial and was convicted of all seven criminal fraud charges against him. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March and also was ordered to pay $11 billion in forfeiture by Kaplan.

Both Bankman-Fried and Ellison had faced the same statutory maximum sentence of about 110 years in prison for their crimes.

WATCH: FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried appeals fraud conviction

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried appeals fraud conviction



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