For three days this week, twenty startups participated in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025. Each company was selected from the Startup Battlefield 200 to represent the best of the group and competed for a chance to win the Startup Battlefield Cup and one hundred thousand dollars. After intense pitching, a winner has been chosen.
These startups were handpicked to compete, and each presented a live demonstration in front of a panel of venture capitalists and tech leaders who served as judges. After hours of deliberations, TechCrunch editors reviewed the judges’ notes and selected five finalists. The finalists were Charter Space, Glīd, MacroCycle, Nephrogen, and Unlisted Homes.
The five finalists then presented in the finale before the final panel of judges, which included Aileen Lee, the founder and managing partner of Cowboy Ventures, and Digg founder Kevin Rose. We are now ready to announce that the winner of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 2025 is Glīd.
Glīd, which is pronounced “Glide,” aims to streamline the complex, multistep process of moving a container from a ship to a freight train. The company has developed several hardware and software products designed to speed up this process and reduce the cost of getting shipping containers to the railhead and on to their final destination. Its first product is the GliderM, a hybrid-electric vehicle equipped with a hook on the back that can pick up and move twenty-foot containers directly to the rail without requiring forklifts or hostler trucks.
The runner-up was Nephrogen. Nephrogen is a biotech startup that uses artificial intelligence and advanced screening to develop a specialized delivery system. This system is designed to safely deliver gene-editing medicines into the exact cells in the kidney. Founder Demetri Maxim stated that after three years of development, Nephrogen has created a delivery mechanism that is one hundred times more efficient at transporting medicine to the kidney than the delivery vehicles currently approved by the FDA. Given that he lives with polycystic kidney disease, Maxim plans to participate in the clinical study himself.
These two companies follow in the footsteps of Startup Battlefield legends like Dropbox, Discord, Cloudflare, and Mint. With more than fifteen hundred alumni having participated in the program, Startup Battlefield Alumni have collectively raised over twenty-nine billion dollars in funding and have had more than two hundred successful exits.