After two days of live demos and pitches, it is time to announce the five finalists at this year’s Startup Battlefield. These finalists were chosen from an initial pool of thousands of applicants. The TechCrunch editorial team first narrowed the field down to 200 companies that joined us at Disrupt, with the Top 20 competing on the Disrupt Stage.
Based on feedback from our expert judges, we have now selected our finalists. They will take the stage one more time at 11:30 a.m. PT on Wednesday to compete for the grand prize of one hundred thousand dollars in equity-free funding, as well as temporary custody of the Startup Battlefield Cup. You can watch the finals on the livestream on the TechCrunch website, or if you are attending the conference, you can watch on the Disrupt Stage.
Without further ado, here are the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield finalists for 2025.
CHARTER SPACE
Charter Space has built a developer tool for aerospace engineers, but its real mission is to serve as a fintech company for space. The software captures manufacturing and test data directly from the source. This dataset then feeds an underwriting interface that ties directly in with the largest insurance carriers in the market. The goal is to provide faster, cheaper, and more reliable risk evaluation for spacecraft insurance. Eventually, it aims to power new forms of credit and nondilutive funding for space companies looking outside of venture capital and the public markets.
GLĪD
Glīd, which is pronounced “Glide”, aims to streamline the complex, multistep process involved in moving a container from a ship to a freight train. The company has developed several hardware and software products to speed up and reduce the cost of getting shipping containers to the railhead and eventually to their destination. Its first product is GliderM, a hybrid-electric vehicle with a hook on the back that can pick up and move twenty-foot containers directly to the rail without the need for forklifts or hostler trucks.
MACROCYCLE
MacroCycle has developed a shortcut that promises to make recycled plastic as inexpensive as virgin material. The startup has devised a way to pluck desirable synthetic fibers from waste textiles, leaving everything else behind. Unlike most chemical recycling, MacroCycle’s process does not break down polymers. Instead, it loops the polymer chains back on themselves, forcing them into rings called macrocycles, which remain behind after contaminants are washed away.
NEPHROGEN
Nephrogen is a biotech startup that uses artificial intelligence and advanced screening to develop a specialized delivery system for safely getting gene-editing medicines into the exact cells in the kidney. Founder Demetri Maxim says that after three years of development, Nephrogen has succeeded in creating a delivery mechanism that is one hundred times more efficient at transporting medicine to the kidney than the vehicles currently approved by the FDA. He plans to participate in the clinical study himself, given the challenges he faces living with polycystic kidney disease.
UNLISTED HOMES
Unlisted Homes is like Zillow but for houses that are not yet on the market. Using public records of twenty-one million homes, Unlisted created profiles for each property, providing the same kind of information that you would find on any other real estate listings site. The company does not plan to facilitate real estate transactions through the platform, since the resources for those transactions already exist. Instead, Unlisted will sell sponsorships on individual ZIP codes to real estate agents, who will be listed as local experts on every home in that ZIP code.