Intero Biosystems Wins TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 2026 and $100,000

By Daniel Okafor

Intero Biosystems won the Startup Battlefield Cup at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco this week and took home the $100,000 prize. The Denver startup beat 19 competitors over three days of live pitching in front of venture capitalists and tech executives.

The company builds 1mm human intestinal "organoids" — lab-grown tissue that mimics the gut. Drugmakers can use that tissue to test how a compound might affect the human body before trials in people. Intero sells its flagship product, GastroScreen, to pharmaceutical, biotech, food and chemical companies.

Charlie Childs and Madeline Eiken founded the company. It spun out of the University of Michigan.

How the competition worked

TechCrunch selected 20 startups from the Startup Battlefield 200. Each one pitched a live demo before judges drawn from venture capital firms and tech leadership ranks.

After hours of deliberation, TechCrunch editors reviewed the judges' notes and cut the field to five finalists:

• Apate
• Flox Intelligence
• Intero Biosystems
• Industrial Next
• Satlyt

The final five demoed before a closing panel: 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.

That panel picked Intero Biosystems as the winner.

Who is the runner-up?

Apate, an Australian startup, took second place. Dali Kaafar founded the company after research work at Macquarie University in Sydney.

The product is unusual. Apate deploys thousands of AI agents that pose as easy targets for criminals. The agents answer scam calls, reply to suspicious messages and emails, click phishing links and join social media groups to bait fraudsters.

Customers get access to the agent fleet plus an insights portal. That portal delivers intelligence and analytics on scams aimed at their end users, employees, brands and products.

The mechanics are simple. Scammers waste time and resources on fake victims, and their tactics get logged. Apate turns that waste into data its customers can act on.

What does winning mean for Intero?

The Battlefield track record explains why the prize matters. Past winners and finalists include Trello, Discord, Cloudflare and Mint — all companies that launched on the Disrupt Stage and later became household names in software and fintech.

The alumni numbers back that up. More than 1,700 startups have gone through the program. Together they have raised over $30 billion in funding and produced more than 200 successful exits.

For Intero Biosystems, the win puts a lab-tissue company from a university spinout in front of that investor audience at a moment when drug-development costs keep climbing. A 1mm piece of gut tissue that flags a toxic compound before human trials can save a pharma company months of work and a failed study.

The $100,000 cheque is small by venture standards. The visibility is the real asset, and the alumni list shows what founders have done with it before.