News
Startup Battlefield 200 applications close May 27
Your shot at VC access, global visibility, TechCrunch coverage, and $100,000 in equity-free funding is gone in a week.
Startup Battlefield 200 applications close May 27. If you’re building a breakout startup — or know a founder who is — this is the moment to act.
Apply today for the opportunity to take the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, October 13-15, alongside 200 of the world’s most promising early-stage startups.
The clock is ticking for early-stage founders
Pre-Series A founders, consider this your final countdown reminder: the strongest startups are already entering the arena, and the application window is closing fast.
If your startup has already been nominated, don’t wait to complete your application. This final week moves quickly, and last-minute submissions risk getting buried as applications surge ahead of the deadline.
Know a startup that deserves the spotlight? Nominate them now so they still have time to apply before May 27.
The companies that define categories rarely start polished
Some of the most consequential companies in tech history didn’t launch with splashy fundraising announcements. They started with a pitch.
Dropbox demoed to a room full of skeptics. Cloudflare took the stage before most people understood what edge networking meant. Discord was still a scrappy gaming startup called Hammer & Chisel.
They all passed through the same crucible: Startup Battlefield 200. That’s not a coincidence — it’s a pattern. And it starts with an application.
Startup Battlefield 200 has never been a competition for the most polished companies. It’s a competition for the most promising ones. Pre-launch is fine. No revenue is fine. What matters is whether what you’re building genuinely changes something — not incrementally, but meaningfully.
If you or a founder you know is building something impactful, then the application itself becomes the first pitch. Apply before May 27.
More than a pitch competition
Startup Battlefield 200 is where breakout companies get discovered.
Selected startups will showcase live on the Disrupt Stage in front of 10,000+ attendees, leading VCs, global media, and the broader TechCrunch audience. This is your opportunity to gain investor exposure, receive direct VC feedback, and prove your company belongs among the next generation of category-defining startups.
Every one of the 200 selected companies receives:
- A fully funded three-day exhibition booth at Disrupt
- Founder masterclasses with world-class VCs and operators
- A featured startup profile in the event app
- Press list access and lead-generation opportunities
- Opportunities for TechCrunch editorial coverage, podcasts, and speaking appearances as the company grows
And every selected company pitches, whether on the Disrupt Stage or the Pitch Showcase Stage. Both put founders in front of the investors, media, and partners who attend Disrupt specifically to find what’s next.
You don’t need to make the top 20 for this experience to change your trajectory. Get started by nominating and applying here.
The Startup Battlefield 200 track record speaks for itself
More than 1,700 companies have competed in Startup Battlefield 200. Together, they’ve raised over $32 billion and generated more than 250 exits, including acquisitions by Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Uber, and Amazon.
The network runs so deep that alumni have even acquired each other: Dropbox acquired fellow Battlefield 200 alum DocSend in 2021.
This is also the same launchpad that helped accelerate companies like Fitbit, Trello, and Mint.
Behind every one of those outcomes was a founder willing to make a bet on themselves publicly, in front of people who were paying attention. Apply and learn more here.
Who should apply?
We’re looking for ambitious early-stage startups building innovative, potentially category-defining products.
Applications are open globally across all industries. Most selected companies are pre-Series A, though select Series A startups may qualify on a case-by-case basis.
To apply, startups should have:
- Founders with vision, execution, and real traction
Thousands apply every year. Only 200 are selected. Just 20 finalists pitch live on the Disrupt Stage. One startup takes the crown and wins $100,000 in equity-free funding.
One week left to make your move
The founders who wait until they feel ready often wait too long. You do not need to be polished. You need to be promising.
If you’ve been sitting on this, here’s the reality: the worst outcome is you don’t get selected this cycle — and you come back next year with a stronger application because you went through the process.
The stage matters. The community lasts. The milestone is real. But the deadline is now one week away.
If you’re building something category-defining — or know a startup that deserves the spotlight — submit your nomination and complete your application before May 27.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Business
Mutual Benefits Assurance Reaffirms Commitment to Workforce Wellbeing with “Sweat It Out!” Event
Twitter and Block co-founder Jack Dorsey announced a new app on Tuesday called Buzz. Positioned as a challenger to Slack and GitHub, Buzz is a group chat platform for the workplace that puts humans and their AI agents in the same conversations.
Dorsey wrote on X that Buzz is “model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source.” This product seems to be more than just a Dorsey passion project. According to its website, Buzz was built by Dorsey’s company Block, which also operates products like Square, Cash App, Afterpay, and Tidal.
As startups increasingly rely on AI agents to get work done, it can be challenging for employees to collaborate on various tasks across different platforms. Buzz’s utility is that it merges several different workflows into one workspace. It looks a lot like Slack, but with native AI agents and the ability to manage GitHub projects all from the same window.
Since the platform is open source, developers can make their own Buzz instance feel more customized to the needs and workflows of their specific team. If a team needs a new feature, they can build it and deploy it on their own, since they have full access to the source code.
Dorsey isn’t the only entrepreneur trying to pursue AI-native alternatives or additions to Slack. Paradigm partner and CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos recently unveiled a similar open source product called Centaur, which he describes as a “virtual employee” that runs either inside of Slack or via an API.
“There’s a lot of room for improvement for agents that live in Slack and can do more work than just coding for teams. In the enterprise setting, this means that you’ll want to self-host for security and control, and you want people to use it in Slack,” Konstantopoulos wrote on X.
For newer startups that are using AI agents and don’t have an established presence on Slack, Buzz (or its competitors) could be worth investigating. But Buzz itself admits that it is in its “early stages,” so it’s probably not a good idea to port your team over just yet.
Buzz’s free desktop app is available now for macOS, Windows, and Linux, and the code for the app has been uploaded to GitHub.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
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