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| It’s Day 3 of Disrupt and we are so tired weâre flopped in the green room giggling maniacally at the dumbest jokes you can imagine. To be fair, thatâs our baseline anyway. Enjoooooy! â Christine and Haje |
| | Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch |
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Startup Battlefield 2022 Winner! It began with 20: As seasoned TechCrunch readers will know, startups participating in the Startup Battlefield were handpicked to compete in the event. During the first two days of Disrupt, the companies pitched before judges for a chance to win $100,000 and the coveted Battlefield Cup. After much deliberation, the TechCrunch editors pored over the judgesâ notes and narrowed the list down to five finalists: Advanced Ionics, AppMap, Intropic Materials, Minerva Lithium and Swap Robotics. They pitched in front of the final panel of judges today, which included Mar Hershenson (Pear VC), Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone, Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures), TechCrunch editor in chief Matthew Panzarino, David Tisch (BoxGroup) and Richard Wong (Accel). One startup emerged victorious. Okay without further ado, the winner of Startup Battlefield 2022 is Minerva Lithium! Minerva Lithium has produced Nano Mosaic, a coordinated polymer framework that looks a bit like black gravel and extracts critical materials from brine in just three days. Minerva says that it can extract one metric ton of lithium using just 30,000 gallons of water, and it can do it in three days. Evaporative brine processing needs to evaporate 500,000 gallons of water to get to the same amount of lithium. Just one gram of this absorbent material has a surface area equal to that of a soccer pitch, which should give you an idea of just how little youâd need to extract a large amount of minerals. Read our coverage on Minerva Lithium here. Intropic Materials is the runner-up, with its set of enzymes that can be added to plastics at the very beginning of their life cycle, before it is even turned into products. Plastics are great for so many things, but they stay around for an awfully long time. The additives the company makes have been proof-of-concept tested and it wants to upend how plastics are made and disposed of. |
| | Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch |
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The TechCrunch Top 3 Quiet launch: Manish again had two of our top stories this week. The first one is on Reliance, which launched the JioBook, its first laptop, of which he writes, âThe company appears to have ambitious plans.â So fine: Manishâs other story involves India fining Google $162 million for what the country said was anti-competitive practices on Android mobile devices. Manish reports that India is Googleâs largest market in terms of users, and Google powers 97% of the countryâs 600 million smartphones. Soâ¦yeah. Spend management: Banyan, a platform for customers, such as banks, fintechs, hotels and merchants to automate expense management, bagged $43 million in a mix of equity and debt funding that Kyle writes âpositions Banyan well with ample runway to grow.â |
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Startups and VC Advanced Ionics, a climate tech startup that hails from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is striving to drive down the price of green hydrogen, reports Harri. They are changing the game by slashing how much electricity is needed for electrolysis by as much as 50%. Thereâs an abundance of dating apps on the market, but there arenât many apps that aim to keep the spark alive after you enter a relationship. Enter Sparks, an app catering to existing couples looking to introduce new and fun experiences to their lives, Aisha reports. The Barcelona-based startup, which exhibited as part of the Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, debuted as an MVP in May 2021 and officially launched this week. Hey, I have a cool idea â letâs do a few more: You turn me right round, baby, right round: Christine suggests that if you want to know how a dress looks on you, AIMIRR has your backâ¦and front. I like the cut of your jib: RIF Robotics powers robots that inspect and organize surgical equipment, Kyle reports. Collision imminent, power to shields: Kayhan Space is making orbit safer with timely, automatic collision warnings for satellites, by Devin. Time for a break maybe: Paul reports that Ambr wants to solve the billion-dollar burnout problem by tracking employeesâ working habits. Like data, but different: Lucas writes that BetterData taps the blockchain to help create better synthetic data. |
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| | | Image Credits: Richard Drury / Getty Images |
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