At the end For two days, 20 startups pitched their companies at TechCrunch’s Startup Battleground at Disruption 2022. These 20 companies were selected as the top 200 from the new Startup Battleground and competed to take home the Battleground trophy and $100,000.
TechCrunch editors and expert judges have shortlisted the following five finalists, who will present in front of an entirely new panel of judges on the disruptive deadline, October 20, 2022.
Advanced Ionics
Advanced Ionics is striving to lower the cost of green hydrogen by reducing the amount of electricity required for electrolysis by 50%. That’s an admirable goal, because despite all the talk about hydrogen as the “fuel of the future,” the industry is still dirty—with polluting production methods that wreak havoc on the climate. Most of the hydrogen gas that humans produce is “grey”; Classification This means that manufacturers are relying on methane (or worse, burning coal) to use the material for fertilizer and fuel. But as climate change awareness and demand for hydrogen-powered cargo grows, so does demand for an environmentally friendly alternative. In contrast to the gray matter, “green” hydrogen uses renewable energy and electrolysis to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. It’s a climate-friendly production method, but it’s expensive because it requires tons of clean energy.
AppMap
Boston-based AppMap wants to keep bad code from making it to production. Starter is the first of its kind, an open source flexible runtime code analysis tool built with the simple idea that developers can see the behavior of software while writing it to prevent problems while the software is running. . As a static analysis tool that shows runtime data, AppMap – built from the ground up over three years – works in the code editor to help developers see which components are connecting to which components, at what speed and latency, what network speed, and whether there are any bugs in between. It allows them to gain insights and make improvements faster than ever before.
Entropic materials
Plastics are great for many things, but they last a very long time. They jump to the rescue with a set of enzymes that can be added to plastics early in their life before entropic conversion into production. The company’s additives have tested proof-of-concepts and are looking to improve how plastics are made and disposed of. Entropic additives biodegrade most of the commonly used plastics in conventional commercial composting. Enzymes are usually added to pellets or powders used in plastic production. This gives plastics new, biodegradable capabilities without changing the manufacturing processes used to create plastic products. At the end of the life cycle, the products can be dissolved into their component parts when it is time to dispose of the material.
Minerva Lithium
Minerva has developed Lithium NanoMosaic, a composite polymer framework that looks like black pebbles and extracts vital substances from radiation within three days. Minerva says it can extract one metric ton of lithium using just 30,000 gallons of water, and does it in three days. Evaporative brine processing would have to generate 500,000 gallons of water to reach the same amount of lithium. Just one gram of this nutrient has the same surface area as a football field, which gives you an idea of how much you need to extract a large amount of minerals.
Change robotics
Swap Robotics manufactures electric lawn mowers and snow removal robots and will detail how to make sustainable household tools on stage. For the next few years, 95% of the startup’s focus will be on optimizing robotic lawnmowers on 1,000+ acre utility scale solar farms. The company’s second focus is sidewalk snow plowing. The team decided that their mission would be to create a solution to sustainably cut grass in a controlled environment. Swap Robotics realized that cutting solar plants comes with its own challenges, as it requires a special cutting surface to get under the solar panels, and realized that a robotic solution would solve the problem.
