The competition has been incredibly fierce, but we now have a winner. At the very beginning, there were 22 startups.
We hand-picked all these great companies from the wild world of startup land so they could compete in our highly competitive startup competition — the Startup Battlefield. They all presented in front of multiple groups of tech leaders serving as judges. The startups were competing for $50,000 and the highly coveted Disrupt Cup.
After hours of deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to six finalists: online kid safety service Bark, interactive Twitch alternative Beam, Blockchain credit startup for emerging countries BitPagos, daily vitamin maker Ritual, ultra-affordable underwater drone SeaDrone and ultra-affordable water filtration system WaterO.
These startups made their way to the finale to demo in front of our final panel of judges, which included: John Borthwick (betaworks), Charles Hudson (Precursor Ventures), Alfred Lin (Sequoia Capital), Susan Lyne (BBG Ventures), Alan Patricof (Greycroft Partners) and Matthew Panzarino (TechCrunch).
Applications for the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt San Francisco will open soon. Please check out our Startup Battlefield Hub, apply and email Battlefield Editor Sam O’Keefe with any questions (sam@beta.techcrunch.com).
And now, meet the TechCrunch Disrupt New York 2016 Battlefield winner.
Winner: Beam
Beam is a platform that ties in with the growing world of e-sports to offer a low-latency chat platform for live streamed games. But beyond that, Beam lets viewers actually interact with the games by measuring the general intent of all of the comments to play along with the live streaming gamer. You can think of it as a Twitch WePlay that actually works.
Read more about Beam in our separate post.
Runner-Up: WaterO
Startup Battlefield: Countertop Purity with Water-O #TCDisrupt https://t.co/EyKwwvwCU3
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) May 11, 2016
WaterO uses reverse osmosis, the gold standard in water filtration, to bring clean water to families. This normally costs an exorbitant amount, forces users to tear out their plumbing and wastes around 80 percent of water. Plus, renters can’t use it. But with WaterO, only around 20 percent of water is wasted, with no re-tooling of the plumbing at a $399 price point for the hardware.
Read more about WaterO in our separate post.
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