Five Illinois-based companies have been selected among 200 that will participate in TechCrunch's 2024 Startup Battlefield, a global startup competition taking place in San Francisco this October.
In what some have described as the "world series of startup competitions," the over 15-year-old event has featured startups that went on to break out in their respective fields, including Cloudflare, Dropbox, Getaround and Discord.
While all 200 companies selected in the latest cohort of Startup Battlefield will be featured during the competition later this year, only 20 will be selected to pitch in front of top-tier venture capital firms and thousands of other attendees for a chance to win $100,000 in equity-free prize money.
The participating startups represent a wide range of areas including software-as-a-service, healthtech and biotech, hardware and robotics, fintech and edtech, logistics and more. Startups are selected for a number of reasons including their products, how they aim to change their industries, the impact on their geographic regions and the competitive landscape. The competition features founders from across the globe.
Over the years, more than 1,300 companies have participated in the competition, and those businesses have collectively raised more than $29 billion in funding, with another 200-plus reaching exit status.
The five companies representing Illinois according to TechCrunch include:
- ASL Aspire.
- Iris Finance.
- PherDal Fertility Science.
- Pulse Charter Connect.
- Wave Therapeutics.
Rivet, an artificial intelligence-powered audience management platform that started in Boston but later moved to the West Loop after landing $500,000 in pre-seed funding led by Drive Capital, was also among the early-stage startups selected.
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