The 9 Best Cybersecurity Startups from Disrupt Startup Battlefield

Every year, TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield pitch competition attracts thousands of applicants. We reduce these applications to the top 200 contendersand among them, the top 20 compete on the big stage to become the winner, taking home the Startup Battlefield Cup and a $100,000 cash prize. But the remaining 180 startups also blew us away in their respective categories and are participating in their own pitch competition.

Here’s the full list of cybersecurity startups selected for Battlefield 200, along with a note explaining why they landed in the competition.

AIM Intelligence

What it does: AIM offers enterprise cybersecurity products that protect against new AI-based attacks and use AI in this protection.

Why it’s remarkable: AIM uses AI to perform penetration testing of AI-optimized attacks and to protect enterprise AI systems with custom guardrails, and offers an AI security planning tool.

Corgéa

What it does: Corgea is an AI-powered enterprise security product that can scan code for flaws as well as find broken code intended to implement security measures such as user authentication.

Why it’s notable: The product enables the creation of AI agents that can secure code and work with, he says, any popular language and its libraries.

CyDeploy

What it does: CyDeploy offers a security product that automates asset discovery and mapping of all applications and devices on a network.

Why it’s notable: Once assets are mapped, the product creates digital twins for sandbox testing and allows security organizations to use AI to automate other security processes as well.

Pegen

What it does: Cyntegra offers a hardware and software solution that prevents ransomware attacks.

Why it’s notable: By locking down a secure system backup, ransomware does not win. It can restore operating system, applications, data and credentials within minutes of an attack.

HACKERverse

What it does: HACKERverse’s product deploys autonomous AI agents to carry out known hacker attacks against a company’s defenses in an “isolated battlefield.”

Why it’s notable: The tool tests and verifies that vendor security tools actually work as advertised.

Research on the mill pond

What it does: Mill Pond detects and secures unmanaged AI.

Why it’s notable: As employees adopt AI to help them in their jobs, this tool can detect AI tools that access sensitive data or otherwise create potential security issues in the organization.

Polygraphic AI

What it does: Polygraf AI offers small language models suitable for cybersecurity purposes.

Why it’s notable: Companies use Polygraf models to ensure compliance, protect data, detect unauthorized use of AI, and spot deepfakes, among other examples.

TruSources

What it does: TruSources can detect AI deepfakes, whether audio, video or images.

Why it’s notable: This technology can work in real time in areas such as identity authentication, age verification, and identity fraud prevention.

ZEST Security

What it does: AI-powered enterprise security platform that helps IT security teams detect and resolve cloud security issues.

Why it’s notable: Zest helps teams quickly track and mitigate known but unpatched security vulnerabilities and unifies vulnerability management across clouds and applications.