In the second episode of Inside Startup Battlefield, we take a trip to TechCrunch Disrupt 2022 to hear pitches from the top five companies: Aaron Hall from Intropic Materials, Elizabeth Lawler from App Map, Chad Mason from Advanced Ionics, Sheeba Dawood from Minerva Lithium, Tim Lichti from Swap Robotics. We get to know the companies and the unique problems they’re solving through their pitches and the judges’ follow-up questions. Plus we hear from our host and Battlefield Editor, Neesha Tambe, about what working with each company was like. New episodes of Inside Startup Battlefield drop every Monday. Be sure to check out all of the other podcasts in the TechCrunch Podcast Network: Found, Equity, The TechCrunch Podcast, Chain Reaction and The TechCrunch Live Podcast.
In the second episode of Inside Startup Battlefield, we take a trip to TechCrunch Disrupt 2022 to hear pitches from the top five companies: Aaron Hall from Intropic Materials, Elizabeth Lawler from App Map, Chad Mason from Advanced Ionics, Sheeba Dawood from Minerva Lithium, Tim Lichti from Swap Robotics. We get to know the companies and the unique problems they’re solving through their pitches and the judges’ follow-up questions. Plus we hear from our host and Battlefield Editor, Neesha Tambe, about what working with each company was like.
New episodes of Inside Startup Battlefield drop every Monday. Be sure to check out all of the other podcasts in the TechCrunch Podcast Network: Found, Equity, The TechCrunch Podcast, Chain Reaction and The TechCrunch Live Podcast.
Matt Burns 0:00
Hey everyone, welcome to startup battlefield nearly 1000 companies have presented in San Francisco, London, Berlin and Africa. We call these companies a battlefield 20. These companies are competing for $100,000 into this
aileen lee 0:18
is too good to be true. Now the question is how big is the market.
Unknown Speaker 0:23
With that, we will go ahead and move to the winner of startup Battlefield 2020. And that is
Neesha Tambe 0:30
one big round of applause. Hello, and welcome to episode two of inside startup battlefield. It's me your host and startup battlefield editor Nisha thumbay. Last week, we learned what goes into selecting the startup battlefield companies, how the top 20 companies prepare for the competition and the elements of a winning pitch. In this episode, we're going to take a trip to TechCrunch Disrupt 2022 And listen into the top five companies stage pitches.
Unknown Speaker 1:04
May I have your attention? Please welcome TechCrunch Managing Editor,
Unknown Speaker 1:08
Matt burns.
Matt Burns 1:12
Hey, everyone, Welcome to StartUp battlefield. There's a lot of you out there. To me, this is the best part of the show. And judging by the amount of you out there, I think you agree as well. Since 2008, nearly 1000 companies have presented start a battlefield we've held a competition in New York City, San Francisco, London, Berlin and Africa, South America and Australia. Let's go over the ground rules. These companies have six minutes to present. And then they can get six minutes of questions from a panel of judges, the judges are grading these companies based on their potential for impact. And that can be either financially or socially if the company is going to change the world but not make any money. We want to reward that as well, too. So with that, I think we got to bring out the judges and get this show on her way.
Neesha Tambe 1:59
Some of our judges this year included alien Lee from Cowboy Ventures, Milo Werner from MIT is the engine and pay whoo from sosv of the top 20. Battlefield companies selected by finalists go on to pitch in front of six of these judges.
Matt Burns 2:15
I want to announce the five companies that are selected as finalists presenting first and tropic materials at map advanced ionics Minerva, lithium, and lastly swop robotics, they're ready over there. So let's get going from Oakland, California we have in Tropic materials presenting for in Tropic materials Aaron Hall founder and CEO welcome to the stage.
Unknown Speaker 2:43
7.3 billion tonnes of plastic have been produced since the 1950s and 86% of that has become waste. And in Tropic materials. We're commercializing a breakthrough enzyme stabilization technology that lets us embed the tools necessary to break down plastics directly inside of them. Plastics are made of polymers. And polymers are found all over nature, whether it be cellulose in vegetables, chitin and crab shells, or gluten and mac and cheese. I used to be a chef. So I think in food analogies, and we don't worry about these polymers polluting our planet and causing problems. Why? Because nature has evolved another class of polymers called enzymes that can break down polymers. They act like scissors, cutting up the individual chains, so that the small molecules that are left behind can be readily broken down in the soil by microbes and returned back to the planet. And there are enzymes that can break down plastics. In tropic materials, our enzyme stabilization technology lets us embed the enzymes directly within the plastic, protecting them from the processing environment so we can turn them on at the end of life and degrade the materials from the inside out. This accelerates the degradation rate from months to years, down to days or weeks. I didn't tropic materials. We're using enzymes to change the way that we make and break down materials. Join the movement. Thank you.
Neesha Tambe 4:18
Now we'll hear the judges ask the presenter some questions about their pitch. The first question you'll hear comes from Maryanna Saenko of future ventures followed by David Tisch of BoxGroup. And finally, Matthew Panzarino TechCrunch. First question that
Unknown Speaker 4:32
I have is on cost when you talk about there's a lot of use of plastics, the counter use to plastics either figure out how to recycle them or use compostable materials. How does your additive compare within that landscape?
Unknown Speaker 4:43
Yeah, absolutely. It's a really good question. We're working with enzymes that are readily available. They're already used in a lot of consumer goods. And we're looking at sort of the 10s of dollars per kilogram range, which is well within the sort of five to $50 range that plastic additives tend to be in and because we're very efficient, we only need to use very small amounts. So we're looking at maybe one point, you know, small numbers, not 234 x.
Unknown Speaker 5:07
What is the moat? Like, there's a lot of people who will be going after this, like, what is the differentiation? For you versus other people who are going to try the same thing?
Unknown Speaker 5:15
Yeah, definitely. So a lot of the other players I see in this space are really enzyme engineering platforms, they're looking at trying to use AI to basically design enzymes to do things, right. And they're gonna be limited in a lot of ways to the environments that enzymes are just inherently Stable within. And those are mostly downstream plays, meaning they're going to have to still face the same challenges that the current recycling stream phases, which is going to collect, sort clean and then process into the package, where we can really differentiate is that we can actually go in at the beginning, we can think about going in at the end as well, that's not off the table. But by being able to go in at the beginning. It includes the tools right at the start, right? So it's like IKEA, you get your furniture, it comes with the tool to build it, you don't have to go find one. So trying to move fast. We're also working on IP and the trade secret stuff, I think
Unknown Speaker 6:03
most of us covered, what differentiates you from any other encapsulation company, specifically, is that there are a lot of enzyme engineering companies, as you mentioned, well, not a lot, but there are a few. What about other encapsulation companies? What's your moat? Specifically?
Unknown Speaker 6:15
Yeah, so there's a lot of enzyme immobilization, this is not the first time anyone's tried some of this, this work. What we've shown in our previous publications is that we have some best in class performance. And it's a platform across a wide variety. So I like to use a kind of clothing analogy. It's small to extra large, and that covers a large swath of the enzyme space that we can do without actually tailoring each individual design. And we can tailor if need be right? Because sometimes it needs to be perfect. Thank you,
Matt Burns 6:42
thank you very much. Give him a round of applause.
Unknown Speaker 6:49
The judges were fantastic. They asked really insightful questions. Some of them we had very, very strong clear answers for and we have, you know, vision around them. Other ones, they're areas that we're working on. And that's good, right? Those are the things that you want pointed out, because we need to nail those in. That's how we continue to grow as a business. So it's like iterate, iterate, iterate, and you're probably not building the right thing, if all the answers are already there. Yeah, it was great. So I founded in 2020, during the pandemic in May. And so this company building has been largely virtual. And so this is actually the first big onstage pitch I've done. Startup journeys are never smooth. And so, you know, behind the scenes, it's Rocky and ups and downs, and like, you know, tears and everything else. But sort of that like Guiding Light of, well, we're going to have the chance to actually put something out there and show the world what we're doing, and really bring attention and awareness to this big problem. And this exciting space, right? It's not just all doom and gloom, like this is cool, there's opportunity to do things. And so it was a win to be here, it was a win to get up on the stage. And I counted as a personal win to get to say my first big studio like stage pitch was with TechCrunch. And that TechCrunch was brought, that's amazing. I mean, everybody here is so good, right? And we're all so different. Every single one of these teams is amazing. All of the founders that I've met, they're so inspiring. It's also really nice to be amongst other founders, and that kindred spirit. And it's I, you know, obviously everyone's not going to win. But every one of these teams is certainly capable of winning. So I'm just super excited about the whole thing.
Neesha Tambe 8:24
App map came to us through a referral. I was surprised when I came upon what they were doing, because the kind of visibility they provide to developers very unique and very necessary. The founders themselves are just phenomenal. Their CEO, she's a total badass, they came at it with such an open mind, and they really sucked the marrow out of this experience in the best way. With that, let's go
Unknown Speaker 8:52
to their pitch. Developers are the engine of growth and innovation, building the products we all rely on. But developers spend up to half their week in toil. Toil is the tedious work and software creation that arises from complexity. Toil robs 25 million developers of the joy of coding. This cost businesses over $85 billion a year in wasted effort. Developers are lost in a maze of tools. They don't control away from the coding they love to do, developers. If you're lost in toil, you need a map. Maps are accurate, up to date runtime data about software behavior, as it is, at any moment for any environment. App is the only tool to shift performance and security runtime analysis all the way left into the code editor. Delivering the developer observability experience is a massive market opportunity to disrupt incumbents in the dynamic application security testing space and the application performance monitoring space. But there's another opportunity ahead to support the $40 billion of developer adopted pools with runtime insights inside the code editor. Developers map is free for individuals, students and open source projects in the VS code and JetBrains marketplaces. Join us at map helps development teams reduce toil, and deliver more performance secure and reliable code faster. And for developer focused organizations. Let app map help you deliver more value to your users. Thank you.
Neesha Tambe 10:27
All right. This first question comes from Connie Maka Bella of Kindred Ventures and the second will come from Alien Lee of Cowboy Ventures.
Unknown Speaker 10:36
So it sounds like there's modes of being able to communicate to outside stakeholders with this work product, and then modes of being able to just manage your own processes better is that the two typical modes? You see?
Unknown Speaker 10:47
Yes, absolutely. It's a personal productivity process. But I think the real value is to illuminate and create a common artifacts that people can use to actually discuss state, which is invisible.
Unknown Speaker 10:58
Congratulations. And also they were big fans of this kind of developer led growth model. And so it's very smart. Most of these companies who are developer adopted first have to figure out monetization, right? To build a scale business. So how do you think about the kind of the evolution to getting paid? What kind of features will cause people to pay you and whose budget will come out of?
Unknown Speaker 11:21
I think that's a great question. So as you know, developer led growth, you really want to figure out how you can become the de facto standard, the lingua franca of the type of value want to deliver to developers. So we did go with an open source freemium model to begin with. But as we were working with our developer community of 25,000, developers, we were able to surface what some of the higher order issues were. So for example, architects were doing hand reviews of maps to find n plus one queries and things like this. And those things are very, they're very interested in paying for those types of services. So analytic services, reporting, sharing, one of the things that leadership reports doing is taking these add maps in order to go get more resources to describe the technical debt and software flaws that are present in there. And does it
Unknown Speaker 12:04
need to rise up to like the boss, the developers, because that's the person was the budget, right? individual developers may not have budget. And in that case, does it come from the DevOps budget, or it comes from easy DevOps
Unknown Speaker 12:13
managers, large development team? gratulations awesomeness. Thank you.
Matt Burns 12:18
Right. Thank you very much. Give him a round of applause.
Unknown Speaker 12:21
You just came off the final stage, how are you feeling? relieved? Yeah, it's been an intense week, this was a tremendous and transformative opportunity for us, you know, as a software, Dev Tools company, the TechCrunch audience is who we want to be reaching. And we had a tremendous amount of user growth between the first pitch and today's pitch. In fact, we had 3000 new installations in 36 hours for our developer tool that we've been working on. So it's been really an amazing journey to be here. I applied because somebody said, Hey, you should apply to this. And I was like, oh, that sounds cool. And I didn't expect to be accepted. And I didn't expect to be picked for the top 20. And I definitely didn't expect to be in the top five. Coming out of this, I feel that now we have a bit of a better foundation of in terms of how we're looking to help and communicate and engage with our with developers around the world to help make their lives better. And going through this process allowed us to crystallize that vision. And I didn't expect that you know what I mean? Like I didn't expect that to come out of this gives you a chance to revisit who you are and what you're trying to do in the world. And make sure that you are centered in that.
Neesha Tambe 13:48
Advanced ionics was a challenge to look at their application, because they made some pretty audacious claim. When we are picking companies, we want to make sure we do due diligence to say that yes, this works. Chad had been doing this since childhood. You know, he's from the Midwest, he's really proud of the company having its roots in the Midwest as well. And to be able to showcase that at TechCrunch saying innovation can come from anywhere from anyone and it can be the thing when you were 16 just fiddling around with that turns into what will I'm sure be a you know, billion dollar company in the near future. So let's go in here and pitch. I bet
Unknown Speaker 14:29
you didn't think you'd be talking about hydrogen today for your happy hour. 90 plus percent of hydrogen today is used in just two things, and that's ammonia and petrochemicals. And so I liked the ammonia example because I grew up on a family farm in North Dakota and hydrogen is used to make ammonia which is a fertilizer that's put down to help crops grow like barley. Now, these heavy industries are highly polluting over 30% of total emissions today is just from heavy industries. like ammonia, cement and steel. So in order to have a sustainable world, we need to decarbonize these heavy industries. Clean hydrogen can be made using a process called electrolysis. And one thing I really learned that is important for electrolysis, and it's still true today is that electricity use limits electrolyzers. And even if your electrolyzer was free electricity cost, and the amount of it that you use just dominates so much. And so, you know, basically, that's why advanced Onyx was founded is to set the new standard for industrial electrolysis. And we do that with breakthrough electrolyzers, reducing electricity requirements down to 35 kilowatt hours to make one kilogram of hydrogen. And we do this with what we call Symbian cell technology. And it does what other electrolyzers can only dream of doing, eliminating the delicate membrane or brittle ceramics that are seen in every other technology. And what's amazing about this platform architecture is there's no expensive rare materials that are used everywhere else, no toxic fluoropolymers are difficult to recycle chemicals. And then we do both the material side, and the systems under one roof with our amazing team. By the end of 2030, we're going to have over $2 billion in cumulative sales booked. And more importantly, abating over 10 Giga tons per year of emissions by the year 2050, just with our technology alone. And that dream I had as a kid of clean hydrogen making clean ammonia, for farms, such as my family's will finally be realized. Thank you very much.
Neesha Tambe 16:38
The first question you'll hear comes from Peter from Stellation capital, followed by Mar of pear ventures,
Unknown Speaker 16:45
you outline a super ambitious goal, what are the technology risks of kind of continuing to scale up that you need to advance through over the next year to approach commercialization?
Unknown Speaker 16:57
It's not so much technology risk, it's a matter of putting stacks and testing them and getting those hours. You know, often with many startups, there's this chicken and egg problem of getting early partners and proving it out. We've been very lucky to have some really amazing early stage partners that are willing to take a risk and work with us.
aileen lee 17:15
So this is the right time. For a product like this. I'm curious how far we are from actually having this green hydrogen at a price that is competitive, maybe you can tell us about it. And what's the you know, what do you need to prove to get to that.
Unknown Speaker 17:28
So there's one thing under our control in our industry, and that's use less electricity. The other thing is really, we're riding on the coattails of the amazing work that the solar wind and other clean energy industries have done. And they've been the ones who've been deploying and driving down the price of clean electricity for all of us. And so everything that plugs in and uses that electricity, just like electrolyzers needs that cheap electricity from them. And so it's important we use as little of it as possible.
aileen lee 17:54
How far are we though, like, you have to, you know, the green energy has to get cheap enough. And you guys have, you know,
Unknown Speaker 18:01
it's a big job. I mean, the our entire industry has to scale up. What I've read recently is there's some forecasts that we have 10 times less electrolyzer production capacity worldwide than we're going to need to scale up this industry. And really, that's mirrored across many clean energy technologies, not just ourselves in the hydrogen industry. So we really need to get to deploying capital into companies like ourselves, but also a lot of other great companies to scale up this tech and start to have an impact. I'm glad it's over, I can relax finally, and maybe watch some other pitches and get to enjoy what people talk about. I love answering questions. You know, I'm really in a very fortunate position to be able to educate people about hydrogen, but also learn from their perspectives, maybe as outsiders to the hydrogen industry to, you know, I've known about TechCrunch Disrupt for quite a long time. Of course, seeing it on the SILICON VALLEY TV SHOW with that is pretty hilarious. I've had two to three team members, including myself where I say drop everything. If something from TechCrunch comes up that day. You know, every hour of the day be thinking about what do we need to be doing for TechCrunch
Neesha Tambe 19:11
Minerva lithium is a company that I honestly just didn't believe when I was reading your application, because when a company says they can process saltwater and produce lithium in sub two weeks at a higher rate than anything in the market that's ever existed, and their byproduct is potable water, you kind of have to say is that is that real? Is that true? When we put started battlefield companies on stage, we do require some elements of a live demo, which they did, they brought the processing systems. They also took a live video of the process happening so that we could share it with the world. And that's what kind of differentiates us from other competitions. It's not just talk, we get to see it and we got to see that with Minerva.
Sheeba Dawood 19:54
Today. The whole world is transitioning to clean energy due to which the end energy storage market is expected to increase in billions in coming years. Minerals are fundamental for clean energy transition. And earlier this year in February, President Biden announced to bolster critical mineral supply chain for minerals such as lithium, which is expected to increase more than 4000 person in coming decade. Lithium is a primary component in battery and battery market is expected to reach $183 billion by 2025. And this requires 1 million metric tonne of lithium. There are various resources of lithium in the form of hardrock and brine. Mining lithium from hardrock is pretty much what you think it could be very similar to traditional or mining. On other hand blind are the natural resources of lithium, which are present in the form of Salt Lake oceans and continental brine constituting 66% of total global lithium resources. So solar evaporation is a current technique that is used to extract lithium from brine, in which water is pumped into large ponds about 20,000 acres and allowed to be operated for 36 months. And to just produce one metric ton of lithium, the user 500,000 gallons of water. What we see here that we do have enough resources of lithium in brine, but lithium brine industry lack efficient direct lithium extraction technology to currently address exploding battery market. So addressing these challenges, Minerva lithium have developed direct lithium extraction technology using nanotechnology. These sponge like materials are chemically and physically designed to just attract lithium and reject all other minerals. So taking advantage of these selectivity, our process is to step which can extract lithium within 48 hours, processing it to battery grade lithium, Minerva, lithium, with its disruptive technology and outstanding team aims to provide sustainable energy technology to rapidly growing energy storage market. And this technology is not just limited to lithium extraction, but can be extended to other critical mineral extraction like cobalt nickel, with a water purification as byproduct. Join me in this journey to make United States a global leader in clean energy transition. Thank you.
Neesha Tambe 22:39
The next set of questions comes from rich Wong of Accel and David Tisch of BoxGroup.
Unknown Speaker 22:44
First of all, congratulations on the progress. So at scale, how will the cost profile or kilogram or whatever volume or weight of lithium? How will it compare to the solar evaporation approach, please.
Sheeba Dawood 22:57
So for solar ibro of operation, just to produce one metric ton of lithium, they spent $6,000. And we our cost is about $1,000. To extract one metric ton of lithium.
Unknown Speaker 23:09
Is there any downside? I mean, it seems like a dramatic improvement, like is there? Is there a logic is there a trade off? That's worth understanding?
Sheeba Dawood 23:17
Definitely. So we are eliminating the operational cost. And we are also eliminating lot of chemical hazards and footprint and you know, electricity. So these are some of the things that go into solar of operation. Ours is room temperature technique, we do not use any forms of energy like electricity, and we have tried to reduce the water usage. And that sums up the whole price. Why won't you be successful? What will cause your company to not be successful? This company has various verticals, that's the reason we have said that we develop sustainable energy technologies. And this is not just extended to lithium, but other critical minerals. And like I mentioned, and also water purification. So this is a byproduct, you put a sponge, and when you remove the sponge, you also get water purified, so that could be one of the other verticals that we can extend. So
Unknown Speaker 24:09
just to clarify you extract lithium from Brian Yes and produce battery grade lithium and drinkable water. Yes.
Matt Burns 24:17
I got that.
Unknown Speaker 24:19
Yeah, just checking. Oh, so yeah.
Sheeba Dawood 24:22
I am Chiba Dowd, CEO and co founder of a minute via lithium. Our aim is to fuel the Evie revolution. I have been to many onstage pitch competitions, but this was overall a different experience for me. What I liked here, they trained me continuously for four weeks, which I don't think so I would see this kind of rigorous training anywhere else and then also helped me to gain confidence you know that I am expert in what I do. And you know when someone says that it boosts you up and you know, there's no place for fear after that. Even though we live in North Carolina and Greensboro. We do not have companies like us around us, like here you have a lot of support and a lot of resources. But we just wanted to bring that awareness. And we wanted to bring that awareness that technology like this exists, and there's a potential to it. If we win, first thing is we will celebrate our victory. And I'm also hoping that we would get some investors getting investors is most important.
Matt Burns 25:25
Introducing the last company in the last round, we have swap robotics.
Unknown Speaker 25:30
Hi, everybody. I'm Tim liechty, co founder and CEO of swap robotics,
Neesha Tambe 25:35
working with swap robotics was really great their founder was such a gem to work with. One of the things that was really inspiring about swop robotics is he didn't have founder itis. So founder itis is this idea that founders just really stick to their guns, but not necessarily in the best way. They struggled to take feedback. They don't want to pivot their product swap actually started out as a snow plow. And they switched over to cutting the solar fields, which ended up being a multibillion dollar market. And now it's doing very, very well like they can't even make robots fast enough to keep up with the demands, which is great. So let's go over to their pitch. Our mission
Unknown Speaker 26:14
is to make outdoor work equipment 100% Electric, the outdoor world needs to be maintained. But there are two main problems today, legacy equipment is gasoline and diesel powered, and there's a long term labor shortage. To help solve these problems. We started by creating 100% Electric robots for sidewalk snowplowing. In the summers, we were originally going to do grass cutting for sports fields. But we kept on hearing that these massive 1000 plus acre utility scale solar farms were a huge headache. When we look deeper into the problem, we learned a few things. Today, solar energy is the cheapest form of New Energy. And after a power plant is built, the biggest ongoing expense is actually cutting the vegetation and the grass on that site. And so our solution was a robotic vegetation management for solar farms. But the solution is so much more long term. We built a powerful modular robot that can be used for not just grass cutting or snow piling, but dozens of outdoor use cases like street sweeping or tree planting. And getting back to solar cuts. We've developed the world's first 100% Electric Rough Cut deck that is able to cut down extremely thick vegetation. We also develop the world's first 100% Electric grass cutting deck that is able to offset up to six feet to go underneath solar panels. And around those IBM's. We launched our product in mid 2022. And there was so much pent up demand that within 60 days of launching, we had over $9 million in signed agreements. So we started in snow. We graduated to solar cats, and we're building an outdoor work robotics platform. Join us in making outdoor work equipment sustainable. were swapped robotics. Thank you.
Neesha Tambe 28:11
Questions here come from Dave Samuel a freestyle VC, Nisha dua of BBG Ventures and lo Toney of Plexo Capital.
Unknown Speaker 28:18
Wow. I mean, it's just amazing. It's so awesome to see entrepreneurs, like your team build this. And also I grew up in Maine. So yes, let us know being shoveled there. If you can talk a little bit about the unit economics. So yes, high level what this costs. And as you're talking about, maybe we're looking at monthly usage, and you guys own it, but just tell me a little bit about how you're thinking about the unit economics.
Unknown Speaker 28:40
So the we operate on robotics as a service, which is really convenient for the customers because they're used to already paying a cost per acre. And in terms of those unit economics, because we can run them as close to 24/7 as possible. We're not there yet. But over the next one to three years, we can reach $30,000 in revenue per robot per month, without going too deep into how much the robot costs us. It's well under three months for a payback on those robots. What is
Unknown Speaker 29:09
your go to market look like? Like how do you sell to solar farms? And do any of these new investments? Introduce some strategic partnerships?
Unknown Speaker 29:19
Yeah, for sure. So there's three main categories of buyers. We're actually taking all three routes. So we're working with the OEMs, the solar asset owners and the vegetation cutters themselves.
Unknown Speaker 29:30
Maybe just your quick thoughts around the bigger vision that's possible with your technology?
Unknown Speaker 29:35
Absolutely. So we want to be really laser focused on getting to that first 100 million in annual recurring revenue. If we really want to create a huge platform over a 20 year perspective, that's the quickest way to actually do that, to then have the budget for other use cases. So 90 plus percent of our focus is on those solar cuts. We are still working a little bit but a lot less on the winter sidewalk snow plowing with some strategics that can do a foul Some plus robots with us once we hit 100,000 million in ARR, then we'll explore other use cases. Thank you.
Matt Burns 30:07
Thank you great answer.
Neesha Tambe 30:10
picking a winner is honestly impossible. And I'm glad that I don't have that task. It's really up to the judges in the final round to pick the winner. Every company is the best in their field, or they are doing one of the most innovative things in their field. So to pick just one is very hard. What makes the companies stand out is typically you know, they're making a step function change in their industry. They are doing something in a very novel very unique way that's highly defensible. And also, there's a great potential for an exit so next week, we're going to take a little detour to see what the startup battlefield 200 have been up to out on the floor and the discovery stage.
Inside startup battlefield is hosted by me started battlefield editor Nisha fan base. were produced and edited by Maggie Stamets and Grayson Mendenhall, Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator and Henry pic of it manages TechCrunch audio products. Special thanks to all of our founders, experts and the TC staffers who lent us their voices and expertise. Inside startup battlefield is part of the TechCrunch Podcast Network.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai