Founders, your window to enter Startup Battlefield 200 closes in just three short days.

Applications for Startup Battlefield 200 officially close on June 8, 11:59 p.m. PT. Do not wait any longer. Secure your shot at competing on the Disrupt Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 this October at San Francisco’s Moscone West.

Thousands of startups have already stepped forward. If you’re building a company with the potential to reshape an industry, now is the time to make your move.

Apply or nominate a startup before the deadline.

What is Startup Battlefield 200?

Startup Battlefield 200 is where ambitious early-stage startups go from unknown to impossible to ignore. Selected founders will take the spotlight at Disrupt, pitching live in front of top investors, influential media, and the global startup ecosystem.

One startup will take home $100,000 in equity-free funding, but every selected company gains exposure that can accelerate growth, attract customers, and open doors to future fundraising opportunities.

Over the years, Startup Battlefield alumni have collectively raised more than $32 billion and achieved more than 250 exits. Alumni have gone on to be acquired by companies such as Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Uber, and Amazon.

The competition has also helped launch companies such as Dropbox, Discord, Mint, Fitbit, and Trello.

Why founders are racing to apply

In a competitive fundraising market, standing out has never been more important. Startup Battlefield 200 offers founders a rare opportunity to put their companies directly in front of investors, media, customers, and potential partners.

Selected startups receive:

• A free exhibit table for all three days of Disrupt.

• Four complimentary Disrupt passes.

• Branding and visibility inside the Disrupt event app.

• Press exposure and lead-generation opportunities.

• Access to founder-only masterclasses.

• The opportunity to pitch live on the Disrupt Stage.

• Direct feedback from leading venture capitalists.

• A chance to win $100,000 in equity-free funding.

Who should apply?

TechCrunch is looking for bold early-stage startups with a working MVP and a vision capable of disrupting an industry.

Bootstrapped, pre-seed, and seed-stage startups are encouraged to apply. Select Series A startups in capital-intensive sectors may also qualify.

If you’re building a category-defining company, this is your opportunity to prove it on one of the biggest stages in tech.

Three days left. One opportunity.

The application window closes June 8, and every application is reviewed by the TechCrunch team.

With only three days remaining, this is your chance to put your startup in front of investors, media, customers, and future partners all in one place.

Apply or nominate a startup before the deadline, and earn your place among the next generation of Startup Battlefield competitors.

Jensen Huang’s comments at Computex defend the Samsung bonus structure that delivers $400,000 to chip engineers, but land alongside an $80bn Nvidia buyback announced two weeks ago.

Jensen Huang, the Nvidia chief executive, told reporters on the sidelines of Computex in Taipei on Tuesday that workers should be paid “as much as possible,” framing the principle as the response to a question about Samsung Electronics’ new bonus structure that delivers as much as $400,000 to memory chip engineers.

“I pay my employees as much as I can,” Jensen Huang said, before adding, “but it doesn’t make this right,” in an unusual public hedging from a CEO who almost never qualifies his own positions in real time.

The Samsung context is the trigger for the question. The Korean memory firm’s union and management reached a deal earlier this month, after a near-strike that survived an injunction filing from a smaller non-chip union, that allocates 10.5% of semiconductor operating profit to chip-division bonuses, with payouts of up to 600 million won (about $400,000) per memory-division worker contingent on sustained profit targets through 2035.

The arrangement was described in Reuters analysis as the largest single profit-share commitment in major Korean corporate history. Samsung supplies HBM4 to Nvidia for the Vera Rubin platform, which made the question to Huang structurally relevant rather than merely topical.

The harder context is the cash-return commitment Nvidia announced two weeks before Huang’s remarks. The company’s Q1 fiscal 2027 results, released on 18 May, included an $80bn share repurchase authorisation, a quarterly cash-dividend increase from $0.01 to $0.25 per share (a 2,400% lift), and a stated commitment to return at least 50% of free cash flow to shareholders through 2026 and beyond. The company returned a record $20bn to shareholders in the quarter alone.

Nvidia’s $81.6bn quarterly revenue and 85% year-on-year growth comfortably support the return profile, but the arithmetic relationship matters: the buyback alone is larger than Nvidia’s total annual payroll many times over.

The two positions Huang is now publicly holding, that workers should be paid as much as possible and that Nvidia should return half its free cash flow to shareholders, are not strictly in tension. Both can be true; the company has the cash to do both.

But the public framing matters at a moment when corporate AI productivity gains are increasingly accumulating to shareholders rather than to workforces, and when Morgan Stanley’s European-banking forecast last week doubled the projected AI-driven job-loss figure to 20%.

Huang’s instinctive defence of high worker pay, even with the “it doesn’t make this right” hedge, is the closest a major AI-infrastructure CEO has come to publicly acknowledging the labour-and-capital tension the AI build-out is producing.

The other Huang comment from this week’s Computex appearances is worth noting alongside. Huang told a separate audience that Nvidia engineers should be using AI tokens worth roughly half their annual salary every year to remain productive, framing non-use of AI tools as analogous to designing chips with pencil and paper.

That position is, on its own terms, a defence of generous worker compensation in token-purchasing rather than salary terms: if engineers are issued $100,000-$150,000 in annual token budget on top of base pay, the realised compensation package is materially larger than the published salary figure suggests.

It is also a framing that depends entirely on AI-token costs remaining at current pricing rather than continuing to rise on the trajectory Commonwealth Bank’s Matt Comyn flagged this week.

Nvidia employs roughly 36,000 people globally. Average compensation per employee, on the company’s most recent disclosures, runs to several hundred thousand dollars including stock-based compensation. The AI boom has driven Nvidia’s share price up roughly 1,170% over the past five years, which has made meaningful numbers of Nvidia employees who hold restricted-stock units into multi-millionaires through normal vesting cycles.

His remark therefore lands inside an Nvidia compensation reality that has, by the standards of large public technology companies, already been unusually worker-favourable.

Huang is travelling to Seoul this week to meet Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Jae-yong and other Korean industrial leaders. The bonus-structure question will likely come up again. The public position Huang has now taken is harder to walk back than the standard executive non-answer.