TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield is still one of the toughest stages in startup land. Thousands apply each year. Just 200 make it into the Startup Battlefield 200. From there, only 20 reach the big stage to compete for the Startup Battlefield Cup and a $100,000 prize.
But the action doesn’t stop with those 20. The rest of the Battlefield 200 is packed with ambitious teams quietly redefining their corners of tech.
In media and entertainment, six companies stood out.
Alltroo: Streamlining celebrity charity and fan sweepstakes
Alltroo wants to take the chaos out of celebrity giveaways.
The startup runs the entire sweepstakes flow when a star is involved — from promoting the campaign, to handling entries, to selecting the final winner. That covers everything from "meet your hero" events to charity-focused giveaways where fans contribute to a cause.
For celebrities and their teams, the pitch is simple: one platform to manage the logistics, compliance, and fan engagement around these high-profile campaigns.
METAPYXL: Digital armor for creators’ content
METAPYXL is building infrastructure for creators who are tired of seeing their work copied, scraped, or used without credit.
The platform equips artists and content creators with tools for:
- Watermarking their media
- Tracking how and where it’s used
- Managing licensing terms
- Viewing usage analytics
The goal: give creators more visibility and control over their digital assets, whether they’re dealing with platforms, brands, or other rights holders.
Nebula: Let fans back tracks and share in royalties
Nebula is rethinking how fans support the artists they love.
On Nebula, artists can treat each track like its own mini project. Fans buy tokens in songs at prices the artists set. As those tracks are streamed, token holders can earn a share of the royalties.
It’s part music gallery, part investment-style fan club, designed to turn superfans into partners in an artist’s success rather than just passive listeners.
Oriane: Natural-language search for what’s inside videos
Video might dominate the internet, but searching inside video is still painful. Oriane wants to fix that.
The company offers a search tool that can find brands and trends in videos using natural-language queries. Under the hood, it uses AI-powered text, image, and video-clip search.
That means a marketer can ask for every video where a certain logo appears. A brand team can track mentions across creators. And content teams can find the exact moment a meme or product surfaces, without scrubbing through hours of footage.
Othelia Technologies: AI as a co-pilot for complex stories
Othelia Technologies is building an AI-powered storytelling environment that keeps humans firmly in the driver’s seat.
The platform is designed to:
- Map a story’s structure
- Surface connections between characters, events, and locations
- Provide high-level overviews of complex fictional worlds
Writers, game designers, and narrative teams can use it to build, edit, and maintain sprawling story universes without losing track of key threads.
Transitional Forms: Instant video simulations and “SocialTV”
Transitional Forms runs live simulations from simple prompts.
Its patent-pending framework lets people create, remix, and export instant video simulations directly from a mobile device. The company says it’s building "SocialTV, the future of entertainment" — a format where audiences don’t just watch content, they actively generate and reshape it.
If the promise holds, that could blur the line between social media, gaming, and television in ways traditional broadcasters aren’t remotely ready for.
Six startups, one clear signal: media and entertainment isn’t just about new streaming services or viral apps anymore. It’s about control — for creators, for fans, and for storytellers — over how stories are made, protected, discovered, and experienced.
