The results of the finals for the Central Asia-Europe region ("Road to TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 2026") have been announced, with Cerberus, WeGlobal AI, and LOOQ finishing in the top three. These three companies will represent the Central Asia-Europe region and travel to San Francisco to participate in the TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 event from October 13th to 15th, and will then advance to the Startup Battlefield 200.
The number of applications has increased significantly compared to the previous session.
The organizers stated that a total of 726 applications were received from 39 countries for this event, which represents an increase of nearly 50% compared to the 485 applications received in the inaugural year of 2025. After selection by each country, 22 teams advanced to the regional finals and presented their ideas to 47 judges from 8 different countries during on-site roadshows.
AI Project proportion rises to 84%
The event organizers stated that among this year's applications, 84% were focused on developing AI products. The three companies that ultimately won awards also centered their work around this direction, covering areas such as network security, educational services, and advertising measurement.
- Cerberus: Automatically detect system vulnerabilities in enterprises with AI
- WeGlobal AI: Providing schools with mental health and career guidance tools
- LOOQ: Measuring the actual number of people exposed to outdoor advertisements
TechCrunch Startup Battlefield The project leader Isabelle Johannessen stated that this year's participating companies cover fields such as healthcare, education, productivity, enterprise services, and network security. Regional entrepreneurs are leveraging this platform to gain broader international exposure.
The champion is from Uzbekistan.
The first-place winner, Cerberus, comes from Uzbekistan and is a AI cybersecurity company that specializes in automatically identifying security vulnerabilities in corporate systems. The company believes that many existing AI security tools rely too heavily on general-purpose large models, which may lead to incorrect judgments. Once such issues occur in corporate infrastructure scenarios, the consequences can be more serious.
The founder, Aziz Akhmedkhodjaev, stated that as more and more development work involves AI, the rate at which code vulnerabilities appear is accelerating, making it difficult for corporate teams to identify issues in a timely manner. This is also the core scenario that the company has targeted. The report mentioned that Cerberus has previously reached 500 Global Eurasia and has been selected as a Alchemist Silkroad Silicon Valley residency project.
Kazakhstan and Japanese teams make it to the top three
Second place went to WeGlobal AI from Kazakhstan. This company focuses its products on the issue of insufficient psychological counseling resources in schools and hopes to use AI tools to help schools track students' mental health status and provide career planning support.
Third place is held by LOOQ, which was founded by Ayan Sakenov and Yudai Ishida. They develop hardware devices based on cameras for the outdoor advertising market, as well as attention and API. Their goal is to count how many people actually see offline advertisements such as billboards, providing advertisers with data that is closer to the real effects.
OpenAI also provided a total of $280,000 in API support to 22 finalist teams. Among them, the top three teams received a total of $100,000, while the remaining 19 teams each received $10,000.
