Last week, TechCrunch held its annual Disrupt conference, which culminates in a "startup battlefield." Past winners of the competition run the gamut from digital men's fertility clinics to software for cannabis businesses to customer-support AI.
This year, the winner was a lithium extraction startup. Three of the other five finalists were also climate- or environment-oriented, focusing respectively on plastic decomposition, green hydrogen and outdoor work robots. The preponderance of climate-focused companies is striking, as is the breadth of their approaches.