Salva Health became the winner of the Startup Battlefield competition during the three-day TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 conference in San Francisco. It competed for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100 thousand.

The founders of the startup offer an important and relevant development. It is a portable device for detecting breast cancer in the early stages. This solution was proposed by Valentina Agudelo and two of her friends.

The idea came after she discovered an alarming gap in breast cancer survival rates between Latin America and the developed world while researching for a university entrepreneurship competition six years ago. This is attributed in part to the fact that in many Latin American countries, large rural populations do not have access to mammography and other diagnostic tools.

 

The startup battle was attended by 20 companies that were selected as the best from the Startup Battlefield 200. Their presentations were made to venture capitalists and technology leaders who acted as judges.

After many hours of discussion, TechCrunch editors analyzed the judges’ notes and narrowed the list to five finalists: Gecko Materials, Luna, MabLab, Salva Health, and Stitch3D.

These startups made it to the finals to demonstrate their developments in front of a jury consisting of representatives from Mayfield, SignalFire, Construct Capital, Floodgate, and Notable Capital.

The second place in the Startup Battlefield went to Gecko Materials, a startup that created a unique dry glue. The development was demonstrated by the startup’s founder, Kapela Kerst, who literally hung a bottle of wine on her little finger – the only thing keeping it from breaking was the new glue.

It can hold a lot of weight, peel off easily, and be reused up to 120 thousand times. When creating the glue, the founder was inspired by the way real geckos hold onto surfaces.