The latest group of 32 enterprise standouts who competed in Startup Battlefield represent a shift beyond app platforms into data stacks. Together, these teams are recoding workflows with AI agents that get the math right, nailing the hard problems of trust and compliance, modernizing data plumbing and mainframes, and reimagining go-to-market in an age of real-time multimodal interfaces. It’s an image of what buyers really want in 2026: speed, control, auditability and nothing less than ROI within quarters, not years.
The AI Agent Era Goes Fully Enterprise-Grade
Agentic software is shifting from demos to durable teams. Maisa places AI “co-workers” to orchestrate sophisticated processes with full audit trails, a necessity for regulated industries. JustAI vows end-to-end completion of marketing, and Zinnia serves the needs of sellers by combining data collection and guidance into one assistant. Dextego’s instructors rely on the science of behavior change to up leadership and sales skills — an application where companies are able to quickly measure lift.
On the product side, Blok allows teams to test features with synthesized user cohorts, resulting in much quicker directional signal than traditional A/B tests.
Breakout transforms static pages into conversational SDRs that qualify, recommend and route incoming leads.
And Unthread turns help desk design on its head by considering Slack the system of record, and not a bolted-on channel, reflecting where work actually gets done internally.
Finance teams aren’t immune; they have copilots of their own. Billow is addressing the manual sprawl of financial operations with multimodal AI and voice interfaces optimized for controls and accuracy. For HR and hiring, Mappa is the company bringing behavioral voice analysis to screening for traits like empathy and clarity — a thing being fought in courts but also increasingly tested, not just across structured interviews.
Security, Trust, and AI Governance in the Enterprise
Enterprises will not scale AI without trust. AI Seer combines different AI methods to verify such claims, and surfaces “untruths,” even revealing a next-gen version of the polygraph. Elloe serves as a real-time auditor for model outputs, suppressing hallucinations by auditing the answers against external ground truth before these reach end-users. Plurall AI is tackling deepfakes across modalities, in a world where not only voice and video, but also text can all be generated at scale.
At the center are data governance and privacy. Elroi controls user permissions and compiles consented datasets for training AI, so risks shrink as rules change. Dobs AI takes on unstructured documents without seizing control — the data remains with the customers and the agents extract, summarize and analyze it. Etiq is the “copilot” for a data scientist, emphasizing lineage and context so generated code or workflow results in reality rather than optimistically guessing.
And accessibility is an enterprise need, not a nice-to-have. CODA’s AI avatars convert audio and text into sign language, an instance (among many others) of machine learning proliferating inclusion while keeping pace with the compliance that many companies around the world are compelled to match. Reports from industry organizations such as the Stanford AI Index and leading consultancies have emphasized that, in an age of trustworthy AI and accessible AI at board-level, this cohort is bringing tangible tools to bear on this mandate.
Data Plumbing and Legacy Modernization in the Enterprise
Many businesses are still attached at the hip to mainframes and code written decades ago. Hypercubic captures corporate knowledge of legacy applications to document, debug and de-risk modernization with AI. Zetic lifts the cost and latency trade-off with on-device real-time AI — taking user growth uncoupled from ever-increasing cloud inference bills while maintaining offline reliability for edge use cases.
Nimblemind gives healthcare a purpose-built data layer and claims to provide faster, safer prep of multimodal clinical data with automated labeling, audit trails and APIs. For research organizations and core facilities, Gravl serves as a storefront and back office — “Shopify for science” — enabling them to monetize instrumentation and services that have long been locked behind email threads and PDFs.
Businesses also require clean, permissioned data with which to train and tune models. That’s the thread uniting Elroi’s consent frameworks, Dobs AI’s secure document agents and Etiq’s context-first orientation. As McKinsey has made clear in its own analysis of the economics of generative AI, building value has less to do with model skills and much more to do with data quality and workflow integration.
Go-to-Market Reimagined for Real-Time Engagement
Today, marketing and sales stacks are getting more interactive (and multimodal). Libertify turns static documents, such as PDFs or slide decks, into secure, conversational explainers that answer questions. WeShop turns prompts into studio-quality product images, compressing creative timelines for both e-commerce teams and influencers. Sponstar transforms cities and events into branded treasure hunts, combining quests, rewards, and location-based gaming to activate an audience.
Cashew provides marketers with a research platform that prioritizes insights from actual consumer panels over synthetic data. PRVIEW automates the chores of tracking speaking slots and award competitions, an efficient way for communications teams to earn visibility without spreadsheet debt. For physical merchants and venues, May-I makes computer vision analytics — think e-commerce-grade behavioral insights for foot traffic, flows and demographics.
Customer communications are going phygital, and global. KrosAI provides ultra-low-latency voice agents and phone numbers in over 30 next-generation markets, enabling call center and field service experiences that mirror local infrastructure conditions. One of the unnamed 3D and XR platforms in the batch is for businesses to capture and publish immersive content from a phone with on-device AI, lowering the barrier for creating spatial experiences on the web.
Global Ops and Workforce Enablement Across Markets
Remote work is table stakes now. Rayda outfits and maintains devices for remote teams in over 170 countries, from provisioning to recycling — just the sort of lifecycle rigor auditors adore. Collabwriting transforms the web into a collaborative writing surface, adding highlights, notes and AI “knowledge triggers” that present findings when and where teams need them.
Mendo works on generative AI upskilling, or recording internal best practices so its power users can drag the rest of their organization along. Atlantix seeks to industrialize entrepreneurship both within and outside the enterprise, mapping founders to university-born innovations and providing scaffolding from pitch to launch.
To those stuck in compliance-heavy industries, Nimblemind’s auditable pipelines and Maisa’s traceable agent actions echo a wider sentiment: enterprises want AI that can describe itself. That’s in line with advice from analysts such as Gartner, which has emphasized governance, risk and transparency as key prongs in AI adoption strategies.
What to Watch Next for Enterprise AI Adoption
What unites these 32: Agentic workflows, falsifiable outputs, and pragmatic integrations over the glittering model benchmarks. Anticipate buyers to reward platforms that provide demonstrable lift in revenue operations, finance and support while leaving security teams comfortable with consent, lineage and auditability. If the last wave was all about proving AI works, this one is about proving that it works within the rules enterprises have to live by.
