Six media startups vying for $100,000 at Disrupt Startup Battlefield

At Disrupt Startup Battlefield, six young companies that put a new twist on an old problem represented just how much the tech-investment landscape has changed in the past decade. Together, they are drawing a map of where content, fandom and rights management is going next: more open, more findable and vastly more interactive.

Timing is everything; streaming continues to be the engine of global media growth, with the IFPI reporting double-digit gains in recorded music revenues and further expansion of subscription and ad-supported listening. The creator economy, meanwhile, continues to mature as brands move spend toward influencer-driven formats, researchers at Insider Intelligence said. Against that backdrop, the following six startups tackle aspects of monetization mechanics, provenance, discovery, creative tooling and real-time experiences.

Alltroo streamlines celebrity giveaways and sweepstakes

Alltroo provides the platform for celebrity sweepstakes and charity prize campaigns — promotion execution, entry management, compliance, winner selection & fulfillment. The payoff is not just convenience but risk reduction. In the United States, prize promotions are under a patchwork of regulation that also requires registration and bonding in states like New York and Florida for valuable prizes. Alltroo’s pitch: a turnkey system with fraud checks and reporting that enables talent teams to run bigger, faster campaigns without legal headaches.

There’s proven demand. Fan-powered campaigns have generated nine figures of revenue for nonprofits over the past decade, as illustrated by widely reported outcomes from many predecessors in the space. Alltroo’s bet is that more standardized and better data can push down the cost of interest-led philanthropy while bumping up conversion rates and donor retention; it will feel less like a one-off fan experience, and more like opening the doors to an evergreen program.

Metapyxl offers creators provenance and control

Metapyxl provides a rights-aware content management layer: watermarking, usage tracking, license terms and analytics that move with media assets wherever they go. As generative AI continues to blur lines between real and synthetic content, provenance signals that transcend what you expect may be required, moving from “nice to have” to an essential signal. Industry coalitions — the Content Authenticity Initiative and the C2PA standard, for example — are already encouraging cryptographic provenance at scale; Metapyxl’s solution is an expression of that momentum but aimed at giving independent creators newsroom-grade controls to compete with big media.

The commercial logic is straightforward. Better data on where and how assets are used enables smarter licensing, faster takedowns and new revenue models. For brands, it strengthens brand-safety guardrails. For artists, it’s a means to proving origin from which they can enforce terms and get paid.

Fan royalties turn listeners into patrons

This music-gallery startup allows fans to purchase tokens linked to individual tracks at prices set by the artist and stake a claim in streaming royalties. The concept has parallels with experiments on platforms that have fractionalized royalty rights for marquee recordings, but the focus here is on early-stage artist development — turning superfans into micro-investors who can help amplify discovery and absorb some go-to-market risk.

The model straddles the world of fintech and fandom, so obeying rules is crucial. The offerings under existing exemptions (like Reg CF or Reg A+) should be structurable, and clarity on reporting and payouts will distinguish market leaders from hype cycles. If it works, it could push catalog economics in the direction of community ownership while getting artists new runway without ceding masters.

Oriane turns video search into a conversation

Oriane uses multimodal AI to help brands and creators index and search whatever they really care about inside videos — logos on screen, products held in hand, popular aesthetics — from within natural language queries. For marketers, that question may sound like a no-brainer, but under today’s constraints of blunt metadata filters, “show me every clip where a red can is on screen for more than three seconds in skatepark shots” would be impossible.

Considering Cisco now estimates video represents more than 80% of internet traffic, the capacity to mine frames, audio and context at web scale is long overdue. Oriane’s true test will be precision and recall of messy user-generated footage and how cleanly it plugs into brand-safety taxonomies as well as measurement standards agencies are already used to.

Othelia maps complex story worlds with AI for writers

Othelia is a storytelling workbench designed to capture the story elements that derive from plot arcs, characters and their relationships so that we can make the structure of a narrative visible, see its gaps and iterate on it faster as writers.

And it posits AI as a sidekick to human creativity — not based on its own, as is the assumption underlying much of this work — by allowing for high-level overviews that maintain continuity across episodes, timelines and knotty worlds.

Studios and writers’ rooms are already experimenting with generative tools that fill in outlines, treatments and even previsualization. And while the industry wrangled over authorship during and after the strike, the post-strike consensus increasingly backs AI that enhances craft but keeps credits and control. Othelia falls in line with that trajectory, ostensibly guaranteeing fewer dead ends in development and a stronger spine for robust franchises.

Transitional Forms bets on live simulations

Transitional Forms offers live, prompt-driven simulations that viewers can make, remix and export from a phone. The team calls it building SocialTV — a blend of lean-in excitement from gaming coupled with the shareability of short-form video. Imagine the collective power of things like Twitch Plays Pokémon, but packed neatly into tools anyone can wield.

Interactive, real-time storytelling is a natural next step for an audience conditioned by livestreams, battle royales and fan co-creation. The it factor will be latency, moderation and IP portability — can creators safely reuse and monetize what they spawn across platforms without friction? If the answer is yes, then SocialTV ceases to be a slogan and begins to resemble a new programming category.

Why these six media startups and ideas matter now

Despite the wide range of problems covered, the through-lines are clear: ownership and provenance (Metapyxl), compliant monetization (Alltroo; fan royalties), searchability at object level (Oriane), AI that scaffolds human creativity (Othelia) and formats that reward participation over passive viewing (Transitional Forms). That’s a coherent thesis for all the investors and operators — where value in media is being accrued closer to the fan, closer to the file, closer to the moment something actually happens on screen.