Cyphr Selected as TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 Battlefield Top 20 Finalist

We're taking the capital readiness infrastructure to the global stage.

Today, we're excited to announce that Cyphr has been selected as a Top 20 finalist for TechCrunch Battlefield at Disrupt 2025. On October 28, we'll pitch on the main stage in front of thousands of founders, investors, and industry leaders.

This honor is validation that the infrastructure approach to capital access is resonating.

Why This Matters

TechCrunch Battlefield has launched companies like Dropbox, Mint, Yammer, and Trello. The selection process is rigorous. Out of thousands of applications, only 20 startups are chosen to compete.

But here's what matters more than the recognition:

The problem we're solving is being seen for what it actually is—a structural infrastructure challenge, not just another software feature.

For too long, the capital access conversation has focused on better forms, nicer dashboards, or incremental improvements to broken workflows. Cyphr is building something different: readiness infrastructure that cities, lenders, and economic programs depend on to standardize how modern small businesses get assessed, prepared, and funded.

The Real Infrastructure Play

Modern small businesses don't look like the businesses underwriting systems were designed for. Revenue comes from multiple platforms. Documentation is scattered. Financial behavior is nonlinear. Traditional systems interpret this complexity as risk.

It isn't risk. It's just not recognizable to decades-old models.

Every lender, city, ESO, and capital program is trying to interpret the same messy fragments—and all of them reach different conclusions. That's the structural problem.

Cyphr has created a new readiness primitive—a shared, standardized understanding of what a business is and how ready it is for capital.

This is the same pattern that made Rippling inevitable for employee data, Salesforce inevitable for customer data, and Plaid inevitable for bank data. When you create the primitive that an entire ecosystem depends on, you don't just build a product—you build infrastructure.

What Happens on October 28

We'll have six minutes on stage to explain why capital readiness infrastructure is the category that matters, why our data moat is defensible, and why Cyphr becomes the layer cities and lenders standardize on.

Six minutes to show that:

• The old underwriting logic doesn't work for the modern economy

• No single stakeholder can fix this alone

• The canonical readiness layer is the only structural solution

• We're already proving it works at scale

The judges will ask hard questions. The audience will be skeptical. That's exactly what we want.

Because the more you understand how capital deployment actually works—or doesn't work—the more obvious Cyphr becomes.

Why We're Optimistic

It would be amazing to win it all and take home $100,000. But most of all, we're excited about reaching the people who understand that infrastructure plays take time to build but become inevitable once the network effects kick in.

We're already seeing it:

• Cities are referring other cities

• Lenders are adopting the readiness model

• ESOs are bringing their entire networks

The ecosystem is starting to route through us by necessity, not because we asked nicely.

That's what infrastructure feels like when it's working.

Join Us

If you're at TechCrunch Disrupt:

• Come to our pitch on October 28 on the Battlefield stage

• Find us in the Startup Alley (we'll have a booth)

• Let's talk infrastructure (we're always up for conversations about compound startups, data moats, and why government distribution is underrated)

If you're not at Disrupt but you're working on capital access, economic development, or small business infrastructure—reach out. We're building this with partners, not in isolation.

The capital system isn't failing because people don't care.

It's failing because the infrastructure doesn't exist yet.

We're building it.

About Cyphr

Cyphr is the capital readiness infrastructure platform that cities, lenders, and economic programs use to standardize small business capital assessment. Our platform coordinates businesses, lenders, ESOs, and capital deployment—creating a seamless path from SMB readiness to funding to economic growth.

Learn more at cyphrai.com