Central Eurasia names its 2026 Road to Battlefield winners: Cerberus, WeGlobal AI, and LOOQ — SkimNews
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- Cerberus, WeGlobal AI, and LOOQ took the top three spots at the Road to TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 2026 Central Eurasia regional final and will compete in Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco on October 13-15 before 10,000+ tech leaders
- The competition drew a record 726 applications from 39 countries — nearly 50% more than 2025's debut of 485 from 27 — with 84% of applicants building AI products; 22 finalists pitched before 47 jurors from eight countries alongside an AI judge called AI-Dana
- First-place Cerberus (Uzbekistan) is an AI cybersecurity startup whose agent hunts vulnerabilities in corporate IT systems, explicitly designed to avoid the hallucination problems of general-purpose LLMs; it marks Uzbekistan's first Road to Battlefield champion
- Second-place WeGlobal AI (Kazakhstan) built an AI platform addressing Kazakhstan's shortage of school psychologists, giving schools tools to track student mental health and deliver career guidance at scale
- Third-place LOOQ (Japan, co-founded by Ayan Sakenov and Yudai Ishida) builds camera-based hardware and an "attention API" to measure real-world viewership of billboards and out-of-home ads, pitching itself as "Google Analytics for the physical world"
- The three winners share a $100,000 investment pool funded by Astana Hub Ventures, IT Park Ventures, and Silkroad Innovation Hub — $50,000, $30,000, and $20,000 respectively — while OpenAI awarded $280,000 in API credits across all 22 finalists
Why it matters: Applications jumped from 485 to 726 and country representation grew from 27 to 39 in one year, while 84% of applicants were building AI products — a signal that Central Eurasia's startup pipeline is both widening and concentrating around AI. The three winners walk away with $100,000 in equity investment, $280,000 in OpenAI API credits, and a slot in front of 10,000+ global tech leaders, a material launchpad for founders from markets historically underrepresented at TechCrunch Disrupt.
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