Tech
Applications close in 48 hours — here’s everything Australian founders need to know about Stripe x Startup Battlefield
The window is almost shut. On August 19, eight startups will take the stage at Stripe Tour Sydney in front of investors, global press, and the Australian tech community. One startup walks away with automatic entry into TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco — no application, no further competition, a guaranteed spot on the world’s most iconic startup stage.
There are only 48 hours left to apply. Don’t wait.
Here’s everything you need to know.
What is Stripe x Startup Battlefield?
Startup Battlefield is TechCrunch’s flagship pitch competition — the one that launched Dropbox, Cloudflare, Discord, and Trello. Collectively, Startup Battlefield alumni have raised $32 billion and produced more than 250 exits across 1,700+ companies worldwide.
The Stripe x Startup Battlefield is a first-of-its-kind partnership with Stripe, bringing the competition to Sydney for one night only. Eight Australian startups will be selected to pitch live. Three will win prizes. One will go to San Francisco.
Grand winner: $15,000 in Stripe fee credits + automatic entry into Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, San Francisco, October 13–15, 2026.
Second place: $5,000 in Stripe fee credits.
Third place: $2,000 in Stripe fee credits.
Every applicant — whether selected to pitch or not — will be invited and registered to attend Stripe Tour Sydney on August 19.
What we look for — and what won’t hold you back
We are not looking for the most polished companies in Australia. We are looking for the most promising ones. The question we ask about every application is simple: Does this change something? Not incrementally — genuinely.
A few things that will not disqualify you:
Some press coverage won’t hurt you. If your company has had local or industry coverage but your core technology hasn’t had its moment yet, that’s exactly what this stage is for.
You don’t need customers yet. You need a working MVP, but revenue and launch are not requirements.
You’ve applied before. Many Startup Battlefield companies applied more than once before being selected. A past rejection is not a data point about your company’s future.
How to put together a strong application
Show your product working. Not a mockup. Not a pitch deck with screenshots. Your actual MVP, in real time, on video — even if it’s rough. This is the single most important part of your application.
Be honest about your competition. Naming your competitors and explaining specifically why you win tells us more about your market understanding than any TAM slide ever will.
Tell us why you. The founding story — what you saw, why now, why you’re the right person to build this — is a meaningful part of how we evaluate teams. Most founders underwrite it. Don’t.
Don’t overengineer it. A clear, honest application that shows a real product will outperform a polished one that buries the company underneath it.
The deadline is July 20. It will not move.
Applications close Monday, July 20, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. AEST. There are no more extensions. There is no waitlist. Once it closes, the only way to that stage is in the audience.
If you’re still deciding whether to apply — apply. The worst outcome is a stronger application next time. The best outcome is a stage in San Francisco in October.
The next company nobody has heard of yet is building something that will matter. It could be yours.
Free to apply · No equity taken · In-person, Sydney, August 19, 2026.
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Tech
Patreon stops asking AI bots not to scrape — and starts blocking them
Patreon, the membership platform for creators, is cracking down on AI scraping its content for training purposes. On Thursday, the company shared that it’s working with internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare to directly block access to AI bots designed to train their AI models on creators’ work without permission.
The strengthened measures were necessary because AI scraping has become more sophisticated since it first put measures in place to deter AI crawlers in 2023, the company says. In addition, Patreon’s paywall has long locked much of creators’ content out of reach of crawlers. But more recently, the company introduced new discovery tools like a redesigned Home Feed and its tweet-like Quips, which could expose more content to crawlers.
The changes come about as more online publishers and content creators are coming to grips with how AI is ingesting their work for the purpose of making their AI models smarter. To combat this, Cloudflare now offers tools that allow website publishers to restrict AI bots, including a marketplace that lets websites charge AI bots for scraping, dubbed Pay Per Crawl. Earlier this month, it changed its policies so that “mixed-use” crawlers, meaning those that both index and train on a website’s content, are blocked by default on any pages that host ads.
Patreon says that it’s extending its existing work with Cloudflare to use the company’s AI Crawl Control technology to update its AI policies and enforcement tools. The difference here is that instead of simply asking AI crawlers not to scrape content using the robots.txt files — a standard way to provide bots with instructions on how they can use its site — Patreon is now actively blocking AI training bots.
“Consent shouldn’t depend on whether a scraper chooses to behave,” a Patreon blog post explains, referencing the stricter measures.
When testing the features, individual AI training crawlers’ weekly attempts to access Patreon went from “thousands of attempts to zero,” the post noted. That indicates that the AI scrapers were ignoring Patreon’s robots.txt file and scraping the site anyway, despite its requests.
However, the company said that it will allow bots that index pages and organize information that can be used to send users back to Patreon.
“As AI agents become increasingly powerful and popular, creators deserve a meaningful say in how their work is used by AI companies,” remarked Patreon’s product chief Drew Rowny in the announcement. “On most of the Internet, creators have to accept AI training on their work just to reach and grow an audience. Patreon has a different vision: creators should be able to grow their audience and control how their work is used.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Amazon fixing bug that billed some AWS customers billions of dollars
Some Amazon cloud customers woke up on Friday to a surprise bill estimate that said they owed billions of dollars for cloud services they had never used.
Amazon confirmed on Friday that it’s trying to resolve a bug in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing portal that showed some customers “owed” millions or billions in cloud computing costs.
In an update on its status page, Amazon said it began seeing inaccurate billing data as of late Thursday. But by Friday morning, the company conceded that the “rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue.” Amazon said the change relates to its billing computation subsystem.
The good news for the customers who were told they “owe” millions or billions to Amazon is they are likely off the hook. The billing estimates “do not reflect actual usage and charges,” Amazon said.
According to several screenshots posted by Amazon customers on Reddit, one customer was quoted a billing estimate of close to $2.5 billion for this month’s AWS usage, while others had similar alerts, ranging from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars.
When reached by email, Amazon spokesperson Aisha Johnson referred TechCrunch to the company’s status page and did not comment further, or answer questions about the bug. The company would not say, when asked, if any AWS accounts had been suspended or paused as a result of the issue.
The issue is expected to last several more hours, per Amazon’s status page.
Updated with a response from Amazon.
Tech
Amazon fixing bug that billed some AWS customers billions of dollars
Some Amazon cloud customers woke up on Friday to a surprise bill estimate that said they owed billions of dollars for cloud services they had never used.
Amazon confirmed on Friday that it’s trying to resolve a bug in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing portal that showed some customers “owed” millions or billions in cloud computing costs.
In an update on its status page, Amazon said it began seeing inaccurate billing data as of late Thursday. But by Friday morning, the company conceded that the “rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue.” Amazon said the change relates to its billing computation subsystem.
The good news for the customers who were told they “owe” millions or billions to Amazon is they are likely off the hook. The billing estimates “do not reflect actual usage and charges,” Amazon said.
According to several screenshots posted by Amazon customers on Reddit, one customer was quoted a billing estimate of close to $2.5 billion for this month’s AWS usage, while others had similar alerts, ranging from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars.
When reached by email, Amazon spokesperson Aisha Johnson referred TechCrunch to the company’s status page and did not comment further, or answer questions about the bug. The company would not say, when asked, if any AWS accounts had been suspended or paused as a result of the issue.
The issue is expected to last several more hours, per Amazon’s status page.
Updated with a response from Amazon.
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