And The Winner Of TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2014 Is… Vurb

It’s been a long, tough road, but it’s finally time to crown the winner of the Disrupt Battlefield. This year’s batch was truly awesome. Twenty-seven startups took the stage to present. The six finalists were Boomerang Commerce, ISI Technology, Mimi, Mink, ShowKit, and Vurb. It was an amazing batch with multiple hardware startups, innovative business models and good engineering. But only one could take home the Disrupt Cup.

All these startups made their way to the finale to demo in front of our final panel of judges, which were John Borthwick (Betaworks), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Chris Dixon (Andreessen Horowitz), Marissa Mayer (Yahoo), Brian Pokorny (SV Angel), and Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures).

And now, here it is, meet the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2014 Battlefield winner.

Winner: Vurb

Vurb is a web and mobile contextual search engine. When you type a query in Vurb, you get everything you need without having to leave the search engine. The company is rolling out search for Places, Movies, and Media. It will soon launch search for add People, Startups, and others. For example, if you search for a film, you get a trailer, showtimes, reviews, a link to watch the movie on Netflix, the IMDb score and more.

Fred Wilson made some heated comments on stage. “This problem is a bitch, you won’t solve it, and it will kill you,” he said. But it looks like the company managed to convince the other judges.

You can read more of our Vurb coverage here.

Disclosure: One of Vurb’s seed investors is CrunchFund, an early-stage VC fund co-founded by Michael Arrington, who also founded TechCrunch.

Runner-Up: ISI Technology

ISI Technology is developing a smart water heater, the Model 1. It’s not sexy, but it’s useful. The device can provide immediate, infinite and temperature auto-stabilizing hot water. It has a WiFi connection and a smartphone app.

You can call it the Nest of water heaters — ISI Technology is tackling a huge market. It can also extend or turbocharge your existing water heater. The Model 1 costs $399.

You can read more of our coverage here.