McMaster Spectrum awards $105k in Student Startup competition
Article via McMaster Spectrum
For the second year running, McMaster’s on-campus entrepreneurship initiative Spectrum made a big splash – this year awarding more than $100,000 to student entrepreneurs at its Spectrum Student Startup Competition.
CIBC Hall at McMaster was filled to capacity with well over 225 student entrepreneurs, McMaster staff and faculty, and members of Hamilton’s entrepreneurship community.
After a months-long process of narrowing down our original 50+ applicants to 10, The Top 10 finalists were given a slot in the Competition to compete for a prize pool of $105,000.
Thanks to McMaster Engineering, we were able to double our prize money this year!
Five winners each won $20,000 in cash and an automatic spot in McMaster’s accelerator The Forge. Plus, they were awarded in-kind prizes from our generous sponsors.
An additional $5,000 prize was given to the startup that the audience voted as The People’s Choice.
(Note: We had originally intended on awarding four prizes of $25,000 each. The calibre of startups was just too good! We decided, during the event, to instead award five startups $20,000 each.)
Judges, Winners and Competitors
The panel of judges would decide the winners and provided the Top 10 Finalists with great feedback, pulling on their own experiences from their respective entrepreneurial successes. This year’s judges were: Adam Spence of the Social Venture Exchange and Mars Discovery District; Sean Van Koughnett, AVP and Dean of Students at McMaster University and founding director of UWaterloo’s Velocity; and Dr. Sunny Kumar an experienced venture capitalist and Executive-in-Residence at Innovation Factory.
Each startup team had to select only one person, who would present their 3-minute pitch to the audience. After hearing each pitch, and asking a few questions, the judges had to deliberate and choose the five startups who would go home as victors. They did this by taking into account the live pitch and all aspects of the application process.
The audience in attendance got to vote for their favourite startup, and award that team the People Choice Award.
After careful consideration and calculations, this year’s winners are as follows:
Eatable (Mohammed Ahmed) – $20,000,
FISH Technologies (Melissa Houghton) – $20,000,
HINT (Jacob Jackson) – $20,000,
TronClub (Gregory DeLaunay) – $20,000,
Virtual Possibilities (Mitch Wilson) – $20,000, and
People’s Choice to Cognosco (Akiv Jhirad) – $5,000.’
(See details on each company below)
We were astounded and proud of the quality of this year’s applications, semi-finalists, and finalists. At every stage of the process, the competition was incredible competitive and decisions were difficult. The feedback was overwhelming: the entire community is impressed with what McMaster student entrepreneurs are doing.
The Top Ten Finalist startups competing were: 20/20 Optimeyes, Cognosco, Eatable, FISH Technologies, HINT, KiDi SMS, Nectocare, TronClub, Virtual Possibilities, and Zentrella.
Company details
Eatable: Mohammed (Fawad) Ahmed, Wesley Kerfoot, Rishabh Moudgil, Avian Yuen, Steven Zhang
Eatable is about revolutionizing the way people create and connect through food. Our mobile app platform serves as a hub for students to search and share recipes.
University students have difficulty finding cost-effective, convenient, and healthy ways to cook – they also love to share what they create. Eatable provides student-friendly recipes in a home cooking community passionate about sharing self-made meals. Sharing on recipe apps is not compatible with how students want to showcase their food creations. Eatable will allow students to share recipes in a more personal and fun way.
FISH Technologies: Melissa Houghton, Robert Van Gemeren, Kris Cuachon, Vinod Chaudhary, Ali Sheikh
Farming Innovations & Sustainable Horticulture (FISH) Technologies is a company that is focused on reinventing the farming industry through innovation. This reinvention is focused on reducing the environmental impact of current practices while maintaining, or increasing, profitability of our clients. Our current focus is on the greenhouse industry, with the intention of introducing a commercially viable aquaponics system to replace current practices.
We plan on building a system that has a low initial investment cost that can be upgraded as finances become available. This system will feature automatic water balancing and hands free fish waste removal. We will focus on making the system easy to use, which will reduce the risk involved in investing in the new technology. We will also provide the opportunity for servicing which would help reduce the knowledge barriers associated with new technologies.
HINT: Jacob Jackson, Ahmed Elmeligi
At Healthcare Innovation in NeuroTechnology (HINT) we are developing a wearable monitoring device for high-risk patients that can detect a stroke in their sleep. Until now, a stroke during sleep resulted in either debilitating effects or death. This is because sleep strokes are unable to receive the highly effective, time-sensitive treatment. Our device provides continuity of care outside of the hospital for up to 250,000 patients and will save the lives of thousands of stroke victims every year, while maintaining quality of life. At HINT, we care for you when nobody else can.
TronClub: Gregory DeLaunay, Roslyn DeLaunay, Jennifer Bendle
Tron-Club™ lowers the barrier to entry for aspiring Makers by supplying them with monthly circuit building kits. Each kit starts easy and ends challenging. Tron-Club™ was founded in June 2015 with an initial $1,500 grant from the Ontario Summer Company. Tron-Club™ was the most successful company in the Ontario Summer Company for that year. To date, we have shipped over 1,600 kits, we have invested over $5,000 in equipment, have over 11,000 YouTube view for our commercial [ref], we have a total revenue over $60,000, and our projected sales for the year will be over $100,000. We have been featured in many blogs and in TechCrunch.
Virtual Possibilities: Mitch Wilson, Dr. David Langlois, Lawrence Schembri, Dr. Tian Zhang, Stephanie Hoeppler, Amy Dyck, Mo Khan, Xiaoyue Wang, Gavin Zhang, Kyle Arscott
Virtual Possibilities Inc. (VPI) is commercializing a novel surgical navigation system technology (“LaparoGuard”) designed to markedly improve the safety profile and accuracy of laparoscopic procedures. Our solution will reduce surgical tool-patient tissue collisions, reduce costly readmission procedures and improve the efficiency, workflow speed and intraoperative planning in an operating room, by increasing surgeon’s confidence in the correct placement of hardware therapy. VPI estimates that its predictive, error-prevention imaging & navigation technology could play a pivotal role in allowing the 90% of North American hospitals that lack the resources for surgical navigational systems to afford a flexible, affordable solution.
Cognosco: Akiv Jhirad, Mandakini Jain, Larona Toteng, John Barberiz
Cognosco was inspired by the increasing rate of traumatic brain injury due to vehicle accidents, falls, violence and sports. We are a medical device startup aimed at creating non-invasive solutions to prevent the detrimental effects of traumatic brain injuries in victims, through early detection. Currently, our research and development is being focused towards a portable device that uses near infrared spectroscopy technology to noninvasively examine the presence of a bleed underneath a patient’s skull. A time and cost effective solution using this technology has been created by our group. The portability of our device allows it to be a diagnostic tool on site of the accident, which makes it an essential tool for paramedics to possess. It is also accurate enough that hospitals will find it diagnostically useful, and inexpensive enough that emergency caregivers (safety officers in sports centers, emergency dispatchers) will also find it to be resourceful.