More than 100 students who participated in three business competitions and a demonstration embodied the spirit of entrepreneurship at the annual at Cornell April 18-20.
鈥淭he quality is always going up,鈥 said Zach Shulman 鈥87, J.D. 鈥90, director of Entrepreneurship at Cornell, which hosts Celebration. 鈥淪tudents are thinking about starting companies earlier, so they tend to be better prepared.鈥
Winning the Student Business of the Year competition and $5,000 was , which provides real-time remote monitoring and minimal diagnostics for honeybee colonies.
Beekeepers lose about $80 million per year due to the death of their colonies. And that doesn鈥檛 count the millions of dollars in annual crop revenue, from apples to almonds, that are dependent on honeybee pollination.
鈥淭his technology allows beekeepers to prioritize the colonies that are in the most urgent need of intervention, minimizing colony losses for large-scale commercial beekeepers,鈥 said Nathan Oakes, a doctoral student in computational biology, who co-founded the company with Hailey Scofield, a doctoral student in neurobiology and behavior.
Combplex was a member of the , meaning Oakes and Scofield went through six months of course work to build their company.
鈥淭his competition particularly was an opportunity to explain a problem, and our solution, framed in a way that mattered to members of the investor and business communities 鈥 two groups that scientists don鈥檛 often talk to,鈥 he said. They will use the award to produce prototypes for local field testing this summer, he added.
The company also won $5,000, matched by an additional $5,000 from Cornell鈥檚 Center for Technology Licensing, and second place in the Cornell Venture Challenge, a competition run by for more fully formed startups.
The winner of that competition, and $25,000, was , co-founded by Sahil K. Gupta 鈥15, M.Eng. 鈥16. The company makes smart microphones for devices and hearing aids, using a microphone that separates sounds coming from multiple directions and zooms in on the sounds the hearer cares about, providing improved speech recognition and higher-quality recordings. They use a bio-inspired design that measures a sound鈥檚 particle velocity instead of its pressure.
Coming in third in the Cornell Venture Challenge was , created by a Cornell Tech team to offer templates and tools for grassroots reporting on local issues.
In the Big Idea competition, where students pitch ideas as opposed to representing actual companies, Cowscope was the winner in the for-profit category, winning a $3,000 prize. Its idea is to target bovine mastitis contamination, which affects 30 percent of dairy farms each year. Their solution? A portable microscope system with fast analytics to help famers quickly diagnose individual animals. A camera takes a picture of the sample slide and analyses it via smart phone.
The technology could be used in beer brewing and other food and beverage industries, said founder Sachiye Koide 鈥18, a biological engineering major.
鈥淲ith my $3,000, I hope to continue building a prototype of my idea 鈥 maybe making it smaller and more useable for the farmers,鈥 said Koide. The team included sisters Monica Ong 鈥19 and Amanda Ong 鈥19 and Swathi Chakrapani 鈥19.
AMPS won first place in the nonprofit category, and $3,000, for its idea for a faster, easier way to charge mobile devices in developing countries: a solar-powered hub where owners can swap out their discharged batteries for 50 cents. 鈥淲e have even considered doing a pilot program at Cornell, to see how people interact with the system,鈥 said team member Alex Li 鈥20, an electrical engineering major. Other team members are Rohan Patel 鈥20 and Shen Lee 鈥20.
Teams from eLab shared the stories of their ups and downs at eLab Demo Day, April 19.
Brynne Merkley 鈥20 and Colby Triolo 鈥19 talked about launching their , a platform that matches travel partners who share the same schedule, budget or interests.
Jamie Kim 鈥19, founder of granola company , told the crowd that her company has now sold 5,000 bags of sweet and savory granola and is being sold on Amazon Prime, selling out on their first day of launch.
And Antithesis launched a Kickstarter campaign for their .
The founders of Dexter, a product to help people understand and acquire cryptocurrency, described how they discovered there wasn鈥檛 a need for their product 鈥 and how they are now exploring a completely different idea.
鈥淚t鈥檚 not about persisting in selling the product that you want to sell, it鈥檚 about persisting in finding out what customers actually want,鈥 said Tom Schryver, executive director of Cornell鈥檚 Center for Regional Economic Advancement and an eLab instructor. 鈥淲hen a team realizes they鈥檙e pushing the wrong product, stops at the right time and finds the right thing to do, that鈥檚 just as worth celebrating as every successful team you鈥檒l see here today.鈥
Contributors to this article were Kathy Hovis, a writer for Entrepreneurship at Cornell, and Debra Eichten, marketing strategist at Entrepreneurship at Cornell.
This story also appeared in the .
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