NYU’s most promising innovators were recently awarded a combined $200,000 in start-up cash at the annual $200K Entrepreneurs Challenge, held by NYU Stern’s Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation. The three winning teams – composed of students and alumni from across the University – were chosen after pitching their ideas and enduring Q&A by judges from venture capital, technology and design, education and social enterprise sectors.
April 25 marked the culmination of one of the largest and most rigorous venture competitions in the world. More than 200 teams comprising over 500 entrants from 14 schools at NYU competed this year in one of three challenges: New Venture, for those pursuing start-ups in a variety of sectors; Social Venture, for those pursuing both social impact and financial sustainability; and Technology Venture, for those focused on bringing intellectual property developed at NYU to market.
The $75,000 Rennert Prize was awarded to HireCanvas. Co-founders Scott Holand (Stern MBA ’14) and Kevin George are creating a better campus recruiting experience for recruiters, universities and students by managing data at campus recruiting events.
The $50,000 Social Venture Prize went to Codesters. Gordon Smith (Stern MBA ‘06), Manesh Patel, David Oblath, Prerak Shukla, Joe Schinasi, Revell Horsey, Thomas Ricard and Juan Farfan teamed up to create a tool for schools and teachers that integrates a cloud-based coding environment with a coding curriculum.
The $75,000 Technology Venture Prize was awarded to Skinesiology. Students from the NYU School of Medicine have engineered fitness tights with a resistance-generating system that increases muscle activity and helps regular people burn more calories during both work-outs and daily activities.
The Technology Venture Competition is co-sponsored by the NYU Innovation Venture Fund, EisnerAmper LLP and Lowenstein Sandler LLP.
“Over the past eight months, our 12 finalists were provoked, prodded and praised by our coaches, mentors and evaluators,” explained Luke Williams, executive director of NYU Stern’s Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation. “In the end, each team emerged with a new business concept that imagines a powerful market disruption and a plan to transform it into reality.”
