Nanotechnology engineering entrepreneurs win backing in pitch events

Students at Waterloo Engineering claimed the majority of prizes in a pair of recent competitions organized by the Concept entrepreneurship and pre-incubator program. In the Concept $5K Finals - formerly the Velocity Fund Finals - teams featuring our nanotechnology engineering students took one of four $5,000 awards, plus the $500 People’s Champ prize, for students with business ideas.

The winning nanotechnology engineering students in the Concept $5K contest, which was held by video for the first time due to the coronavirus pandemic, were:

SMRTCoat (Daniel Stranart, Luke Wiersma and Han Liu, nanotechnology engineering), which is developing a spray-on, colour-changing solution to detect contact that could cause concussions in young athletes.

The People’s Champ award, voted on by online viewers of videos submitted by the 10 finalists in the contest, went to:

iuvoderm (Tiana Colantonio, Jonathan Wu, Hillman Leung and Adrianus Sukuramsyah - nanotechnology engineering), which is developing a patch for foot ulcers suffered by people with diabetes.

Concept is a program offered by Velocity, an incubator for early stage, pre-seed technology startups at the University of Waterloo.

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