A graduate of Waterloo Engineering was among the big winners when Velocity held its winter pitch contest for early stage startup companies this week.
Rohit Rajan (BASc ’12, mechatronics engineering) and partner Omkar Deshmukh, the founders of Dolphyn, claimed one of four $50,000 investments up for grabs at the Velocity Fund Pitch Competition at Catalyst137 in Kitchener.
Dolphyn is building the equivalent of Google Drive for data scientists.
Omkar Deshmukh (left) and Waterloo Engineering graduate Rohit Rajan of Dolphyn.
The other three winners were: Supervisa, which is making immigration visa applications simple, affordable, trustworthy and fast; Forward Robotics, which is making aerial crop spraying faster, cheaper and safer with autonomous vehicle take-off and landing drones; and Life Sciences Key Technologies (LSK), which is aiming to decentralize health-care diagnostic testing.
LSK and Caribou, which is coordinating personalized medical travel expenses, also received $50,000 investments from the new Velocity Health Tech Fund, which was announced at the event.
The pitch competition, part of the flagship entrepreneurship program at the University of Waterloo, featured 10 finalists vying for a total of $300,000 in investments.
Two other finalists also have ties to Waterloo Engineering.
Scope, a 2020 Capstone Design project that is creating electronically tunable lenses for smartphones, is made up of nanotechnology engineering students Holden Beggs, Alisha Bhanji, Zhenle Cao, Ishan Mishra and Fernando Pena Cantu.
Gravity Medical, which is developing innovative devices for application in orthopedic surgery, includes Tim Lasswell (MASc ’17, mechanical engineering) and Nima Zamani (MASc ’17, mechanical engineering).