Students at Waterloo Engineering claimed the majority of prizes in a pair of recent competitions organized by the Concept entrepreneurship and pre-incubator program.
Jeremy Wang, a PhD candidate in mechanical and mechatronics engineering, won the $10,000 second-place prize in the Graduate Student Startup Fund for grad students and postdoctoral fellows looking to turn their research into companies.
And in the Concept $5K Finals - formerly the Velocity Fund Finals - teams featuring engineering students took three of four $5,000 awards, plus the $500 People’s Champ prize, for students with business ideas.
Aileen Agada, an environmental engineering student at Waterloo, won one of four $5,000 prizes on the line in the recent Concept $5K Finals pitch event.
Wang, a Concept $5K winner last fall, is developing aircraft collision avoidance algorithms to allow airplanes to safely and efficiently fly themselves. His startup, Ribbit, is retrofitting planes to make them fully autonomous and eliminate the need for pilots to transport cargo.
The winning engineering students in the Concept $5K contest, which was held by video for the first time due to the coronavirus pandemic, were:
BeBlended (Aileen Agada, environmental engineering), which connects black women to hairstylists through an online platform that is already in use in Waterloo.
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.
Vision Spatial Technologies (Sam Dugan and Connor Kent, mechatronics engineering), which has created a platform powered by computer vision to monitor high-risk areas of recreational activities.
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.