For the second time in two years, two Waterloo Engineering startups have been chosen out of hundreds of others as contenders for the 2015 James Dyson Award.
Grasp and Voltera V-One, both founded as Capstone Design projects, are among five Canadian finalists for the award.
Samson Berhane, Sarb Singh and Ryan Terpstra, a team of then-mechatronics engineering students, founded Grasp to create a bicycle lock
Voltera created a 3D printer, pictured below, that uses conductible inks to quickly make
Grasp and Voltera advance to the next stage of the competition that will reduce the top 100 entries to a shortlist of 20. The final winner will be announced in November and wins $54,000, plus $9,000 for its university department.
A Canadian first
In 2014, Suncayr, a Waterloo nanotechnology engineering student startup, was the runner up in the Dyson competition. It was the first Canadian company to be honoured in the finals of an international design competition. EyeCheck, founded by Waterloo systems design engineering students, was also part of the final round of last year's competition that began with over 600 entries from 18 countries.
The James Dyson Award is an international student design competition open to university students or recent graduates who studied product design, industrial design or engineering. It is run by the James Dyson Foundation set up by James Dyson, a British inventor who developed the Dyson bagless vacuum cleaner.