Engineering teams take three Concept pitch prizes

Wednesday, December 1, 2021

Three student teams featuring members from Waterloo Engineering took home $5,000 each from the recent Concept $5k pitch competition for fall 2021.

MicroBuild Masonry, Learnlist and Hydro House were among eight finalists competing for four prizes at the virtual event, which is staged three times a year.

MicroBuild (Adrian Simone, third-year civil engineering) is developing a sustainable, biological method to manufacture masonry units.

Learnlist (Aman Mathur, fourth-year systems design engineering) is an online platform to save, curate and share knowledge.

Hydro House (Peter Cornelisse and Lucas Godkin, both four-year mechanical engineering) is developing an off-grid, sustainable system to generate and store energy in remote communities.

Connecting women to women doctors

Two other teams with Waterloo Engineering students also made the finals.

Bebaha Virtual HealthCare (Niharika Srivatsa, first-year systems design engineering, and Rashi Jaising, master’s of business, entrepreneurship, business and technology) is a virtual clinic that connects women to women doctors in India.

HipPO (Linda Mao and Evan Kim, both fourth-year mechatronics engineering, and Bryan Poon, Pascal Voyer-Nguyen and Anthony Tran, all fourth-year mechanical engineering) is developing a smart hip brace to promote pain relief and mobility for people with hip osteoarthritis.

Concept is an experiential entrepreneurship and pre-incubator program at the University of Waterloo. It is provided by Velocity, an incubator for early stage, pre-send startup companies.

Video pitches by the winning teams can be found on YouTube by going to Fall 2021: $5k Finalists.