Startups with ties to Waterloo Engineering figured prominently again today with $130,000 in funding up for grabs at the Velocity Fund Finals.
They took three of four $25,000 awards, plus a $10,000 bonus for top hardware company, as well of two of four $5,000 prizes for early stage startups.
Winning startup companies pose with their prizes at the Velocity Fund Finals, where $130,000 in funding was up for grabs.
The big winner at the pitch event for University of Waterloo students or recent graduates, which is staged three times a year by the Velocity entrepreneurship program, was A-Line Orthopaedics.
Co-founded by Tim Lasswell, who earned a master’s degree in biomedical engineering at Waterloo last year, A-Line claimed both a $25,000 award for more seasoned companies and the $10,000 hardware prize.
Lasswell and partner Parham Rasoulinejad are developing implants for safer, faster surgeries.
The other $25,000 winners with Waterloo Engineering connections were:
- Bibu Labs (Tahseen Shabab, electrical engineering, 2013), which uses artificial intelligence to provide defense against cyberattacks.
- SannTek (Noah Debrincat, Thomas Dunlop, Karolyn Mackowiak, Ben Milligan and Chris Taylor, all 4B nanotechnology engineering), which is developing a marijuana breathalyzer.
The fourth winner in the top category was Fuzzbuzz, a fuzzing platform that keeps critical software secure.
Waterloo Engineering winners in the $5,000 category were:
Members of SannTek celebrate their $25,000 win.
- Circadian Energy (John Curticapean, Ben Hudson, Tony Qu and Malcolm Williams, all 4B mechatronics engineering), which is developing a low-cost system for neighbours in the developing world to share electricity.
- Intelline (Kyle Faller, 3A mechanical engineering; Ankil Patel, 1B electrical engineering), which builds mass custom cryocoolers. The third team member is Chris Matthew.
The other $5,000 winners were Freewheel, an accessible, affordable retrofit system for walking devices, and Quantum NanoPure, which provides affordable access to specialty fullerene molecules for researchers and distributors.
Twenty teams in the competition had three minutes to pitch their startups to judges, with $25,000 winners also earning space at the Velocity Garage, the country’s most productive startup incubator, in downtown Kitchener.