Twelve fourth-year Waterloo Engineering teams competed in the 2026 Norman Esch Entrepreneurship Awards for Capstone Design. A panel of industry judges awarded more than $100,000 across all 12 teams.
The teams pitched a wide array of solutions — from a wearable cooling device for menopausal hot flashes to an AI tool that automates body camera redaction for law enforcement.
“Participating in the Norman Esch Entrepreneurship Awards is incredibly rewarding — it’s a chance to show off work you’ve poured yourself into for the past year,” said Jordyn Maywood, a fourth-year biomedical engineering student on the CoolFlash team. “Receiving awards is validating, but it’s also useful — it tells people we’re serious, that this product is good and needed in the market.”
Six teams took home $12,000 each, the other six received $5,000 and one also won the Adel Sedra People’s Choice Award, winning an additional $4,500.
The competition was emceed by Waterloo Engineering alum Matt Stevens (BASc ’04, PhD ’08), who co-founded CrossChasm Technologies — later FleetCarma — while still a student. Judges were three Waterloo Engineering alumni: Akash Vaswani (BASc ’14), general partner at Velocity; Sylvia Ng (BASc ’04), founder of ReturnBear; and Sanjay Malaviya (BASc ‘93), founder of RL Solutions.
The Esch Foundation has supported entrepreneurial senior engineering students pursuing commercialization of Canadian innovations since 2014.
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