Teams with members from Waterloo Engineering claimed three of the four $5,000 prizes on the line today at the latest on-campus pitch competition for students with business ideas.
CodeGem, Ribbit and Scope were among nine finalists out to impress a panel of judges in three minutes as the Concept $5K Finals – formerly the Velocity Fund Finals – were staged at the Student Life Centre.
Members of the he four winning teams take the stage at the Concept $5K Finals held in the Student Life Centre today.
CodeGem (Stephanie Mills, Ian Kemp and Kaylyn Lau, all third-year management engineering students) is developing an analytics tool powered by machine learning to be built into GitHub’s review process.
Ribbit (Jeremy Wang, PhD candidate in mechanical engineering, and Carl Pigeon, a University of Toronto engineering graduate) are building software kits to replace commercial pilots in regional planes and hope to create a fully autonomous airline.
Scope members (left to right) Zhenle Cao, Ishan Mishra, Alisha Bhanji, Holden Beggs and Fernando Pena pose with their ceremonial cheque.
Scope (Fernando Pena, Zhenle Cao, Ishan Mishra, Holden Beggs and Alisha Bhanji, all fourth-year nanotechnology engineering students) is building lenses with electronically tunable optical power for use in cellphone cameras.
The fourth $5,000 winner, Flowy (Neil Liu, fourth-year computer science, and David Zhao, fourth-year accounting and financial management) is building software to make process automation easier.
Four other teams with engineering ties also made the finals. They were GoolooUp, Recircuit, Tomat.io and Vision Spatial Technologies.
The pitch contest was established in 2011 and is held on campus each term.