The Palihapitiya Venture Creation Fund provides two $50,000 awards to University-selected Capstone Design teams with the intention to transform their Capstone Design project into a promising startup post-graduation.
Created in 2014, the Palihapitiya Venture Creation Fund is a gift from Chamath Palihapitiya, Waterloo Engineering alumnus and founder of Social Capital, a venture capital fund that aims to solve the world’s hardest problems by starting and investing in breakthrough companies in healthcare, education, financial services, consumer and enterprise.
Eligibility
Value
Application deadlines and selection process
About Chamath Palihapitiya
Past Recipients
2022
Reduce, Carbonize, Adsorb has created a solution to eliminate water bottles from ending up in landfill as a novel and high-performing thermal decomposition process that converts PET products into an activated carbon product.
Read more about the project here.
2021
Hyperbeam is a shared browser that lets people in different locations surf the web and watch TV shows and movies together online. The technology’s target audiences are young adults in long-distance relationships with romantic partners and close friends who wish to remain connected. Hyperbeam has signed up over 1.2 million users, with over 170,000 actively using the app each month. Its monthly revenue is approximately $23,000, derived mainly from premium monthly subscriptions.
Scribenote is an automated record-keeping software for veterinary medical professionals. Scribenote’s software transcribes each client conversation into text categorizing the appointment data. A backup is automatically made of the recordings for future reference. They discovered that most of the information entered manually into an animal’s medical record after an appointment had already been discussed. The duplication in information gathering was “a huge opportunity” to come up with a solution for simplifying the data collection process.
More information about both teams can be found here.
2020
In 2019, more than 657 billion smartphone photographs were taken. Scope, a Nanotechnology Engineering team, is working on a new type of optical zoom lenses with electronically tunable optical power that will help people take better photos while reducing battery use, costs, and processing power of smartphones. The system tackles this problem by redesigning the fundamental lenses creating the camera and making them electrically tunable, allowing for a single aperture to do everything that current systems need 3-5 apertures to do. The team has also created software to allow for optical zooming with the single lens. The Scope lens can also be used in other optical applications and markets including optical microscopy, AR/VR headsets, consumer robotics and drones.
2019
Stacktronic, a Mechanical Engineering team, addresses the unfilled market for high-convenience battery packs with minimal user design and integration effort. Small companies, design teams, and research groups are increasingly in need of high-voltage, energy-dense, mobile power sources at relatively low production volumes per configuration. Existing solutions either require custom engineering at high expense and long lead times, or are of low quality and require significant work on the part of the user.
Project Beacon, from Systems Design Engineering, created an emotional wellbeing platform that supports universities with the increasing demand for counselling services on campuses and also helps students get care faster for their mental health concerns. It provides resource recommendations, where the improvement will be measured using validated scales. It also provides universities with data analytics for resource utilization and insights of overall campus wellness.
2018
In 2018, the winning project was SannTek from Nanotechnology Engineering. They have developed a “marijuana breathalyser” that is capable of determining the concentration of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive component of marijuana, present within a breath sample. Essentially, it is a breathalyzer equivalent for marijuana detection. The two-part device which features a single-use disposable cartridge and a portable analyzer has undergone user testing at the law enforcement level to establish ease of use and accuracy. Competitive products have proven too fragile or complicated to ensure proper usage and readings, making SannTek’s device a front runner.
2017
The endoscope – called SWIRVE, an acronym for ‘short wave infrared vascular endoscope’ – is the brainchild of mechanical engineering students Michael Phillips, 22, of Sussex, New Brunswick, and Phil Cooper, 22, of Pembroke, Ontario, who plan to call their startup Vena Medical.
VivaSpire is the second team made up of nanotechnology engineering students John Grousopoulos, 22, of Kitchener, Mostafa Saquib, 21, of Kitchener, and Chris Hajduk, 22, of Guelph.
With the support of Chamath both of these entrepreneurial student teams will be able to expand the potential of their ideas, further expanding the capabilities of their working prototypes and through mentorship explore future business opportunities for Vena Medical and VivaSpire.