Karthik Prasad and Thomas Mastantuono with Velocity Campus Director John Dick.
Pragmatica, a startup that aims to make speech therapy more accessible via VR, was one of four winners of $5000 at the Velocity $5K Finals yesterday.
Pragmatica is a joint venture by Computer Science master’s student Karthik Prasad and recent Waterloo Engineering graduate Thomas Mastantuono. They were among the seven finalists chosen from the twenty-three teams competing in the semi-finals.
Friends, faculty members, and potential investors came to the Theatre of the Arts yesterday to hear teams’ three-minute pitches as well as a fireside chat with Akash Vaswani, a Mechatronics Engineering alum and co-lead of the Velocity Fund.
“It was a surreal experience to pitch in front of a crowd and have our idea evaluated by judges,” Prasad says. “While it was a bit scary to pitch on such a stage, it was also really exciting to see the prospects of our company…We received a lot of valuable feedback from the judges and our session with Akash Vaswani after the event, making it a great learning opportunity to identify our weaknesses and work on improving them.”
The other three winning teams were Entangled Vision, a company creating macular degeneration testing equipment; EyesoBio, a biotechnology company improving eye product testing; and Swish, a company developing better cleaning solutions for solar panels. EmpathEase, a company that will collect patients with culturally aligned therapists, won the Audience Choice Award.
The relationship between tech and health was a common theme at this year’s Finals, with five of the seven teams pitching working on a topic related to medicine or health. In Pragmatica’s case, they are seeking to provide a VR-enabled speech therapy program featuring social situation and interactions, in order to help children with communication difficulties. With wait times for traditional speech therapy of six months to a year, and individual sessions costing $150 or more, Pragmatica hopes they can provide an alternative or supplementary service that will make speech therapy more accessible.
Pragmatica began as an engineering capstone project but was developed in consultation with therapists and other experts as well. “We have to remain cognisant of the fact that we don’t know everything, and always seek help whenever needed,” Prasad says.
The Pragmatica team will use their winnings to fund pilot testing of their VR program. “We are absolutely delighted about winning the event and we are happy to see our hard work pay off!”
“We enjoyed getting to hear the pitches of all our brilliant, entrepreneurial students who were part of the Velocity $5K finals,” says Stephanie Whitney, director for Research & Innovation Partnerships in the Math Innovation Office. “We are excited about Pragmatica’s VR speech therapy solution that is aiming to improve access and affordability in healthcare, and we congratulate them on their win!”
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