Five student startups from Carnegie Mellon University are getting a little more support, earning $60,000 in investment capital through the 2014 McGinnis Venture Competition, a cross-campus entrepreneurial challenge.
Winners include:
Impaqd: Jason Cahill and Neel Kishan, two MBA students in the Tepper School of Business at CMU, took the top prize of $25,000 in the graduate student division. With Impaqd, the pair has created a real-time, GPS-enabled app that connects shipping customers directly to freight carriers to allow them to identify and fill empty cargo spaces.
Solvvy Inc.: Justin Betteridge and Medhi Samadi, an alumnus and current graduate student in CMU’s School of Computer Science, took second place and an investment of $15,000. Solvvy is an intelligent problem-solving assistant that enhances a user’s ability to find web content through the use of state-of-the-art text analysis technology.
Appbase: Taking third place and an investment of $10,000, Appbase–created by graduate students Anjur Kumar and partners Siddharth Kothari and Shannan Sullivan–provides a unified database interface to handle all data syncing and querying needs for app developers.
Tailored Fit: Tailored Fit, an online shopping service that learns an individual’s preferences over time and makes personalized recommendations, took first place among the undergraduate companies, receiving a $4,000 investment. Tailored fit also took the top spot at Startup Weekend Pittsburgh in October.
Captions: Second place in the undergraduate category and $2,500 went to Captions, a team that has created a new application for eye glasses that projects translations for any foreign language being spoken to a screen in front of the user’s eyes.
Funding for the competition comes from an endowment from Gerald McGinnis, chairman, CEO and founder of Respironics Inc.
Source: Pittsburgh Business Times
