Promising student and alumni ventures walked away from the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge with prize money to further develop their businesses.
The President’s Innovation Challenge is run by Harvard Innovation Labs, a university program that provides resources and mentorship to students from all 13 Harvard schools who are interested in building an idea into a future venture. More than 600 teams were accepted into the i-lab this year, and around 150 were chosen to participate in the President’s Innovation Challenge and compete for non-dilutive funding. Through a series of meetings with advisors, workshops and panels, the teams developed their ventures to push the boundaries of their fields.
Last week, 25 of these teams were selected to pitch their startups during a hybrid event for a share of $510,000 in prize money, provided by the Bertarelli Foundation.
The ventures in this year’s competition included startups preserving endangered and extinct Native American languages, offering speech therapy through a technology platform and helping African migrants send money with zero fees.
“The President’s Innovation Challenge calls on the Harvard community to develop compelling solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems. It’s our year-long effort to provide meaningful feedback and move teams forward,” Matt Segneri, executive director of the i-lab, said in the event’s kickoff. Watch Segneri’s full remarks and the student pitches here.
This is the 10th anniversary of the i-lab, which Segneri said has worked with more than 3,000 ventures from 150 countries who have raised around $5 billion in capital.
The following information about this year’s award recipients was provided by the i-lab.
This year’s $75,000 award recipients are:
- Adaptilens for revolutionizing vision correction by restoring the eye’s ability to focus
- Aurie for redesigning the medical services and supplies that people in the disability community use every day, starting with a safely reusable intermittent urinary catheter system
- Hue for helping people find the best beauty products for their complexion
- Limax Biosciences for treating internal and external injuries with a stretchable adhesive hydrogel
- Myspeech for enabling access to high quality speech therapy through a technology platform
The five winners of $25,000 are:
- CashEx for helping African migrants send money with zero fees
- CassVita Inc for using proprietary technology to foster prosperity for smallholder farmers
- Imago Rehab for creating a robot-assisted virtual clinic that restores hand function to stroke survivors
- M13 Therapeutics for delivering any gene to any cell with a unique phage-derived particle
- VATARA for designing low-cost, negative pressure wound therapy
The President’s Innovation Challenge also awarded $10,000 in Ingenuity Awards to teams advancing ideas with the potential to be world-changing, even if they are not yet fully formed ventures. This year’s four Ingenuity Award winners, each receiving $2,500, are:
- Coastal Protection Solutions for designing easily deployable systems to protect against coastal floods
- ListenIn for linking hearing aids with the brain to identify a speaker in the crowd
- Madad for building an avalanche early warning system
- Speakden for nurturing fluent speakers of endangered and extinct Native American languages
