Last week, 25 startup ventures from the Harvard i-Lab, Launch Lab X Geo and Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab pitched their business plans at the 10th annual Harvard President's Innovation Challenge awards ceremony.
The live virtual event took place May 5, allowing the 25 companies to compete for a share of the $510,000 in prize money, provided by the Bertarelli Foundation.
After the presentations, 10 ventures from five different tracks — social impact, open, health and life sciences, Launch Lab X Geo and Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab — won a share of the prize money. In each track, there was one grand prize winner and a runner-up. Three teams also won Ingenuity Awards — a prize for Innovative ideas that have not yet been developed into fully-formed enterprises.
Matt Segneri, the Bruce and Bridgitt Evans Executive Director, Harvard Innovation Labs said more than 2,000 venture teams have gone through the competition since it began in 2011.
"We’ve seen founders from 130 countries and they’ve raised more than three billion dollars," he said in a statement. "This year's group of finalists and winners are just a taste of the enormous creativity in our ecosystem, and I couldn’t be prouder of our vast, vibrant, and diverse community — and its collective progress in these most uncertain of times."
Five teams won a grand prize of $75,000 each. From a social impact startup that's helping students in India to a health and life sciences venture improving drug delivery for chronic disease treatments, here are the grand prize winners:
- The Apprentice Project: Developing students in India into future leaders through choice-based learning.
- Chaku Foods: Making snacks that are better for people and better for farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa.
- Karivez Bio: Transforming chronic disease treatment through improved drug delivery.
- Matice Biosciences: For leveraging nature’s regenerative powers to flawlessly repair skin.
- Manifold Bio: For changing drug discovery into measurement-driven drug design.
Besides the grand prize winners, five other ventures teams were awarded $25,000 each. The second place winners were:
- Beacon Bio: Improving hearing and healing by restoring eardrums with regenerative grafts.
- My Dental Key: Advancing dental education via comprehensive, expert-verified dental education technology.
- SanaRx Biotherapeutics: Developing live therapeutics to treat diseases of the alimentary tract.
- Thrive!: Helping local governments budget for equity and root out racism.
- Tuverl: Making public transportation more accessible for commuters in African countries.
And lastly, Harvard granted $10,000 to three Ingenuity Award winners:
- CshFlow: Using blockchain to provide financial services to the unbanked.
- Morphology: Developing smart, robotic lighting that adjusts to people’s needs.
- ChalkEd: Harnessing data to make online classes engaging and equitable for every student.
According to Sengeri, more than 60 percent of this year's winning PIC ventures included a woman co-founder and more than 50 percent had a BIPOC co-founder.
He said, "At the Harvard Innovation Labs, we strive to be an ecosystem that puts diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, at the center of everything we do. Our success is bigger than any bottom line. It’s about fostering a community where everyone can thrive and build things that matter."
