Ringing in its 11th year, the Tufts New Ventures Competition—Tufts University's annual startup pitch contest—announced the winners this week. This year was a little different: the university decided to add a third track, the medical/life science track, alongside its general/high tech and social impact tracks. The competition awarded more than $150,000 in cash and sponsor contributions.
Here are the winners:
First Place - General/High Tech
SpotLight Parking LLC Instead of driving around the block on busy nights looking desperately for a parking spot, SpotLight allows users to match off with a licensed valet; it’s Uber, but for parking. They’ve already partnered up with VPNE Parking Solutions, a valet parking business downtown, to get their product off the ground.
Orange Analytical Devices Latching onto an expanding market for medical marijuana cultivation, Orange Analytical Devices proposed a portable, low-cost device that measures the potency of its active chemicals: tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD).
Second Place - General/High Tech
N2Cube Instead of chucking the days-old pastries, N2Cube’s product provides a cubic foot of space to fill with cartridges that “purge” the oxygen with inert nitrogen, which purportedly keeps baked goods and other similar perishables palatable for longer.
First Place - Life Science
Adecto Pharmaceuticals Citing that 25 percent of breast-cancer deaths come from 15 percent of breast tumor cases — specifically those with triple-negative breast cancer— Adecto is looking to research and develop antibody-based therapeutics that could end up being safer than chemotherapy and radiation.
Second Place - Life Science
MySupport MySupport’s product is looking to match up families, people with disabilities and seniors with support workers and professionals to foster a better, more personal relationship over time. It does so through surveys that target patients and clients’ needs to match them up with providers who can fulfill them.
Third Place - Life Science
MicroLife To better ward off infant death and brain damage at birth, MicroLife is engineering a more streamlined device for measuring oxygen levels in infants’ blood flows. Current devices in the market are unwieldy and inefficient, but MicroLife’s promises better miniaturization on its silicon microchip.
First Place - Social
Global Literacy Project The Global Literacy Project’s Curious Learning System, tested in five countries, gives valuable feedback on how children learn, working more efficiently around the bigger problem of building schools and distributing millions of books to children worldwide. The project will measure the effectiveness of mobile devices in driving children’s curiosities to help stem the problem of global illiteracy.
Second Place - Social
SolarRoute SolarRoute proposes to network “agrochemical stores, microbanks, top-up cell credit distributors, and rural kiosks” to trained solar sales agents in developing markets to help ease the energy poverty that affects geographically and economically remote communities in Nicaragua.
Third Place - Social
Knowledge Center In developing countries that can’t afford to provide their children access to educational resources and the Internet, Knowledge Center wants to help by building 24/7 Wi-Fi enabled rooms equipped with rentable books and laptops, newspapers and magazines, and study spots.
Image via Shutterstock.
