Student entrepreneurs kept their cool in winning Rice University’s major startup prize for their ice cream company.
Protein Pints, co-founded by Michigan State University students Paul Reiss and Michael Meadows, took home first place at the Rice Business Plan Competition, or RBPC. The placement comes with $150,000 in investment from Houston-based venture capital firm Goose Capital.
“The love and support that we've been shown during our time here at Rice, and the relationships and the friends that we've made, is something that I know I and every other student here is going to remember for the rest of our lives,” Reiss said in his acceptance speech on April 6, the final day of the competition.
The RBPC is co-hosted by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship and Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business.
In total, $1 million in prizes was awarded to startups, RBPC Director Catherine Santamaria said. Forty-two startups competed, representing 35 universities from four countries.
“That’s a large number of prizes, but the biggest thing our startups leave with is a feeling of generosity and community from this room,” Santamaria said in a speech at the event. “This community is always ready and willing to help our founders and support our vision for the competition by investing time, money and resources in these student innovators.”
The competing startups in 2024 represented five areas of technology: energy, clean tech and sustainability; life sciences and health care solutions; consumer products and services; hard tech; and digital enterprise.
While Houston startups didn’t place in the top positions this year, one company, LiQuidium, won the $25,000 NOV Energy Technology Innovation Cash Prize. Lithium mining startup LiQuidium was founded by University of Houston students Parisa Taheri, Erin Picton and Pranjal Sheth.
In the 2023 competition, three Texas companies landed in the top seven positions. FluxWorks, out of Texas A&M University, took home the Goose Capital grand prize, while Rice-founded startups Sygne Solutions and Tierra Climate took second and fourth place, respectively.
In addition to Goose Capital, other local investors that put up prizes included The OWL Investment Group, an angel investor network founded at a previous RBPC, and the Houston Angel Network.
Previous RBPC winners, even those based outside of Houston, have found routes back to the Bayou City. Louisiana-based Mallard Bay Outdoors, a startup focused on booking hunting trips, won prizes at the event before expanding its operations to Houston last year.
Mallard Bay raised $4.6 million in funding in March, led by Houston-based Soul Venture Partners. The company was introduced to the Softeq Venture Studio — now one of its major investors — thanks to the Rice competition.
