NiFTy, a local video game asset purchasing platform for blockchain-based games took home the top prize at the McGinnis Venture Competition, an event hosted by the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University on March 22. The five-person team's victory, which comes with a $25,000 investment in the form of a safe note, is the latest sign of a growing trend of acceptance for Pittsburgh's budding Web3 community.
The team plans to use the funding to further build out the development for the backend technology of its platform, which is vying to serve as a marketplace of various purchasable video game assets that are made by users. These assets are secured and verifiable as authentic through the use of nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, which themselves are similar to a unique code that is used as a form of proof of ownership but for digital goods.
"Basically, you have video games — that's the next generation of entertainment — and you have items in video games. Well, they remain in video games for a long time. Now, let's say I am Michael Jordan, I want to sell my basketball. Well, if I am the Michael Jordan of video games, I can't do that right now. So this platform is the best way for me to sell my things, to create in-game assets that I can then trade with anyone around the world. This is just the technology that enables it," Mehul Agarwal, the chief architect at NiFTy and a graduate student at CMU, said. "NFTs are up and coming, but we haven't seen many use cases. Now, NiFTy comes up with the use case, which is all gaming assets that often remain inside games and shelved off can now be traded on open marketplaces all around the world."
NiFTy's first place finish at the graduate level of the competition means it beat out 10 other pitch presentations held throughout the day to claim the top prize. Funding for the competition, which sits at $60,000 in total investment dollars for CMU entrepreneurs, is provided by the endowment from Gerald E. McGinnis, founder of Respironics, a Pittsburgh-based medical breathing supply company now owned by Philips.
"We want to put CMU at the forefront of the Web 3.0 revolution," Pranjal Chavarkar, another member of the NiFTy team and a graduate student at CMU, said. "We aim to provide gamers with an additional revenue stream for their time and investment that they spend on these assets and create more crypto-based gaming companies to come on our platform."
Advanced Optronics LLC, which is developing flexible and biocompatible electronic and optical systems in an effort to reduce the types of invasive surgeries required for a variety of medical applications but namely as they relate to cochlear implants, finished in second place at the graduate level of the competition. In doing so, it secured a $15,000 safe note investment and is led by CMU graduate students Jay Reddy and Ruth Segall.
E-Carebetics placed third in the graduate level of the competition, earning a $10,000 safe note investment as a result. Led by Bingda Li, Devansh Parikh and Mukunthan Tharmakulasingam, the team is creating an AI-powered diagnostic app available on smartphones that aims to detect diabetic retinopathy.
At the undergraduate level, Flurry came in first place and earned a $4,000 investment. The three-person team — which consists of CMU students Miguel Brandao, Jack Winters and Steven Wu — is making a piece of hardware that plugs into a vehicle to uses data from various sensors to calculate road slickness conditions. The hardware then maps these conditions as a motorist is driving on the road and will alert them of any potential hazards.
"We've been working hard on it for about five months, but this idea has been in the works since last year at about this time," Brando said. "Now to come up here and be able to kind of demonstrate and showcase the entirely fleshed out ideas to everyone is really, really nice."
BAM!, which is making a climate controllable bottle for beverages, finished in second place and earned a $2,500 award. It's led by CMU student Kaitlyn Chow.
Both Flurry and BAM! are also now entered into CMU's Venture Challenge competition.
In total, 14 teams competed in this year's find round of the event; 11 at the graduate level and three at the undergraduate level. It started with 50 teams back in the fall of 2021. A panel of judges decided the competition's winners.
"The 14 teams that presented were absolutely amazing; the judge deliberation room was almost a bloodbath," Dave Mawhinney, the executive director of the Swartz Center, said during opening remarks. "Everybody that participated today and presented today is a winner. We really, really appreciate that you've become a part of this ecosystem."
