College class scheduling platform SchedGo is big winner at UC Davis' Big Bang! startup competition

Dillon Hill, Henry Yu and Akshaj Aravind Raghavi are the co-founding team of SchedGo, which helps college students plan their class schedules to be able to graduate on time.

Jose Luis Villegas

By Mark Anderson - Staff Writer

May 24, 2023, 02:45pm PDT

The top $20,000 prize winner in the Big Bang! Business Competition at the University of California Davis also won the people's choice award worth $10,000, sending the founders of AI-supported college class-scheduling platform SchedGo off the stage with two big checks worth $30,000.

The 23rd annual Big Bang, organized by the Mike and Renee Child Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at UC Davis, this year awarded $80,000 through seven cash prizes.

Henry Yu, part of the SchedGo team, said he created the kernel of the company in 2019 as a class scheduling tool for himself, and that later morphed into "the much bigger challenge" of degree planning.

SchedGo is already in use by more than 1,000 users and it offers them optimized and personalized schedules and class calendars to plan to graduate on time.

SchedGo is based in Davis, and its co-founders include Davis MBA students Dillon Hill and Akshaj Aravind Raghavi.

The Big Bang offers prizes for companies and innovations in food and agriculture, animal health, energy, sustainability, education and social entrepreneurship. There was no animal health award this year.

The Big Bang also awarded also three prizes worth $4,000 apiece for space in local incubator spaces including The Lab@AgStart in Woodland, Inventopia in Davis and the Life Science Innovation Center at HM.Clause just south of Davis.

Badaye Technologies Ltd. won two categories, including $10,000 for food and agriculture and a separate $10,000 for the energy and sustainability category. Badaye developed a customizable, pedal-powered device that allows small farm operators to clean maize quickly and with no fuel or electricity. Cleaned grain is safer and easier to store and ship, as well as to process into food. Co-founder Ismael Mayanja is a doctoral candidate at UC Davis in biological systems engineering. His company is based in Kampala, Uganda.

Other $10,000 winners included:

Sacramento-based Square Solutions, which developed a portable cell incubator to safely transport cell therapies. It won the human health category.
Advize, a Los Angeles-based company, won the education award. It's developing a video library of thousands of professionals talking about their careers so students can discover industries and jobs that an algorithm chooses as a match for them.
Davis-based Caregiva won the social entrepreneurship award. It's a Davis-based company that has an app for care givers to support them in their work while supporting their efforts to give care in what can be isolating and difficult work. Caregiva offers support, advice and a network of other care givers.