In its 24th year, the Big Bang! Business Competition at the Mike and Renee Child Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at University of California Davis gave away over $100,000 in really big checks to startup entrepreneurs.
It’s the largest payout in years for the Big Bang, which this year awarded six sector winners $12,500 each and the top award was $25,000. That’s up from last year’s $20,000 top award and $10,000 for sector winners.
The Top Innovation prize, and $25,000, went to EpiSense, a startup working on headband technology that can predict epileptic seizures about 30 seconds in advance by detecting changes in the brain’s electrical activity.
The 2023 startup was co-founded by UC Davis students Jaya Athuluru, studying cognitive science, and Simran Lallian, studying neurobiology.
Six startups each got $12,500, including HappyFeed, in the food and agriculture sector; BikeLane Marketplace, in the energy and sustainability sector; Equine Teaching Innovation in the animal health sector; Birth By Us in the social entrepreneurship sector; Candel in the human health sector; and CourseAssist in the education sector.
The Big Bang also awarded three prizes worth $4,000 each 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.
To be eligible to be in the Big Bang, entrepreneurs need to have raised less than $250,000.
Most of this year’s entrants were local and connected to UC Davis. One team was from Davis Senior High School.
“If you are going to have a superpower, make it making connections,” Andrew Hargadon, chairman of the Child Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, told the audience on the university campus during the awards ceremony Tuesday.
If you are an entrepreneur, you don’t need to learn spreadsheets and accounting software, but you do need to talk to your customers, he said.
The teams in the Big Bang have been working together and with other teams over a series of months, and Hargadon said the participants should consider all those people part of their networks.
“You will be as successful as the network around you,” he said. “Network connections are everything.”
For next year’s silver jubilee anniversary, Big Bang will be hitting up sponsors for larger awards, said Joe DiNunzio, executive director of the Child Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Several local companies got their start at the Big Bang competition, including sustainable plastic company Origin Materials Inc. (Nasdaq: ORGN) and parking technology company Japa Inc.
