This year’s competition has now concluded. We have 3 winning entries and 3 that earned Honorable Mention. Our heartiest congratulations to all six of them and heartfelt thanks to all participants who took time and effort to participate in the competition and make it into a lively contest.  The final results are as follows:

 Awards

First Place           NexVu APM LLC                             (Aditya Nath – Electrical Engineering, 1985)

Second Place      Techbuddy Consulting                   (Prasoon Gupta – Civil Engineering, 2009)

Third Place          Veinus Inc.                                      (Saurabh Gupta, Manoj Goel – Mechanical Engineering 1981)

 Honorable Mentions

                                    BufferInfinite                                   (Shivank Agarwal – Computer Science & Engineering, 2011
                                    AquaClot                                        (Nimish Gopal –  Bio Technology, expected 2012),
                                    Approx Notebooks                         (Shubham Agrawal - Metallurgical & Materials Engineering, expected 2014)

We had originally planned to award cash prizes to top two plans in the competition, however two entries were almost tied for the second place and in addition the three entries in the Honorable Mention category were also very creative and innovative in their approach though they reflected the youthfulness of their entrepreneurs in their approach and goals and thus came in a little lower under the existing judging criteria. So the Executive Committee decided to add a third place award for $500 and INR 5000 (since all three recipients are in India) for each honorable mention to recognize the hard work, ingenuity, and creativity of the entrepreneurs who made to the final round.

NextVu APM LLC won the first place and prize of $1500 for the best business plan in the competition. It provides retailers with instant visibility into store devices and applications usage and performance, and the ROI on new in-store technology investments through its physical, virtual and cloud-based platform.

Techbuddy won the second place award for $1000 for their keen understanding of the market place and market opportunity. They strive to make college graduates employable by nurturing their strengths & interests with an application oriented self learning approach, thus bridging the gap between industry and academia.

Veinus Inc. is winner of third place award of $500. They are developing. a unique, non-invasive, portable vein detection device to visually assist in finding best blood vessels for venous puncturing that is most widely used technique for blood draw.

Apart from the cash awards the top three companies will have an opportunity to present to an Angel forum.  We wish all six of them the very best and invite them to stay connected and seek guidance on their start up businesses if they so desire.

We’d like t thank Dr. Arun Kumar for publicizing the competition on IIT-R campus, Manoj Goel for ongoing help with reviewing entries and sitting through presentations, and our Judge Panel that included Aditya Gupta, Harish Goyal, and Surendra Saxena who worked tirelessly throughout the process to review and analyze entries and provide feedback to contestants to help them develop good business plans.