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.