Without further ado, meet the overall competition winners and the category winners. These are some of the best and brightest startups within the US university startup ecosystem.
First place (and also the category winner for “Top healthcare / life sciences (HCLS) startup”)
Hubly Surgical, from John Hopkins University, built the Hubly Cranial Drill to provide safer medical drilling during neurosurgery. Unique features on the single-use and battery-powered drill include auto-stop, force indication, and visual feedback. The drill improves surgical safety while reducing patient complications and operating room dependence.
“I was so honored to compete alongside all such impressive student founders and absolutely astounded to have won! The AWS program officers have been (and continue to be) incredibly supportive throughout the entire process. The amount of hard work they put into making this competition successful blew me away. They went above and beyond to ensure that each team had the resources and support it needed to succeed. And to the expert judges who took the time to come out and review our pitches: thank you for lending your expertise and knowledge. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to learn from your experience. Thank you again for this honor! I am excited to put this funding toward our early clinical pilots—a crucial step in modernizing neurosurgery for the better.”—Casey Grage
Co-founders:
The startup will use their prize to fund their first in-patient pilots in Chile. This includes building and shipping the Hubly drills, as well as sending a team member to Chile to organize and train the participating neurosurgeons.
Second place (and also the category winner for “Top fintech startup”)
Sotira, from UC Berkeley, is a customizable tool that integrates with top e-commerce marketplaces to provide sellers and resellers up-to-date analytics and insights. Sotira helps sellers and resellers to be more profitable and to streamline their sales, profits, and pricing.
“One key takeaway and learning is the value of starting to build in school and all the resources to build, test and iterate that students have access to.”—Amrita Bhasin
Co-founders:
The Sotira team will put their prize toward the $1.5 million round they are currently raising. They plan to allocate 70% of the funds to hiring and growth, 15% to marketing, 10% to security and storage, and 5% to legal.
Third place
Boston Quantum, which hails from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is working to disrupt the financial industry with their enterprise quantum computing software. Their Vision software locates arbitrage opportunities in systems with over 10 currencies, offers interface via easy-to-integrate APIs, and obtains results that allow users to trade in milliseconds.
“This year’s finalist cohort had both an incredible range of focus and depth of expertise. Clearly, students across fields want to get their hands dirty and build ventures, while still in school. This experiential learning even seems to be an essential part of the education of an aspiring entrepreneur. With the right resources and support networks in place, universities can nurture and kickstart generations of entrepreneurs. I’m excited to see how today’s student entrepreneurs will shape tomorrow.”—Shantanu Jha
Co-founders:
The Boston Quantum team will use their prize to continue bootstrapping, quantifying their value proposition, and onboarding paying customers. Looking forward, they plan to hyper scale.
Top physical consumer products startup
Ceres Plant Protein Cereal, from Tulane University, has created a vegan, keto, non-GMO, and gluten-free cereal that is actively good for the planet. Each serving of cereal contains 20 grams of sustainably sourced plant protein and zero sugar or artificial sweeteners. They ship sustainably and have a carbon footprint lower than most animal-based breakfasts.
“Through the AWS University Startup Competition, I got a sneak peek of tomorrow’s revolutionary companies. It’s empowering to share the stage alongside many companies working to tackle important social and environmental problems through innovative concepts.”—Rich Simmerman
Co-founders:
Ceres will use their prize to support their ingredient-sourcing and production process, lower their cost of goods sold, expand their business on Amazon and Thrive Market, and market their cereal.
Top artificial intelligence / machine learning (AI/ML) startup
S-3 Research, from the University of California, San Diego, is a research-as-a-service company that meets public health challenges with custom technology and human research. They have worked to prevent illegal online sales of opioid and fentanyl, helped fight the COVID-19 pandemic, and improved health equity with their S-3 engine, which combines data generation with analysis and visualization.
“The major takeaways and learning we got out of the AWS University Startup competition is that there is a huge diversity of solutions that can be built on or leverage AWS architecture, and that flexibility leads to an accessible environment for innovation that in the past would have been much more resource intensive.”—Tim K. Mackey
Co-founders:
S-3 Research plans to use the prize to integrate their technology stack into their AWS infrastructure and tackle underserved societal challenges.
Top web3 startup
CryptoClear, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is a software-as-a-service company that provides crypto ecosystem ratings and portfolio analysis for investors and institutions. Their platform uses big data and AI to help people quickly identify relative value and manage risks.
“The AWS competition is an incredible opportunity for us to showcase our startup in front of a national audience. The tremendous support that we received from AWS Startups throughout our startup journey and the final recognition go above and beyond what we can express in words.”—Anne Wang
Co-founders:
The CryptoClear team will put their prize toward a $1 million seed round, which will support their product research and development, IT deployment, and data sourcing. The AWS credit will help with their data storage and cloud computing.
Source link
