Cornell Tech has awarded four student startups investments worth $100,000 each in its 11th annual Startup Awards Competition. The awards include $80,000 in pre-seed funding, as well as co-working space in the Tata Innovation Center and mentorship from a Cornell Tech team (worth a total of $20,000). The awards were announced at Cornell Tech's Open Studios, the campus' end-of-year startup celebration and presentation of cutting-edge research, projects and companies founded at Cornell Tech.
Technology industry leaders and executives, as well as faculty and staff from Cornell University and Cornell Tech, selected the winning student teams. This year's judges included: Greg MorissetteJack Nefsy and Lila Nefsy, dean and vice president, Cornell Tech; Fernando Gomez Baquero, Director of Runway and Spinouts at Cornell Tech. Josh Hartman Chief Operating Officer at Cornell Tech. Jenny FieldingCo-director of Cornell Tech's Startup Studio. Alberto Escarlate Co-director of Cornell Tech's Startup Studio. Sam Dix Co-director of Cornell Tech's Startup Studio. Amanda Ailian _able Partner's partner. Tanzeem ChoudhuryRoger and Joel Burnell Professor of Integrative Health Technologies at Cornell Tech. Howard Morgan Chairman of B Capital Group Momobi, Partner at Watershed Ventures.
“This year's Startup Award finalists impressed us with their ingenuity and problem-solving skills,” Josh Hartman, Chief Operating Officer at Cornell Tech“By looking at a real-world problem, addressing it at its root and tackling it head-on, these students devised innovative solutions that built on the skills they gained through their Cornell Tech education and studio experiences. I'm proud of all they've accomplished and excited to see where the future takes them.”
The 2024 Startup Award winners are:
- Cipheris an end-to-end marketplace that connects businesses and music professionals, tracks negotiations, and automates payments and licensing agreements. “By facilitating music licensing agreements, Cipher unlocks the true value of music,” said the founders.
- Constructing AI, A marketplace that uses generative AI to scale product placement ads. The company says the product placement industry is highly manual and takes months to complete a transaction. “We automatically insert brand assets into influencer videos, shortening transaction times to days,” said the founder.
- Mindsightoffers an end-to-end care management platform that leverages AI to provide personalized mental health treatment recommendations to outpatients.
- Rapid Reviewhelps researchers navigate thousands of papers by converting documents into structured tables.
Mercury Votewhich allows shareholders to sell their voting rights and enable change agents to mobilize previously unused proxy votes, came in second. MercuryVote won't receive any cash prize from Cornell Tech but will receive office space and mentorship through Cornell Tech's Runway program.
Since the Startup Studio was founded, 11 alumni companies have been acquired. in the middlewas acquired by Ichilov Tech. Light OSwas acquired by Navana Tech India. Pilotaand was acquired by Hopper Corporation. OtariIt was acquired by Peloton. DatalogIt was acquired by Nike. OgiIt was acquired by Seed Health. Urwas acquired by Adobe. Trigger FinanceAcquired by Circle. Git Linkwhich was acquired by Infor. bow tiewas acquired by MINDBODY, thread learnwas acquired by CentralReach. Startups founded and spun out on campus, such as Startup Studio and the Jacob Steinfeld-Cornell Institute's Runway Startup Postdocs, have collectively raised more than $330 million in funding and employ approximately 500 people in New York City.
This year's Open Studio also included presentations from select BigCo Studio teams, showcasing the challenges they've been working on with the studio's partner organizations throughout the semester. In BigCo Studio, students are matched with actual BigCo C-level or VP advisors to research, prototype and present new products that help the company achieve its mission, learning how to operate within large corporations (BigCos). This year's BigCo Studio partner organizations include Capital One, Google, JP Morgan Chase, Merck, Microsoft, Verizon and Wayfair.
This year's Startup Studio program was led by Jenny Fielding, Sam Dix and Alberto Escarlate, along with Cornell Tech's Chief Practice Officer Josh Hartman and Studio Directors Naomi Cervantes and Tyler Rorick. The Startup Awards are the culmination of the Studio curriculum, a key component of Cornell Tech's master's degree program that brings together multidisciplinary teams to solve real-world problems. In their final semester, students can choose to form teams and enroll in the Startup Studio, where they combine different program areas, including computer science, operations research and information engineering, business, health tech, urban technology, connective media, electrical and computer engineering, and law, to develop startup ideas and prototypes in an academic environment.
Students who do not enroll in the Startup Studio can also take BigCo Studio or PiTech Studio courses. In PiTech Studio (Public Interest Tech Studio), students will specifically focus on product development and business models that accelerate positive change in the public, non-profit, for-profit and hybrid sectors.
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Cornell Tech is Cornell University's groundbreaking technology research and education campus located on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Our faculty, students and industry partners work together in a highly collaborative environment to further research and develop technology with implications for our digital society. Founded in partnership with the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and New York City, Cornell Tech achieves global reach and regional impact, extending Cornell University's long history of leading innovation in computer science and engineering.
