Meet the 10 college startups that have come to LA for a chance at $250K

As a part of the RECESS Music + Ideas Festival's Field Trip, 10 college startups have been flown to Los Angeles to participate in a Shark Tank-style pitch competition. The contestants hail from across the country and include a team from the University of California, Irvine. 

 

 

Finalists from the Startup Playground will advance to the pitch finals the following day, where the winning team will receive a full scholarship to Draper University, access to the Amazon Web Services startup team and an automatic entry into the Capital Championship finals, where they will compete for the Capital Championship pitch competition and a chance to win $250,000.

 

Let's meet the contestants:

Xperii is an SaaS that connects people searching for paid research opportunities with researchers seeking participants. The team is the Boston Regional Winner. 

 

 

 

Cynthia Chen and I have been collaborating on research in cognitive neuroscience at MIT for about five years now, researching how the brain recognizes faces. I’m wrapping up my Ph.D. in neuroscience, so I handle the experimental side, and Cynthia is a computer science, mathematics and economics major at Brown University, so she has been helping me with the data analysis and programming sides.


 

On a particular visit to the lab, I stopped to check the flyers that I had posted to recruit subjects for one of our studies, looking to see if anyone had torn off any of the paper tabs with contact info. Cynthia asked me what other methods I was using to recruit subjects besides flyers, and when I told her that this was the full extent of our recruitment efforts, she showed me her design for a cloud-based recruitment system that automatically paired qualified participants with research studies that were recruiting for those specific types of people. I immediately saw the immense value in her mock-up and how it perfectly solved the problems that my colleagues and I personally faced when running any research study that needs human participants. After several rounds of customer interviews we've designed a complete end-to-end research platform for behavioral and clinical research study recruitment and management.

 

 

Chen worked very hard to balance school and starting Xperii. While she managed to maintain straight A's across her majors in Computer Science, Mathematics and Economics at Brown University, she has dropped out after this semester to pursue Xperii full-time, as there is no longer room for school in her busy work schedule.



 

Evan Ehrenberg, Cynthia's co-founder, has struggled with a long two-plus hour commute between work, investor presentations, customer and legal meetings, and his research at MIT. With his Ph.D. thesis defense in sight, Ehrenberg has decided to finish out his doctoral degree and currently puts all of his remaining time towards Xperii.

 

 

We're planning to launch our operations in Boston and Providence very soon, and we're currently raising $500,000 on a convertible note to fund our marketing campaign for Boston, Providence and New York City. We've built a great development team, and we'll be looking to add two more full-stack developers and a full-time director of marketing to keep up with the work demand as we scale our company.

 

 

Penn & Hunt, the Philadelphia Regional Winner, is a direct-to-consumer sofa business that will maximize convenience, quality and price for young professionals and grad students.

 

Kabeer and I were talking about how painful it was for each of us to buy a sofa when we moved to business school. I rented a truck and spent over two hours assembling a $600 IKEA sofa with an Allen wrench. Kabeer carried his $1200 West Elm sofa two blocks home to avoid paying an additional $250 to have his sofa shipped 12 weeks later. We both felt there had to be a better way to buy a quality sofa at an affordable price.

 

 

Wharton has an incredible focus on entrepreneurship. We have been lucky enough to work on our business in several of our classes, and our professors have been a tremendous resource as well. We're actually encouraged to start companies here, which is why Kabeer and I chose to come to Wharton.

 

 

We're building our brand and testing marketing messages as we finish prototyping. We'll begin taking pre-orders in July and will start delivering this Fall. 

 

 

 

Quirky ideas for audio products have been floating around in my head since high school, so the idea for the Hexon did not spontaneously pop into existence — it was a much more iterative process, beginning with a canvas artwork-turned-speaker. The foundation for the latest version of this continuously evolving product, now sporting a hexagonal figure and modular elements, came about while doodling in a sketchpad on a trip home to Indiana. I thought perhaps people would have much more control and fun with their speaker system if the product allowed them to "build" and design it themselves. Sure enough, people really seem to dig it!

 

 

Tackling entrepreneurship in addition to being a "good student" is not for the faint of heart. It is an unimaginable amount of work and there is a lack of sleep; however, it's simultaneously one of the most rewarding things a student can do. Through pursuing my startup, I have been provided a multitude of opportunities to employ my education in real time and have honed skills and characteristics outside of those taught in the classroom, including confidence, self-respect, charisma, resourcefulness, flexibility and building value for myself and others. I recommend that students looking to pursue their own venture — and I do recommend students get their feet wet in entrepreneurship — make sure its purpose is something they are immensely passionate about. It will make the large amount of work required to make it successful much, much more enjoyable.

 

 

Following graduation I will be pursuing Audiovert further, as well as working part-time at SquarePlanet, a business strategy and presentation company based in Chicago. Don't tell my parents, but I'm really looking forward to devoting more of my time and attention to Audiovert and SquarePlanet instead of homework and class projects. It's going to be a great summer!

 

 

A commercial service for space-based research in biology via the use of 3D printed microfluidics, the Space Research Company is Denver's regional winner. 

 

 

We had a slow light bulb moment that took a few stages. The first step was working as a student researcher at a center on campus that helps launch experiments to the Space Station, and getting a firsthand look at all the ground-breaking research being done in space. The second piece was being highly involved with the fast-paced commercial space community and recognizing how quickly it is growing. These things helped us realize the potential for creating a company that can open even more access to space, specifically directed at expanding cutting-edge research done in space.

 

 

Balancing student life with startup life is hard. On one hand, as a graduate student, my time is more flexible, and we don't have regimented schedules with classes. On the other hand, we have papers to write, posters for our research, conferences to attend, a dissertation to write and the actual research to do. It's been a very tough struggle, and in my specific case, I've had to extend my graduate degree an extra semester (or two) to balance the time spent on my thesis and the startup.

 

 

We're applying to a number of small business grants (SBIRs) and we're also starting to build and test our prototype right out of my bedroom with money we've won from local pitch competitions in Colorado. As we build more confidence with our hardware, we plan to reach out to our NASA contacts to help get our system up to the Space Station.

 

 

The regional winner from St. Louis is an iPhone app where a meal is donated every time a user takes a photo of their food at a GiftAMeal restaurant.

 

My cofounder Aidan and I were at an Italian restaurant on a lunch break from our summer internship
 at a venture capital firm in Los Angeles, Navitas Capital. The food was really good but we noticed there were not many customers and we wondered why. We then came up with the idea for GiftAMeal and had the light-bulb moment when we realized we could benefit
 all stakeholders involved through getting restaurants customers, assisting customers in discovering great restaurants and helping those in need in the community, all while making a profit.

 

 

Balancing student life while being a full-time entrepreneur is a challenge. I have been able to effectively do both by prioritizing the company, and planning my academic schedule around GiftAMeal's needs. I have also found that the material learned in the classroom better prepares me to tackle our daily challenges in GiftAMeal.

 

 

Next up for GiftAMeal: bring more restaurants onboard to capture our initial test market in St. Louis and then expand nationwide.

 

 

NativX is the winner of the Soutwest Travel Special Pitch category. It's a free platform that integrates cognitive learning technology to create a complete, personalized travel itinerary based on a traveler's specific personality and needs.

 

 

 

The idea started when traveling to Guam. We were lucky enough to have a friend who grew up there so we were able to reach the activities that fit our personalities, such as unlocking the local cliff jumping spots (we are thrill seekers) or an authentic island BBQ shop (it looked more like an abandoned shack). 
We realized, though, that we wouldn't have been able to reach our dream trip without our local friend. That is where the idea NativX originated. We wanted a way to automatically bring a traveler an itinerary with suggestions that are specific to them, especially the ones buried in the fifth page of travel websites. We knew that locals could help make this a reality since they live and experience these areas so we looked to them to give us unique content, all while trying to give local businesses and activities the recognition they deserve!

 

 

It has definitely been a wild ride so far,  but I am definitely enjoying myself. I am at a college that has expected me to manage academics while also being expected to fulfill military duties and succeed as a lacrosse student athlete. I try to bring the relentless work ethic expected of us to the culture at NativX.

 

 

Getting NativX out to travelers so they finally have a way to discover parts of any area that matches their personality — and of course to give back to the local communities that supply the inspiration for our wanderlust!

 

 

 

 

Bloom is one of the competition's wildcard teams. It's a credit card-sized inhaler for asthmatics.

 

 

 

Bloom started with a passion for solving a problem: asthma is something that is close to my family, and inhalers have always been nuisance to carry. Since inhalers have not changed in 40 years, we realized there must be a better way.

 

 

As soon as we realized this way something people wanted, school became the side project. 

 

 

We're working on Bloom fulltime, looking to refine our technology and partner with pharmaceutical companies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brody spent last summer at an entrepreneurship academy in the Czech Republic, and each weekend he would travel to a different city. While on a walking tour in Dresden, Germany, Brody realized the immense amount of pain that exists for travelers to have awesome experiences while traveling and so we set out to fix it.

 

 

Sometimes school feels like it is getting in the way of the business, but our company owes so much to BYU. Being students has given us a network we wouldn't have had access to, given us skills we wouldn't have had otherwise and provided a proving ground for our concept through competitions and mentorship. Both of us are married and have kids (4.5 kids between the two of us), so that adds another layer of responsibility and commitment that we have to learn to balance. We are lucky to have patient spouses.

 

 

Our beta just launched this week in Paris and we're raising a round of funding. Those two things are keeping us pretty focused on the short term.


 

 

The Pivot Environmentalism Special Pitch Category winner, RePurpose aims to empower marginalized trash pickers in urban slums by providing them the crucial equipment to kickstart sustainable cooperatives.

 

 

RePurpose is a platform that better connects trash pickers in slums and refugee camps to the recycling companies that demand their product, cutting out the middle men and doubling the income of millions living in these dense urban areas. In impact entrepreneurship there is seldom a lightbulb moment, rather well thought-out sequences of iterations on a minimal viable idea or product through design thinking practices, rapid prototyping, user feedback and further development based on that user feedback. We spent hours on curating our idea over the course of six months, and we spent 48 hours before our pitch at the Hult Prize in San Francisco putting the final touches on the solution. 

 

 

It's tough at The Wharton School because the culture of the university at-large is that excellence is expected both inside and outside of the classroom; but that is what makes the school so special. Everyone on the team is constantly operating at max capacity all of the time, but coffee, to-do lists and late nights at libraries/early mornings at coffee shops can never take the joy out of the impact we are having with RePurpose.

 

 

We are at the stage where we are ready for an incubator to develop the minimal viable product (that's right, we are finalists without a product, we are as shocked as you are), and to raise a seed round of funding to go to the refugee camps and urban slums where we plan to launch. When we get there, we will live amongst the trash pickers, understand the problems they face and work closely with them on implementing the idea and developing the product based on their feedback.