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March 29, 2022

iii Students Find Success at McGinnis Venture Competition

By Jess Ignasky

The McGinnis Venture Competition is an annual platform for Carnegie Mellon University student entrepreneurs to compete for $60k in investments. Students participate in a multi-round pitch competition while interacting with alumni entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, receiving valuable feedback about their ventures, and competing for an opportunity to raise capital.

This year, iii students were highly engaged in the competition. A team of Master of Integrated Innovation for Products & Services (MIIPS) students (Kyle SnyderVarsha SankarPranjal Chavarkar and Adithiyajothiram Lakshmanaperumal) participated as an entrepreneur team with their startup, NiFTy, a platform for blockchain-based games where gamers can access games and buy, sell or trade their in-game assets as NFTs. Team NiFTy advanced to the final round where they secured $25k in funding and won first place in the overall competition. 

“One of the key points that led to our win was the demo we showed of our platform,” said team member Pranjal Cavarkar. “Designing the UX in an intuitive way whilst keeping the customer in mind is something we learned from the MIIPS program.” 

"We used a lot of concepts learned in the MIIPS program to help with our pitch deck," Adi Lakshmanaperumal shared.

"We used concepts learnt in the Business Models class to help us convey the available market for our solution, positioning maps to help differentiate ourselves from the competition, and the 'human-centered-thinking' approach (a common theme across all design courses at MIIPS) sculpted our thought process during our mockup design."

NiFTy plans to use the funding from the competition to cover platform development costs. They hope to build an alpha prototype by mid-summer of 2022 and hold an initial product rollout in July 2022.

“As we are early adopters in this space, we need to move fast,” says Pranjal. “We are looking to hire full stack and blockchain developers to help build out the platform to achieve our goals.” 

mcginnis-team-nifty.jpg

(Photo © iii staff)

iii students were a part of the competition in other capacities as well. Master of Science in Technology Ventures (MSTV) student, Sarvesh Karkhanis, mentored the third-place team, E-Carebetics, an AI-powered diagnostic solution on mobile devices for diabetic retinopathy. Sarvesh has mentored the group since the concept's inception during the MIT COVID-19 Challenge Hack4TheFuture hackathon in November 2020, where they won their first award.

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(Photo © Sarvesh Karkhanis) 

Since then, he advised E-Carebetics to continue working on their product by forming a start-up. Heeding Sarvesh's advice, the team worked tirelessly, gaining acceptance into the NSF I-Corp program and LifeX accelerator in Pittsburgh. 

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