Spark Grants-Project Olympus - Carnegie Mellon University

Spark Grants

The Olympus Spark Grant Fund helps Project Olympus PROBEs students kick-start their business ideas. Olympus Spark Grant Fund [.pdf]

The Olympus Spark Grant fund is available for PROBE students and is funded by charitable gifts from alumni and other community donors. Students submit proposals and practice 'pitching' the donors. Donors play a vital role in helping Olympus evaluate the students' applications and making award decisions.  This is an ongoing grant fund where donors can begin their participation at any time.  

Project Olympus Announces the 2016 Spring Spark Grant Award Winners

Five PROBE Projects were awarded a $5,000 micro-grant from the Olympus Spark Grant Fund. These grants are made possible through charitable contributions from alumni and Friends of Olympus.

Eleanor Haglund, Founder | Dietrich '16
eebooksis changing the publishing landscape of enhanced e-books. eebooks is developing software that enables writers to easily create media-rich e-books for electronic reading devices.

Torrell DaShawne Jackson, Founder & Investor | TPR 2016
Chiroproktr is an instructional medical device/dummy developed to assist doctors in developing/practicing adjusting techniques for spinal manipulation.

Parag Goel, Founder | ECE, Masters 2016
LogCycle helps schools process visa documents for millions of international students quickly and seamlessly, without touching a sheet of paper.

Austin Webb, CEO | Tepper MBA 2017
Robotany is automating the commercial vertical farming industry by creating mobile robotic solutions that increase labor efficiency by 25%, double crop output and provide an unprecedented level of data collection to improve farm operations.

Kerolos Mikaeil, Founder | ECE and Engineering/Public Policy, 2017
VIC provides vendors, such as Coca-Cola, with a mobile application that focuses on providing real-time inventory data. This information decreases the labor costs associated with manually counting inventory and allows sales representatives to spend more time selling.

Spark Grant Winners

2016[.pdf]
2015[.pdf]
2013[.pdf]
2012[.pdf]
2011[.pdf]

Spark Grant Donors

Michael Baum
Tony R. Berkman
Roger Byford
Eric C. Cooper
Marcel D. DePaolis
Michael Donohue
Marc C. Guldimann
Adrian Hodges
James Jacob Huttner, M.D, Ph.D
Theo Nicholas
The Painter Family
Richard and Nancy Waichler

For a complete list of donors to our programs, please visit the Donor Recognition page. For more information on how to support Project Olympus and its programs, visit Support Olympus.

What They Say

“We applied for a Spark Grant to help get our company off the ground. It gave us the resources we needed to go to a composites conference and build the infrastructure we needed to validate our business idea.”- Glenn Philen co-founder of Carbon Freight

Image of Glenn Philen

What They Say

“Spark Grant has helped me hire a designer to work on the art, design and animation of my project. Also it has allowed me to make a trip to California to do customer discovery, make connections and learn about some funding opportunities.”- Nesra Yannier, NoRILLA

 Image of Nesra Yannier

What They Say

“Spark Grant Funds have really helped us demo our first functioning prototype to our potential customers. Funds have been used to buy some of off the shelf hardware components to build functioning prototype to demonstrate the technical feasibility.”- Srinath Vaddepally, Alert Call

Image of Srinath Vaddepally