Carnegie Mellon University

2021 McGinnis Venture Competition

McGinnis Venture Competition Final Round Celebration

The McGinnis Venture Competition, a platform exclusively for Carnegie Mellon University's community of student entrepreneurs, brings together Carnegie Mellon's best and brightest student entrepreneurs to compete for $60K in investments. Help cheer the final round teams to victory by attending our virtual webinar.

The McGinnis Venture Competition is made possible by a generous endowment from Gerald E. McGinnis, founder of Respironics.

Congratulations to our 2021 Winners

Graduate Track

First Place: Mach9 Robotics is a remote sensing startup creating Google Maps for subsurface utilities. Team members include Alexander Baikovitz and Joshua Spisak.
View Mach9 Robotics' final round pitch

Second Place: Clean Sea Robotics will transform the modern shipping industry by offering an on-demand, disruption free, robotic hull cleaning and inspection service to ship owners and operators. Team members include Daniel Vedova, Stefan Zhu and Evan Myers.

Third Place: Savor Robotics is making multipurpose robots to bring freedom and flexibility to food production. Team members include Connor Colombo and Emily Ellis.

Undergraduate Track

First Place: Moonpy is a Python distribution that allows for rapid code development without sacrificing performance. Team member includes Benjamin Graham.
View Moonpy's final round pitch

Second Place: The Student Community's goal is to help colleges and corporations create a community where their students and new hires, respectively, feel professionally and personally supported during and after the pandemic. Team members include Snehita Sana, Nina Zanarelli and Sarayu Namineni.
View The Student Community's final round pitch

Thank you to our sponsors.

Phone.com
Philips
Choolaah

Schedule of Events

Little Moochi

Undergraduate Track Pitches

10:30 - 11:19 a.m. EST

Undergraduate Teams: 5 min pitch and 5 min Q&A
3 min break between presentations

10:30 a.m. EST ImproovLearning
10:43 a.m. EST Moonpy
10:56 a.m. EST Olio
11:09 a.m. EST The Student Community

Brian Porter

Graduate Track Pitches

1:00 - 4:00 p.m. EST

Graduate Teams: 7 min pitch and 6 min Q&A
3 min break between presentations

1:00 p.m. EST Tarteel
1:16 p.m. EST Clean Sea Robotics
1:32 p.m. EST Mach9 Robotics
1:48 p.m. EST MindTrace
2:04 p.m. EST Monarc
2:27 p.m. EST Mutually Dependent
2:43 p.m. EST Pralent
2:59 p.m. EST Rooted Carbon
3:15 p.m. EST Savor Robotics
3:31 p.m. EST Shadiyana
3:47 p.m. EST A Seat for Me

Glow Up

Awards Announced

5:00 - 5:30 p.m. EST

Join us to hear who are the winners of the graduate and undergraduate tracks of the 2021 McGinnis Venture Competition.

2021 Final Round Teams

A Seat for Me

A Seat for Me

Graduate Track

Jody Madala, Emily Lambert, Adam Yee, Carly Cook and Riley Fisher

View final round pitch

A Seat for Me optimizes the experience of hybrid office workers. They create meaningful employee connections that build community, trust and empathy. Unlike simple seat booking solutions or complicated human resources tools, A Seat for Me focuses on generating the best employee connections to foster a collaborative working culture.

Clean Sea Robotics

Clean Sea Robotics

Graduate Track

Daniel Vedova, Stefan Zhu and Evan Myers

Clean Sea Robotics will transform the modern shipping industry by offering an on-demand, disruption free, robotic hull cleaning and inspection service to ship owners and operators. Clean Sea Robotics leverages UUV technology that inspects and cleans at four times the speed of human dive teams and at half the cost.

ImproovLearning

ImproovLearning

Undergraduate Track

Coleman Isner, Lloyd Brooks and Matt Smith

View final round pitch

The ImproovLearning App is a smart communication system that delivers information from schools to parents on their preferred channels — web, mobile and email.

Mach9 Robotics

Mach9 Robotics

Graduate Track

Alexander Baikovitz and Joshua Spisak

View final round pitch

Mach9 Robotics is a remote sensing startup creating Google Maps for subsurface utilities. Cities around the world lose 20-60% of municipal water due to faulty pipes and infrastructure, yet fresh water is becoming scarcer than ever. As infrastructure exceeds its intended lifespan, monitoring subsurface assets is increasingly critical for reducing water waste and damage.

Mach9 Robotics is developing advanced hardware and software to map the subsurface of cities and automatically identify locations where infrastructure is likely to fail. They are building a platform, based primarily on ground penetrating radar, to acquire very rich information about infrastructure health. Their current machine learning approach will help us analyze large-scale, subsurface datasets 100X faster than the existing state-of-the-art geotechnical data analysis tools with greater accuracy.

MindTrace

MindTrace

Graduate Track

Raouf Belkhir, Max Sims, Hugo Angulo and Bradford Mahon

MindTrace was established for the purpose of commercializing innovations to protect a neurosurgery patient’s mind during brain surgery. MindTrace pairs 3D brain maps with measures of a neurosurgery patient’s behavioral performance, simulates surgical resection plans and predicts cognitive outcomes – all before the first incision.

Monarc

Monarc

Graduate Track

Samantha Tran and Marlo Abramowitz

View final round pitch

Monarc is an accounts receivable management platform for the modern professional services firm

Moonpy

Moonpy

Undergraduate Track

Benjamin Graham

View final round pitch

Moonpy is a Python distribution that allows for rapid code development without sacrificing performance. By drastically increasing the performance of Python, Moonpy enables companies to reduce time-to-market, save on developer expenses and reduce compute resources while opening up new opportunities in AI, web development and edge computing.

Mutually Dependent

Mutually Dependent

Graduate Track

Kristy O'Hara and Meg Wilson

View final round pitch

Mutually Dependent connects military spouses with remote career opportunities. Their goal is to reduce the unemployment and underemployment of military spouses and highlight the mutual dependence between military spouses and their active duty counterparts.

Olio

Olio

Undergraduate Track

Sanjana Jobalia, Sohan Kalva, Preethi Surapaneni, Shwetha Shinju and Aanchal Aich

View final round pitch

Olio is a smart personalized start page to prioritize your life.

Pralent

Pralent

Graduate Track

Samarth Gowda and Sheetal Marigowda

View final round pitch

Pralent is an all-in-one platform for organizations to manage their professional community. Through Pralent, organizations get to manage their programs and communities in one place, run competitions and applications, host events, connect with their members and much more.

Rooted Carbon

Rooted Carbon

Graduate Track

Andy Gollach, Andy Van Dyke and Katie Shirley

View final round pitch

Rooted Carbon is a sustainable packaging company that is addressing the biggest challenge facing the $19.9B packaging materials market -- finding solutions that are fit for purpose, cost-effective and environmentally friendly. Rooted Carbon is working to be a licensed producer of Mushroom Packaging, a completely biodegradable substitute to styrofoam.

Savor Robotics

Savor Robotics

Graduate Track

Connor Colombo and Emily Ellis

Savor Robotics is making multipurpose robots to bring freedom and flexibility to food production. Their firstnrobot service slots into existing lines and makes grab-n-go meals 3x faster than a human at ½ the cost.

Shadiyana

Shadiyana

Graduate Track

Izzah Zaman and Neelam Shoaib

Shadiyana is a Booking.com for the wedding eco-system in Pakistan - a one-stop for all wedding needs.

Tarteel

Tarteel

Graduate Track

Anas Abou Allaban, Abdellatif Abdelfattah, Mohamed Moussa and Aqeel Mohamad

View final round pitch

Tarteel is AI for perfecting Quran Recitation.

The Student Community

The Student Community

Undergraduate Track

Snehita Sana, Nina Zanarelli and Sarayu Namineni

View final round pitch

The Student Community’s goal is to help colleges and corporations create a community where their students and new hires, respectively, feel professionally and personally supported during and after the pandemic. They have created The College Community app (available at Carnegie Mellon) for colleges and are currently working with a company right now to build a similar app for corporations.