4/28/2023 Urvashi Jha, TEC
The Technology Entrepreneur Center in The Grainger College of Engineering and the Carle Illinois College of Medicine have announced the winners of the 2023 Cozad New Venture Challenge. ECE students shone in this competition as members of joint third place team Integrated Dynamics and joint fourth place team Enviro RegTech.
Written by Urvashi Jha, TEC
The Technology Entrepreneur Center in The Grainger College of Engineering and the Carle Illinois College of Medicine have announced the winners of the 2023 Cozad New Venture Challenge. ECE students shone in this competition as members of third place tied team Integrated Dynamics and fourth place tied team Enviro RegTech.
Integrated Dynamics: Integrated Dynamics is building hybrid bioreactors to turn organic waste into hydrogen gas. Americans generate 150 billion pounds of food waste yearly, and green hydrogen is expensive to use in industry. The startup is developing bioreactor systems to quickly process food waste into large quantities of clean hydrogen, which will subtract waste from landfills and pollution from the environment. The team members represent Grainger Engineering (Bioengineering, CS and ECE).
Enviro RegTech: Enviro, a B2B SaaS company is overhauling safety by leveraging algorithms and Occupational Safety and Health Administration data to optimize compliance. The startup also provides tailored training modules and consulting for comprehensive risk analysis for manufacturing companies in the Midwest. The team members represent Grainger Engineering (Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering and ECE).
This year, over $300,000 was awarded in funding and sponsored prizes to Cozad teams to help launch business ventures. The campus-wide program provides mentoring to teams through the phases of venture creation, and resources in idea validation, pitching skills, and customer development. Past participants of the program include several successful startups, including Mesh++, Prenosis, Trala, Cast21, Natrion, and Psyonic. Over $2.5 million has been awarded in cash, top placement, and sponsor prizes to student innovators through Cozad since 2000.
The campus-wide competition kicked off in early February with over 100 competing teams representing 10 colleges. The teams attended 4 workshops on customer discovery, value proposition, financials, and presentation skills, besides optional skills development workshops. Nearly 90 startup teams made it to the Demo Showcase that took place on April 13 at the Illinois Conference Center in Champaign, Illinois. The teams pitched their startup ideas to about 105 past Cozad alumni, investors, mentors, faculty, sponsors, and partners of the thriving University of Illinois entrepreneurship ecosystem who served as judges.
Jed Taylor, Assistant Dean for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Executive Director of TEC, says, “Participation in Cozad New Venture Challenge has grown significantly over the last 23 years, but that isn’t the only indicator of the program’s success. Several goals of this campus-wide program include educating our students, simulating a startup environment for the teams, and ultimately launching a successful venture. Thousands of students have experienced Cozad since its inception, and our most meaningful metric for success is that they’ve used the entrepreneurial mindset skills they gained to be innovative change-makers in the varied paths they pursued post-graduation. We congratulate the Cozad 2023 winning team, Top Tier Lessons, and all the teams that participated, and look forward to working with them in the future."