At the 2024 Startup Awards, four winning companies received prizes worth $100,000 each. The prizes included $80,000 in pre-seed funding, as well as co-working space at the Tata Innovation Center and mentorship from the Cornell Tech team, totaling $20,000. The fifth runner-up received workspace and mentorship. Pictured above: Cornell Tech Chief Operating Officer Josh Hartman (back row, center) with startups Cipher, Compose AI, Mindsight, RapidReview and MercuryVote.
Cornell Tech has awarded investments worth $100,000 each to four student startups in its 11th annual Startup Awards Competition. The awards include $80,000 in pre-seed funding, as well as co-working space in the Tata Innovation Center and mentorship from a Cornell Tech team (worth a total of $20,000). The awards were announced at Cornell Tech’s Open Studios, the campus’ end-of-year startup celebration and presentation of cutting-edge research, projects and companies founded at Cornell Tech.
The winning student teams were selected by a panel of judges comprised of technology industry leaders and executives, and faculty from Cornell University and Cornell Tech. This year’s judges included Greg Morissette, Jack and Lila Nefcy Dean and Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs at Cornell Tech, Fernando Gomez-Baquero, Director of Runway and Spinouts at Cornell Tech, Josh Hartman, Chief Operating Officer at Cornell Tech, Jenny Fielding, Co-Head of Cornell Tech’s Startup Studio, Alberto Escarlate, Co-Head of Cornell Tech’s Startup Studio, Sam Dix, Partner at _able Partners, Amanda Alien, Roger and Joel Burnell Professor of Integrative Health Technology at Cornell Tech, Tanzeem Choudhury, Chairman at B Capital Group, Howard Morgan, and Momo Bi, Partner at Watershed Ventures.
“This year’s Startup Awards finalists impressed us with their ingenuity and problem-solving ability,” said Josh Hartman, Cornell Tech’s chief operating officer. “By looking at real-world problems, getting to the root of them, and tackling them head-on, the students created innovative solutions that built on the skills they gained through their Cornell Tech education and studio experiences. I’m proud of all they’ve accomplished and excited to see where the future takes them.”
The 2024 Startup Award winners are:
Cipher is an end-to-end marketplace that connects companies with music professionals, tracks negotiations, and automates payments and licensing agreements. “By facilitating music licensing agreements, Cipher unlocks the true value of music,” the founders said. Compose AI is a marketplace that uses generative AI to scale product placement advertising. The company says the product placement industry is highly manual, with deals taking months to close. “By automatically inserting brand assets into influencer videos, we reduce deal time to days,” the founders said. Mindsight offers an end-to-end care management platform that leverages AI to provide personalized recommendations for outpatient mental health treatment. RapidReview enables researchers to sift through thousands of papers by converting documents into structured tables.
MercuryVote, which allows shareholders to sell their voting rights and allows change agents to mobilize previously unused proxy votes, came in as the runner-up. MercuryVote won’t receive any cash prize from Cornell Tech, but it will receive office space and mentorship through Cornell Tech’s Runway program.
Since the Startup Studio was founded, 11 alumni companies have been acquired: Enroute was acquired by Ichilov Tech, LitOS was acquired by Navana Tech India, Pilota was acquired by Hopper, Otari was acquired by Peloton, Datalogue was acquired by Nike, Auggi was acquired by Seed Health, Uru was acquired by Adobe, Trigger Finance was acquired by Circle, Gitlinks was acquired by Infor, Bowtie was acquired by MINDBODY, and Thread Learning was acquired by CentralReach. Startups founded and spun out on campus, including the Startup Studio and Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute’s Runway Startup Postdocs, have collectively raised more than $330 million in funding and employ nearly 500 people in New York.
This year’s Open Studio also included presentations from select BigCo Studio teams, showcasing the challenges they’ve been working on with the studio’s partner organizations throughout the semester. In BigCo Studio, students are matched with actual BigCo C-level or VP advisors to research, prototype and present new products that help the company achieve its mission, learning how to operate within large corporations (BigCos). This year’s BigCo Studio partner organizations include Capital One, Google, JP Morgan Chase, Merck, Microsoft, Verizon and Wayfair.
This year’s Startup Studio program was led by Jenny Fielding, Sam Dix and Alberto Escarlate, along with Cornell Tech’s Chief Practice Officer Josh Hartman and Studio Directors Naomi Cervantes and Tyler Rorick. The Startup Awards are the culmination of the Studio curriculum, a key component of Cornell Tech’s master’s degree program that brings together multidisciplinary teams to solve real-world problems. In their final semester, students can choose to form teams and enroll in the Startup Studio, where they combine different program areas, including computer science, operations research and information engineering, business, health tech, urban technology, connective media, electrical and computer engineering, and law, to develop startup ideas and prototypes in an academic environment.
Students who do not enroll in the Startup Studio can also take BigCo Studio or PiTech Studio courses. In PiTech Studio (Public Interest Tech Studio), students will specifically focus on product development and business models that accelerate positive change in the public, non-profit, for-profit and hybrid sectors.
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About Cornell Tech
Cornell Tech is Cornell University’s groundbreaking technology research and education campus located on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Our faculty, students and industry partners work together in a highly collaborative environment to further research and develop technology with implications for our digital society. Founded in partnership with the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and New York City, Cornell Tech achieves global reach and regional impact, extending Cornell University’s long history of leading innovation in computer science and engineering.
