Phase II Teams Selected for the College New Venture Challenge

The Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business has officially announced the 10 teams moving on to phase II of the 2017-18 College New Venture Challenge (CNVC). The CNVC is the College track of the university’s business launch program, the Edward L. Kaplan, ’71, New Venture Challenge (NVC).

Learn more about the teams moving on to phase II of the CNVC below:

Athena Ultraviolet: Athena Ultraviolet is seeking to provide UV-C devices built on LED technology to food transportation companies, enabling them to sterilize and protect fresh produce, dairy, and poultry from contamination in a new and efficient way while lowering ongoing maintenance costs, improving insurance rates, and protecting both consumers and business partners from outbreaks.

Debate it Forward: Debate it Forward utilizes its collaborative, game based curriculum to increase the cognitive skills, empathy, and self-efficacy of students overlooked by the traditional debate circuits. Debate it Forward utilizes college campuses as hubs, employing university students to teach programming.

Find Your North: FYN (Find Your North) is a location-based platform to connect student travelers while they are traveling.

Landslide: Landslide is focused on the social sharing of opinions gauged through polls. Landslide provides an easy way for users to express their views along with friends across a wide range of issues by voting on a number of issues in an easy, clean, and addicting, gamified mobile app.

Pavan: Pavan is a comprehensive user-friendly air pollution app targeted at Indians in urban areas. This app would include the standard air quality index information and forecasting, advice about pollution mitigation, relevant health precautions, and options for civic engagement.

PeerBoost: PeerBoost is a peer-to-peer marketing platform that allows influential, early-adopters of apps to recommend apps to their social connections (friends etc.) in exchange for rewards that are redeemable as cash and prizes.

Power Chips: Power Chips are all-protein chips. They are free from the copious amounts of carbs and fat that potato chips contain, but are still salty and crunchy. Unlike protein powder, they do not require any preparation. Power Chips are an easy, quick, delicious way to have a protein-packed snack.

Project Twine: Project Twine is focused on creating low-cost, highly effective, and personalized courses while not creating original content; it is focused on the curation of personalized educational material on the web rather than the creation of it.

Spott: Spott is a social discovery tool that instantly connects people in the same location. Users are navigated towards places and events where the potential for creating meaningful relationships is enhanced by personalized conversation starters for every setting and interaction.

USpeak: USpeak is designing an app/website that allows voters to directly communicate with their representatives through their opinions of upcoming bills. The app would provide constituents with an abbreviated version of what a bill is and how it vote affect them, and then allow that individual to vote on whether they supported the bill or not and make their voice heard.