2019 Fall Cohort Selected for the George Shultz Innovation Fund
The Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago has announced the four companies moving on to the fall finals of the 2019 George Shultz Innovation Fund. Each of the finalists will present their ventures to the Shultz Innovation Fund advisory committee and public audience during an event hosted by the Polsky Center on Thursday, December 5.
The George Shultz Innovation Fund invests in promising startups from an ecosystem that includes the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermilab, and the Marine Biological Laboratory. The mission of the George Shultz Innovation Fund is to help researchers turn their innovations into ventures that advance cutting-edge technologies, generate significant financial returns, and create lasting impact for humankind.
The fall 2019 cohort finalists are:
DrLullaby is a digital platform that allows exhausted parents to access evidence-based sleep improvement strategies. Dr. Medalie is one of less than 30 board-certified, formally-trained pediatric insomnia specialists. Dr. Medalie found DrLullaby to improve access to care for the 30% of children struggling with the detrimental effects of sleep loss. Affiliation: BSD, Psychiatry. Team: Lisa Medalie (Founder), Lauren Blake (Lead), Lindsay Romano, Jingru Wang
Laiya is an innovative and intelligent solution provider for new drug development. Laiya specializes in Bayesian adaptive designs and implementation for drug and device clinical trials. Their mission is to develop the best-in-class adaptive designs, strategies, and integrated SaaS platform to lower the risk of trial failure, accelerate process time, and maximize portfolio returns. Affiliation: BSD, Public Health Sciences. Team: Ping Liu (Lead), Yuan Ji (PI)
NGOrganize provides advanced digital tools for organizations to manage, monitor, and report their social impact.Their products allow nonprofits to deliver a quantified view of program success to donors and beneficiaries, and empower companies to communicate the ‘social ROI’ of their investments to impact-focused investors, employees, and customers. Affiliation: Booth School of Business. Team: Anish Nagar (CEO); Ani Ajith (CFO); Ajay Nagar (CTO); Dilbag Singh (Customer Success)
Tharzen is the first and only Universal Content Management System for the web. It empowers businesses with ease-of-use interfaces to visually edit existing websites themselves, saving time and money. Its patented A.I. engine works seamlessly with hand coded websites, existing frameworks and all web programming languages such as HTML, PHP and JavaScript making editing easier and faster for both end-users and experienced programmers. Affiliation: PSD, Computer Science. Team: Aseem Bhardwaj (CEO), Mikael Mayer (CTO).