26 Teams Advance to Classroom Portion of the 2026 Edward L. Kaplan, ’71, New Venture Challenge

Published on Friday, February 13, 2026

Today, the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation announced the 26 teams advancing to the classroom portion of the 2026 Edward L. Kaplan, ’71, New Venture Challenge (NVC), the University of Chicago’s signature startup accelerator for MBA students at the Booth School of Business.

Through the NVC, the Polsky Center has graduated more than 370 startup companies and created thousands of jobs for the economy. NVC startups have raised more than $1.2 billion in funding and achieved more than $8.5 billion in mergers and exits.

The teams advancing include:

All Fair is “an operator in your pocket,” capturing a small business’s messy day-to-day operations and translating them into a living digital model of sales, costs, production, and inventory. All Fair’s digital commerce platform and execution engine turn insights into next steps so owners can profitably grow.
Anzyu Dynamics is an AI-powered automation platform for invoice processing and tax recovery in Latin America. The company eliminates manual ERP workflows, reduces compliance risk, and unlocks recoverable cash for mid-market companies in construction and related industries.
Aunnie is a home upkeep service built for speed, efficiency, and consistency. It operates in neighborhood clusters to keep routes tight and reduce travel time, so its team spends more time delivering great work. It uses AI and mathematical modeling to plan routes, schedule visits, and match the right worker to the right home. That system helps them move faster, avoid delays, and keep service consistent from visit to visit. Aunnie focuses on ongoing maintenance—repeat visits that keep the home in a steady reset state. Customers set priorities; they execute quickly, and the home stays consistently maintained week after week.
AXiM is an institutional real estate underwriting and asset-management platform that replaces manual, spreadsheet-driven analysis. Built by former real estate private equity professionals, it enables deeper, faster decision-making by natively modeling risk, strategy, and capital structures beyond what legacy tools can support.
Bedflow Health is a vertically-integrated operating system for Hospital at Home programs. The platform automates patient eligibility screening and orchestrates end-to-end home transfer and care logistics, enabling health systems to safely scale home-based acute care. With Bedflow, hospitals expand inpatient capacity and improve margins, throughput, and patient experience without adding headcount.
BRAIV is an ML-powered clinical decision support (CDS) platform that ensures psychiatric prescribers select the right medication on the very first try. Its Mixture-of-Experts model integrates into EHRs, transforming fragmented patient data into personalized treatment recommendations, improving outcomes for millions, and saving health systems more than $26B in avoidable costs.
CareLumi is the AI infrastructure for the $25B healthcare compliance market. Its AI Compliance Officer, Carl, automates Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial insurance enrollment while maintaining all licenses and operational compliance. The platform helps outpatient providers bill plans and expand faster in a market expanding at a 10% CAGR.
eep is a performance intelligence system that forecasts and protects human performance capacity. By predicting when cognitive overload and burnout risk are rising, eep intervenes early to prevent crashes—helping high-performing individuals sustain consistent, reliable performance without pushing past their limits.
Globridge is a compliance-first stablecoin wallet and payments platform. People and small businesses send and receive digital dollars instantly, domestically and across borders, while viewing balances in local currency. The platform routes transactions across approved rails, adds Treasury-backed yield/cashback where permitted, and provides regulator-ready KYC, geofencing, and audit logs.
Hydrastack compresses the time it takes to convert slot machine games into online formats using AI-driven code translation, reducing timelines from months to weeks. The company begins in regulated casino gaming, building the infrastructure for faster software translation in complex, compliance-driven industries.
Inzollo builds modular, distributor-first tools that manage the full lifecycle of inventory, orders, and warehouse operations. Distributors start with the modules they need today and expand over time for an all-in-one tech solution.
LastingMind is an AI platform that preserves human wisdom, memories, and perspectives through the creation of personalized, interactive AI agents. Users capture their voice, tone, and worldview so friends, family, and future generations can access their guidance long after they are gone.
Muscle Mithai is a wellness brand reimagining nutrition through the lens of South Asian heritage. The company offers clean, functional protein powders featuring nostalgic, bold flavors inspired through culture. By blending “Heritage, Health, and Harmony,” the company provides soulful nourishment that honors identity while supporting modern wellness goals.
Nurture Diagnostics is an ISO-certified digitally-enabled chain of diagnostic labs in India, offering blood and pathology testing with home sample collection, fast turnaround, and WhatsApp-based booking. The company combines physician-led lab operations with a digital report-management app to track health-markers over time and create a centralized longitudinal healthcare database.
Peak Health is a personalized endurance fueling brand combining premium hydration/carbohydrate products with an app that turns training and environmental context into simple fueling plans. Peak helps recreational endurance athletes reduce guesswork, improve performance, and build consistent fueling habits through a seamless product, protocol, and packaging system.
Pomellow is a personal AI computer, an NVIDIA Jetson-based device that runs open-weight generative AI models locally on your desk. It functions both as a private voice assistant and AI engine, keeping conversations private while enabling developers to build AI-native applications that run on the Pomellow SDK.
Rare Earth Rescue is a domestic magnet-to-magnet recycling company supplying rare earth oxide to U.S. permanent magnet manufacturers. By securing feedstock and using proven recycling technologies, the company delivers reliable material under long-term contracts, capturing premium pricing while reducing supply-chain risk for EV, wind, and defense customers.
Recourse is a guided software platform that helps individuals evaluate, prepare, and file small-claims cases correctly—without a lawyer. Through a TurboTax-style workflow, users generate court-ready filings and receive clear guidance on procedural readiness and next steps, tailored to local court rules.
Slideflow Labs is an AI platform company that provides hospitals with the infrastructure to discover, develop, and run next-generation cancer biomarkers in-house. Its platform eliminates dependence on centralized biomarker testing, accelerates diagnosis, reduces costs, and expands access to precision oncology.
Soolie is a beverage alcohol company creating a ready-to-drink (RTD), noncarbonated flavored canned soju made with natural ingredients. The company’s soju is designed to align with growing U.S. consumer demand for convenient RTD formats and more natural ingredients, while preserving the non-carbonation and moderate ABV that define flavored soju.
Storely is an AI-powered e-commerce platform that enables small businesses to build custom storefronts and automate operations using natural language. Merchants describe what they want in plain English and receive working results, giving them the customization and control typically reserved for the largest players.
Trestle is a reconciliation and evidence layer for publicly funded home care. It matches what was approved (authorized services), delivered (electronic visit evidence), and paid (payroll/claims) to produce an audit-ready integrity ledger and an exception register/work queue so organizations can fix mismatches before payroll closes and audits hit.
Unloket is an AI concierge for mid-sized independent hotels with less than 150 rooms and short-term rental operators that centralizes guest communication, handles requests, and provides local recommendations, helping hotel staff respond faster, reduce workload, and deliver a more personalized and consistent guest experience.
Vidnova Therapeutics is advancing a microbiome therapeutic developed at the University of Chicago striving to treat liver disease patients. This asset is under investigation in a Phase 1b clinical trial and uses defined bacterial strains with known safety and metabolomic profiles to enable precise and scalable microbiome augmentation.
Void Vision builds high-fidelity perception datasets for AI systems operating in high-stakes environments. The company combines verified real-world imagery with rigorously validated synthetic data to deliver trusted, reusable training datasets that reduce development time, lower costs, and improve reliability for mission-critical computer vision applications.
VulNova is an asset-first cybersecurity platform that unifies Asset Management (CAASM), Vulnerability Management, and Threat Intelligence using Agentic AI. It provides continuous asset visibility, business-aware risk prioritization, and actionable remediation insights across hybrid enterprise environments through SaaS and on-prem deployments.

The NVC, a pioneering business school venture competition founded at Chicago Booth in 1996, became the richest such program in the nation in 2021 when it awarded $1.73 million in investment to student-led startups. A landmark UChicago event that has gained significant notoriety among the university entrepreneurship community, every NVC Finals over the last five years has awarded more than $1M in funding — including last year’s impressive $2.67M prize pool.

Companies launched through the NVC include household names such as Grubhub, Braintree/Venmo, and Simple Mills. The Rattan L. Khosa First-Place Prize, in addition to other specialized prizes and awards, are announced at the Polsky Innovation Showcase immediately following the finals.