Congratulations to the 2019 winners of the annual Donald L. Lucas Business Pitch Competition.
$5000 First Place Prize
Winner: Zeitro
Founders: Bochen Wang (’18), Yingjie Yu (’18) and Xukun Zhang (’21)
Zeitro integrates Artificial Intelligence with the traditional mortgage industry, helping the mortgage buyer to find the best mortgage product. More specifically, Zeitro focuses on developing algorithms, tools, and languages that make mortgage industry data easier to access, analyze, and integration flow over unstructured data. Such flows require multiple types of entity-centric operations to extract raw data, and then link, combine and fuse information in a ready-to-use application.
$3000 Second Place Prize
Winner: Bliss Band
Founders: Kaitlin Wheeler (’19) and Claire Hultquist (’19)
Bliss Band is a fashionable bracelet designed for women to hold a full month’s worth of birth control. With its vibrating watch face, women can now have a convenient wearable device that keeps their pills close to them at all times of the day. As the global contraceptive market continues to grow, so too does education and access to birth control. Bliss Band takes this as an opportunity to empower women with a product that helps them avoid unexpected pregnancies, allowing them to stay in control of their bodies.
$2000 Third Place Prize
Winner: Seek
Founders: Kaushik Nagaraj (’19)
Seek helps connect clients with lawyers. The public often does not obtain effective assistance with legal problems, either because of insufficient financial resources or a lack of knowledge about when legal problems exist. For problems that require resolution through legal representation, Seek will recommend the top 5 attorneys who specialize in the appropriate area of law within a 5 mile radius of the client.
Passionate Pitch Awards
Winners recieved two rounds of golf at Saratoga Country Club.
Winner: Damaito
Founders: August Rosedale (’22)
Damaito is an affordable wall bag for boxing/martial arts training that can tell the users when to throw punches and returns valuable data after every round about their force and speed of punches. In a time of exponential trends in technology, the boxing/martial arts industry is falling short to give athletes an affordable and all-inclusive tool to help improve punch speed, power, and frequency. Damaito can help make training more beneficial, efficient, and fun.
Winner: iQuery
Founders: Lucas Negritto (’22)
iQuery is a website which aims to help teachers manage classes better and facilitate increased participation. Classrooms need a safe way to facilitate participation among every single student to allow for the richest opportunities to learn. This includes students that are often too shy to speak up and classes that are normally too large to allow individuals to contribute. iQuery provides a platform for anonymous in-class questions in a large classroom and allows the instructor to address questions that might not otherwise be heard.
Judges for the 2019 Business Pitch Competition
We couldn’t make this competition work without the tireless help of our coaches and judges. We would like to thank:
- Steve Foster, Managing Director, SF Advisors
- Quinn Cao, Founder, REE
- Ben Wang, Founder, Nevap
- Alejandro Rendon, Marketing Manager, Siemens
- Morgan Slain, CEO, SplashData
- Mike Kovalich, CFO, Sparc
- Christina Johnson, Adjunct Professor, SCU
Scores were evaluated based on the following criteria: Company Overview, Product/Service, Marketing/Marketing Strategy, Operations, Financial Viability, Management, and Overall Presentation.
Thank you to all who applied to compete, our competitors, judges and volunteers. We look forward to continuing this competition next year!