Cornell Tech Announces 2024 Startup Awards Winners
In a remarkable display of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, four standout student companies have been recognized with prestigious awards at Cornell Tech’s annual Startup Awards Competition. This initiative, now in its 11th year, seeks to bolster newly established startups by equipping them with coworking space and a significant pre-seed funding boost of $100,000 each. These awards were handed out during the exhilarating Cornell Tech Open Studio, an event that caps off the year by showcasing cutting-edge research, projects, and companies conceived on campus.
“This year’s Startup Award finalists demonstrated a remarkable level of creativity and problem-solving capability,” remarked Josh Hartman, chief practice officer at Cornell Tech. He praised the students’ innovative approaches to tackling real-world challenges, leveraging the comprehensive Cornell Tech education and studio experience to produce solutions that promise to have a substantial impact beyond their academic endeavors.
Meet the Innovators: 2024 Startup Award Winners
- Cipher – A unique end-to-end marketplace designed to streamline the music licensing process, connecting businesses with music professionals, and automating negotiations, payments, and licensing agreements.
- Compose AI – This platform revolutionizes product placement advertising through artificial intelligence, enabling brands to seamlessly integrate their assets into influencer videos, thereby dramatically reducing transaction times.
- Mindsight – An AI-driven care management platform providing personalized, outpatient mental health treatment recommendations, aiming to improve patient outcomes.
- RapidReview – A tool tailored for researchers, converting extensive documents into structured tables to simplify the review process in academic research.
The competition’s runner-up, MercuryVote, introduced an innovative approach to leveraging unused proxy votes, empowering shareholders with the ability to sell their votes to effect change.
Trailblazing Success
Since its inception, the Startup Studio alongside the Runway Startup Postdocs at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute has been instrumental in fostering a vibrant startup ecosystem. To date, 11 alumni companies have realized successful exits through acquisitions by major corporations, evidencing the practical impact and success of the program. Overall, startups born from this ecosystem have collectively procured over $330 million in funding, contributing significantly to job creation in New York City.
A Deep Dive into Innovation
This year’s Open Studio also shone a spotlight on BigCo Studio teams who took the stage to present their collaborative projects with partner organizations, encapsulating the semester’s challenges and triumphs. The BigCo Studio embarks students on a journey through the corporate landscape, enabling them to prototype and present new products under the guidance of executives from leading firms.
Directed by a team of visionary leaders, the Startup Studio curriculum culminates in these Startup Awards, marking a pinnacle of the master’s degree experience at Cornell Tech. Here, students merge their diverse academic backgrounds to craft solutions and prototypes in an environment that mirrors real-world entrepreneurial challenges.
To further support their journey post-graduation, each Startup Award winner is granted access to coworking space at the Tata Innovation Center, complementing their pre-seed funding to kickstart their ventures.
Located on Roosevelt Island in New York City, Cornell Tech represents Cornell University’s commitment to innovation, research, and education in technology. In partnership with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and propelled by New York City’s dynamic ecosystem, Cornell Tech stands as a beacon of progressive tech education and research with a global reach and a mission to forge leaders in the digital age.
