2019 Ready, Steady, Go! It’s Time for the 2019 Faculty Startup Sprint
August 19, 2019
By Shubham Aggarwal,
The welcoming event for the Faculty Startup Sprint 2019 took place on August 2nd, with an impressive set of presentations. Nine selected teams were required to provide a 2-minute summary of their startup concept, in addition to customers who they plan on interviewing, and an overview of high-risk hypotheses about their business idea. The program schedule started with a welcome, followed by team presentations, an Introduction to Customer Discovery, Value Propositions and lastly Customer Segments.
Team CarriedAway, founded by Dr. Richard Niederman (Professor, College of Dentistry), Habib Benzian (Adjunct Professor, College of Dentistry), Pratik Sourav (College of Global Public Health ’18), is an initiative to bring dental care to children. Their target customers are nurses, principals, social workers, teachers and parents from the Bronx public school. They will investigate whether school principals desire preventive dental care for kids.
(Left to Right) Habib Benzian, Richard Neiderman, Pratik Sourav
The Chipsters, founded by Azeez Bhavnagarwala (Industry Associate Professor, NYU Tandon School of Engineering), Kartikey Purohil (MS Student NYU Tandon School of Engineering), Yuan Liang (MS student NYU Tandon School of Engineering) and Akhil Subramanya (MS Student, NYU Tandon School of Engineering), is a comprehensive System-on-Chip (SoC) design for security flows. They intend to touch all phases of SoC chip development/design from pre-synthesis, including the use of a static analyzer to examine Register Transfer Level (RTL) for security bugs, to post-synthesis methods including gate level information flow tracking and a myriad of newly developed algorithms. They believe their customers would agree to share System-on-Chip RTL during tool development to verify tool operation and that it will work across a comprehensive class of known security bugs.
(Left to Right) Kartikey Purohit, Akhil Subramanya, Yuan Liang, Azeez Bhavnagarwala
Team Beyond Borders, founded by Sandra M. Duarte (Steinhardt Professor) and Michelle Bocklage (Organizational Officer), is a non-profit organization that will provide free therapeutic and educational services in order to improve the quality of life of individuals with disabilities in developing countries. The target customers include caregivers and physical therapists. They hypothesize that individuals with disabilities and/or caregivers prefer medical missions that provide services throughout the year rather than only once a year and that individuals with disabilities and/or caregivers are willing to travel long distances to receive services.
(Left to Right) Michelle Bocklage and Sandra M. Duarte
OpenAir, founded by Matt Parker (Professor, NYU Tisch) and Christopher Neidi (From Brooklyn SolarWorks) enables climate-conscious New Yorkers to engage in specific measurable actions to advance Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology. They believe that their target customers in NY will accept DAC as a credible climate crisis solution and that another set of target participants will be willing to volunteer time/resources in support of DAC advancement.
(Left to Right) Christopher Neidi and Matt Parker
Team QuMem Tech, founded by Javad Shabani (Assistant Professor of Physics), Kasra Sardashti (Research Scientist, NYU Tandon School of Engineering), and Tri Nguyen (Lab Assistant and Process Engineer, CUNY ASRC and NYU), focusses on design and development of quantum memory devices based on mainstream Si-based technology for quantum computer manufacturing to store quantum information with high coherence and long lifetimes. Their target interview subjects are people from Wells Fargo, Bloomberg, Amazon, and Intel since the team believes that these companies might be the big players in the quantum industry.
(Left to Right) Kasra Sardashti, Tri Nguyen and Javad Shabani
Ritrovo, founded by Cristina Alberini (Professor, Center for Neural Science), Leonardo Munari (Ph.D., Icahn School of Medicine) and Jenny Listman (Ph.D., NYU), aims to provide novel compounds to treat cognitive impairments. Its target customers are patients and an aging population. The team plans to conduct interviews with primary care doctors, psychiatrists, neurologists, and caregivers. Their hypothesis is that identifying novel disease-modifying drugs for Alzheimer’s disease and aging-related cognitive impairments is necessary.
(Left to Right) Leonardo Munari, Jenny Listman and Cristina Alberini
Team Studentbody, founded by Sonia K. Gonzalez (Adjunct Associate Professor, NYU College of Global Public Health), Elizabeth Hucul (Student, MPH, NYU), and Samaria Filosa (Student, MPH, NYU), is a comprehensive text-based health tool for student health and well being. Its target customer interviews are with Jamie Shutter, Executive Director of Health and Well-Being, the University of Missouri and with Kristen Bush, director of student and alumni, among others. Interviewing these candidates might give the founders a better idea of how to enforce their text-based health tool at a university level. They hypothesize that colleges want to invest in student health and well-being and that the students will use a chatbot application to inquire about a health issue since the founders believe that a chatbot is an effective method to interact with students.
(Left to Right) Elizabeth Hucul (Left), Samaria Filosa (Middle), Sonia k. Gonzalez (Right)
ePVA, founded by Janet H. Van Cleave (Assistant Professor at Rory Meyers College of Nursing), Nadia Sultana (Clinical Assistant Professor, Nursing Informatics), and Anthony J. Kostelnak (Meyers College of Nursing ’19), is a web-based clinical support tool that enhances patient-provider communication resulting in improved patient outcomes for head and neck cancer. ePVA has demonstrated usability and acceptability by patients and providers in clinical studies. Some of its target customers are from NYU Langone Health.
(Left to Right) Anthony J. Kostelnak, Nadia Sultana and Janet H. Van Cleave
Team Urbane, founded by Harish Doraiswamy (Research Assistant Professor, NYU NYU Tandon School of Engineering), Juliana Freire (Professor, NYU Tandon School of Engineering), and Claudio Silva (Professor, NYU Tandon School of Engineering), is a customizable urban analytics platform that helps urban planners/architects/data scientists interactively analyze 2D as well as 3D data from cities. They hypothesize that working with 2D+3D is an important consideration for urban planners. They also assume that users are willing to pay for improved speed/performance of their workflow.
(Left to Right) Claudio Silva, Harish Doraiswamy, Juliana Freire
The teams were actively involved in providing comments and questions to one another. Based on the presentations and feedback provided throughout the event, all teams are planning to continue to work on their ventures through August. The final presentations will take place on August 30th from noon through 3:30 pm and conclude with Q&A on startup resources.