Entrepreneurs spotlighted at Charlotte Venture Challenge
Category winners and finalists received more than $20,000 at the 2018 Charlotte Venture Challenge; this year’s event featured 13 innovative startup finalists.
An annual happening in its 17th year, the Charlotte Venture Challenge featured finalist panel discussions and three categories: Student, University Research and Innovation and Community Entrepreneurship.
In the student category, junior Treven Stoddard, responsible for the entry Genubot, received the $1,000 J. Chris Murphy Award. Genubot is an application to assist calculus students in solving problems. The other student finalists Guap LLC (Daniel Peccerilli and Christopher Pereira) and Tijarah (Mohamad Aboufoul and Mohamed Salad) received $500.
The University Research and Innovation panel featured UNC Charlotte teams that had completed both the Ventureprise Launch and national I-Corps customer discovery programs. They were NanEx (Jordan Poler, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences), Vector Analytics (Marcia Price, graduate student, College of Computing and Informatics) Telli-Technologies (Shahriar Jalal Nibir, Ph.D. student, Lee College of Engineering), SmarTrek (Mohamed Shehab, College of Computing and Informatics) and ResArt (Zbigniew Ras, College of Computing and Informatics).
In the Community Entrepreneurship panel category, each of these companies completed the Ventureprise Launch NC IDEA customer discovery program and were selected for their innovation, milestones, market strategy and investment needs. The five panelists shared their customer discovery experiences in a discussion moderated by Paul Wetenhall, Ventureprise executive director. They were CareerUnlocked Inc. (Andrew Lee and Saurabh Sarathe), Med Portal LLC (Eric Kirsch, Christ Chartrand, Todd Serulneck, Eric Medlock and Jim McGuire) Notable (Lindsey Haaser Braciale, Tim Newman), 27 Software (Lee Larson, Nelson Clark, Chris Chartrand, Graham Kerswell, Paul Mitnick and Doug McConoughey) and FixMob Inc. (Nic Gavalas, Mark Vande Guchte, Russell Eldridge).
Each of the University Research and Innovation teams and Community Entrepreneurship companies received $2,000 to continue their customer discovery efforts.
“The awardees have all demonstrated early product market fit, and the funds are to further explore business models,” said Ventureprise Associate Director Devin Collins.
Notable was voted as the People’s Choice Innovator winner by Charlotte Venture Challenge attendees that visited with the 17 displaying companies during the reception following the challenge program.
View more photos from the 2018 Charlotte Venture Challenge.
Photo: 2018 category winners and finalists with Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development Bob Wilhelm (first row, left).