Cornell Tech awarded four student startup companies with investments worth $100,000 each in its eleventh annual Startup Awards competition. The award includes $80,000 in pre-seed funding as well as co-working space in the Tata Innovation Center and mentorship by the Cornell Tech team valued together at $20,000. The awards were announced at Cornell Tech’s Open Studio, the campus’ end-of-year celebration of startups and presentation of cutting-edge research, projects, and companies founded at Cornell Tech.

A panel of tech industry leaders and executives, along with members of the Cornell and Cornell Tech faculty and staff, selected the winning student teams. This year’s panel of judges included Greg Morrisett, Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech; Fernando Gómez-Baquero, Director of Runway and Spinouts at Cornell Tech; Josh Hartmann, Chief Practice Officer of Cornell Tech; Jenny Fielding, Co-Head of Startup Studio at Cornell Tech; Alberto Escarlate, Co-Head of Startup Studio at Cornell Tech​; Sam Dix​, Co-Head of Startup Studio at Cornell Tech; Amanda Eilian, Partner of _able Partners; Tanzeem Choudhury, Roger and Joelle Burnell Professor in Integrated Health and Technology at Cornell Tech; Howard Morgan, Chairman of B Capital Group; and Momo Bi, Partner of Watershed Ventures.

“This year’s cohort of Startup Award finalists impressed me with their ingenuity and problem-solving,” said Josh Hartmann, Chief Practice Officer of Cornell Tech. “By seeing real-world issues, addressing their roots, and tackling them head-on, these students have come up with innovative solutions that build upon the skills they gained through their Cornell Tech education and Studio experience. I am proud of all they have accomplished and am excited to see where the future takes them.”

The 2024 Startup Award Winners are:

• Cipher, an end-to-end marketplace that connects businesses to music professionals, tracks negotiations, and automates payments and licensing agreements. “By facilitating music licensing deals, Cipher will unlock the true value of music,” the founders said.
• Compose AI, a marketplace to scale product placement ads using generative AI. According to the company, the product placement industry is highly manual with deal-times that take months. “We automatically insert brand assets in influencer videos, reducing deal-times to days,” the founders said.
• Mindsight, which offers an end-to-end care management platform that leverages AI to deliver personalized outpatient mental health treatment recommendations.
• RapidReview, which enables researchers to navigate through thousands of papers by converting documents into structured tables.

MercuryVote, which enables shareholders to sell their votes so that changemakers can mobilize previously unused proxy votes, was a runner-up. Although MercuryVote will not receive the Cornell Tech cash award, the team will receive office space and mentorship through Cornell Tech’s Runway Program.

Since the inception of Startup Studio, 11 alumni companies have been acquired: Enroute, acquired by Ichilov Tech; LitOS, acquired by Navana Tech India; Pilota, acquired by Hopper; Otari, acquired by Peloton; Datalogue, acquired by Nike; Auggi, acquired by Seed Health; Uru, acquired by Adobe; Trigger Finance, acquired by Circle; Gitlinks, acquired by Infor; Bowtie, acquired by MINDBODY; and Thread Learning, acquired by CentralReach. In total, startups that have been founded and spun out on campus — including Startup Studio and the Runway Startup Postdocs at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute — have raised more than $330 million in funding and employ nearly 500 people in NYC.

This year’s Open Studio also included a presentation of select BigCo Studio teams, which showcased the challenges they worked on with Studio’s partner organizations throughout the semester. In BigCo Studio, students learn how to navigate working within big companies (BigCos) by being matched with a C-suite or VP advisor from a real BigCo to research, prototype, and present a new product that helps the company achieve its mission. This year’s BigCo Studio partner organizations included Capital One, Google, JP Morgan Chase, Merck, Microsoft, Verizon, and Wayfair.

This year, the Startup Studio program was led by Jenny Fielding, Sam Dix, and Alberto Escarlate, along with Cornell Tech’s Chief Practice Officer Josh Hartmann and Studio Directors Naomi Cervantes and Tyler Rhorick. The Startup Awards are a capstone of the Studio curriculum, a critical component of the master’s experience at Cornell Tech, which brings together multi-disciplinary teams to solve real-world problems. In their final semester, students can choose to form teams and enroll in Startup Studio, where they combine their diverse program disciplines — computer science, operations research and information engineering, business, health tech, urban tech, connective media, electrical and computer engineering, and law — to develop ideas and prototypes for their startup in an academic setting.

Students who don’t enroll in Startup Studio could choose to take the BigCo Studio or PiTech Studio tracks. In PiTech Studio, or Public Interest Tech Studio, students focus specifically on product development and business models that accelerate positive change in public, non-profit, for-profit, and hybrid sectors.

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About Cornell Tech

Cornell Tech is Cornell University’s groundbreaking campus for technology research and education on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Our faculty, students, and industry partners work together in an ultra-collaborative environment, pushing inquiry further and developing meaningful technologies for a digital society. Founded in partnership with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and the City of New York, Cornell Tech achieves global reach and local impact, extending Cornell University’s long history of leading innovation in computer science and engineering.

The post Cornell Tech Announces Winners of its 2024 Startup Awards appeared first on Cornell Tech.

This reaction, or more precisely, the effects—heightened eyesight, hearing, and touch—lay the foundation for Charles Rodenkirch, PhD, and his company Shaper Sense. Rodenkirch joined Cornell Tech’s Runway Startups program, part of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, in 2021.

A biomedical engineer by training, with an undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin and doctorate from Columbia University, Rodenkirch quickly gravitated toward research that focused on our sensory hub – the brain – where touch, sight, smell, sound, and taste are processed and translated into information the human body can understand.

“‘How and why are your senses more accurate when you’re attentive and alert?’ was a central question I wanted to explore,” he shared in an interview. During his doctoral research, he focused on neural interfaces and analysis to investigate how the state of a person’s brain – calm, tired, or aroused, for example – affects sensory processing.

Deconstructing the Brain’s Circuitry

Sharper Sense, the company he founded and leads, is a natural progression from this initial research enterprise. Put simply, he sought to understand the brain’s ability to enhance sensory acuity in response to critical situations or attention-grabbing stimuli and find a way to replicate that beneficial state in a predictable and sustainable manner.

“It’s a well known phenomenon—what’s changing in the brain that allows for that rapid enhancement?” he says. “We teased apart the neural circuitry responsible for that and now have developed Sharper Sense’s main product, a piece of wearable technology, which activates that circuitry on-demand to drive that benefit when it’s needed.”

He’s created the ability to engage a heightened sensory state on demand. Instead of requiring an adrenaline-fueled situation to unlock this state, Sharper Sense’s technology engages a nerve that causes release of a neurochemical that drives this sensory benefit. The result: keener hearing, sharper eyesight, and faster sensory cognition.

One might immediately leap to a sports application – the ability to see a curveball earlier, or the serve off a tennis racket. And, indeed, Sharper Sense is working with ComcastNBC SportsTech, NASCAR, and US Ski and Snowboard to test this approach to help athletes see and feel changes in the playing field, snow texture, and communicate clearly with teammates, or practice at a higher level when fatigued–a state where misperceptions are more likely. However, Rodenkirch also seeks to make a profound difference in the life of everyday people. Namely, those experiencing age-related diminished hearing and vision, and individuals who have sensory impairment from neurological disorders like ADHD. Sharper Sense is currently testing its technology for improving speech comprehension which is a critical component of learning, independence, and social interaction.

Cornell Tech as a Catalyst

When Rodenkirch joined the Cornell Tech Runway program, which included pre-seed funding to help him accelerate progress, he was able to build an experimental lab and run first-in-human testing. This package, equivalent to $175,000 in the first year and $102,000 in the second, includes a salary, research budget, housing allowance, IP registration, and access to education and facilities. Within the first month of joining the program, Sharper Sense was able to raise additional venture capital from Joyance Partners and Social Starts. Today, two years later, participation in the program has culminated in a major article published in Nature Scientific Reports, with significant opportunity ahead:

“We’ve already started testing in our first two clinical indications that we’re targeting, which are age-related hearing loss and adult ADHD. We already have some early data from older adults showing we can enhance their speech comprehension amidst overhead noise, and we’ll have results around adults with ADHD in the near future.”

A lifelong entrepreneur, Rodenkirch built a smartphone repair business while in college, perhaps spurred by watching his mother, an advertising executive, launch her own firm when he was a child. He credits Cornell Tech’s focus and mandate toward innovation and technology transfer as a change agent in his journey:

“The campus itself is linked in with businesses and the city. I had the chance to give closing remarks at a Bloomberg x Cornell event, which opened the doors to key contacts and funders. And Cornell Tech is extremely founder-friendly in terms of the funding offered, facilities, and regulatory and research support, and the entire infrastructure is designed to facilitate the transfer of technology into the business environment. MBAs are right there with the engineers, and in a co-working space like what Cornell Tech offers, we’re constantly helping one another – that informal discourse and collaboration is essential and helps expand our collective knowledge. You can ask fellow founders about HR or payroll systems, and flatten the learning curve as much as possible.”

Indeed, launching a new company is a daunting task. Beyond the core and proprietary research, which has been much of Rodenkirch’s life’s work, there are business pitches, building new research projects, and the need to navigate large and complex bureaucracies. Even a recent breakfast hosted by Cornell Tech during which former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Patti Harris met with the institute’s most successful startup founders. The main constant, he says, is that there will always be new problems to solve, many of which you’ve never incurred before.

“Cornell Tech’s Runway program gave me the confidence to ask the question: ‘Who else knows this technology better – who can describe this and convey what it’s doing?’” he says. “Now I have the skills, advisors, and network to do it. And for Cornell Tech to do this for New York City, so technology and companies stay here in the city, it’s a critical catalyst for the start-up and technology economy.”

The post Cornell Tech Startup Sharper Sense Works to Improve Sensory Performance in Humans appeared first on Cornell Tech.

NEW YORK, NY – Cornell Tech awarded four student startup companies with pre-seed funding worth up to $100,000 each in its tenth annual Startup Awards competition. The awards were announced at Cornell Tech’s Open Studio, the campus’ end-of-year celebration of startups and presentation of cutting-edge research, projects, and companies founded at Cornell Tech. A panel of tech industry leaders and executives, along with members of the Cornell and Cornell Tech faculty and staff, selected the winning student teams.

“I am incredibly proud of the finalists for this year’s Cornell Tech Startup Awards and how much they have already achieved. They are taking exciting new ideas, devices, and algorithms and putting them to work on real-world problems. They have made their mark here at Cornell Tech, and it has been a pleasure to watch these students build some truly impressive companies,” said Greg Morrisett, the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech. “I am confident that these companies will positively impact the world and I am excited to see what they accomplish in the coming years.”

The 2023 Startup Award Winners are:

• Esger, a SaaS platform that simplifies the ESG certification process for small and medium-sized businesses so they are certification-ready in weeks, not months.
• Fig, which facilitates the Prior Authorization process for healthcare providers through intelligent automation and predictive analytics. So doctors can focus on patients, not paperwork.
• Gaia, whose intelligent design tools help architects unleash creativity, design faster, and streamline collaboration. Gaia generates beautiful form, and can follow function. Gaia thinks like an architect.
• Project B, which creates custom-fit bras that are tailored to each customer’s unique breasts using 3D body scans and produces them on demand. We provide our customers with an empowering experience by enabling them to define their fit and style preferences.

Newsroom AI, a copiloting platform that accelerates news article generation in journalists’ own style, making journalists more productive while maintaining the quality and accuracy of their work, was a runner-up.

Since the inception of Startup Studio, nine alumni companies have been acquired: Pilota, acquired by Hopper; Otari acquired by Peloton; Datalogue acquired by Nike; Auggi acquired by Seed Health; Uru, acquired by Adobe; Trigger Finance, acquired by Circle; Gitlinks, acquired by Infor; Bowtie, acquired by MINDBODY; and Thread Learning, acquired by CentralReach. In total, startups that have been founded and spun out on campus — including Startup Studio and the Runway Startup Postdocs at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute — have raised more than $300 million in funding and employ more than 400 people in NYC.

This year’s Open Studio also included a presentation of select BigCo Studio teams, where they showcased the challenges they worked on with Studio’s partner organizations throughout the semester. In BigCo Studio, students learn how to navigate working within big companies (BigCos) by being matched with a C-suite or VP advisor from a real BigCo to research, prototype, and present a new product that helps the company achieve its mission. This year’s BigCo Studio partner organizations featured Anheuser Busch, Adobe, CapitalOne, Google, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Microsoft, and Zinnia Health.

This year, the Startup Studio program was led by Jenny Fielding, Sam Dix, and Alberto Escarlate, along with Cornell Tech’s Chief Practice Officer Josh Hartmann; Lyel Resner, Head of PiTech Studio; and studio directors Naomi Cervantes and Tyler Rhorick. The Startup Awards are a capstone of the Studio curriculum, a critical component of the master’s experience at Cornell Tech which brings together multi-disciplinary teams to solve real-world problems. In their final semester, students can choose to form teams and enroll in Startup Studio, where they combine their diverse program disciplines — computer science, operations research and information engineering, business, health tech, urban tech, connective media, electrical and computer engineering, and law — to develop ideas and prototypes for their startup in an academic setting.

Students who don’t enroll in Startup Studio could choose to take the BigCo Studio or PiTech Studio tracks. In PiTech Studio, or Public Interest Tech Studio, students focus specifically on product development and business models that accelerate positive change in public, non-profit, for-profit, and hybrid sectors.

Each Startup Award winner also receives coworking space at the Tata Innovation Center as part of the $100,000 investment.

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About Cornell Tech

Cornell Tech is Cornell University’s groundbreaking campus for technology research and education on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Our faculty, students, and industry partners work together in an ultra-collaborative environment, pushing inquiry further and developing meaningful technologies for a digital society. Founded in partnership with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and the City of New York, Cornell Tech achieves global reach and local impact, extending Cornell University’s long history of leading innovation in computer science and engineering.

The post Cornell Tech Announces Winners of its 2023 Startup Awards appeared first on Cornell Tech.

Most obviously, what Kaveat co-founders Elizabete Ludborza, a micro-influencer herself, and Dorothee Grant, a model, noticed was the frequency with which predatory contracts were being signed. Both women had signed these kinds of unfavorable contracts themselves and, in the 2021 fall semester at Cornell Tech, shared their experiences of watching brands and agencies prey on the young women who often populate these industries. 

“The only reason I noticed the unfair nature of my contracts is because I have a law background. Most influencers don’t have that,” says Ludborza. “There is a huge power and knowledge imbalance when entering into ‘exciting’ and ‘career-changing’ contracts, which actually mean that you might not be paid for your work or may even contain onerous clauses without your knowledge.”  

Kaveat is one of the recent winners of Cornell Tech’s 2022 Startup Awards, a capstone to the Cornell Tech Startup Studio curriculum, garnering pre-seed funding of $100,000 as well as a co-working space in the Tata Innovation Center. The team joins a large list of Cornell Tech Startup alums who have gone on to be acquired by large companies like Nike, Adobe and Peloton. 

Ludborza and Grant met in an Entrepreneurship class at Cornell Tech and came to realize that confusing contracts were an issue across industries, and sought to find a solution that could be seamlessly integrated into not only the lives of influencers and models, but also that of an everyday person having to deal with a contract. The two were inspired by Model Alliance, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting “fair treatment, equal opportunity, and more sustainable practices in the fashion industry.” 

Modeling, though more established than influencing, is an industry that has standardized harmful and predatory practices. The field is notorious for harassment of models, and other creative artists involved in the process are not afforded basic labor protections. 

The Kaveat platform analyzes contracts and provides users with simple and clear explanations of the content of their contracts. What they are not is a digital lawyer — their goal isn’t to provide and replace legal professionals, in fact, the app will also serve as a space to connect those who are seeking legal advice with specialized professionals that can help users move forward with legal action. 

In the future, the founders hope to see Kaveat used not only to help young entrepreneurs navigate the influencing and modeling industries, but also make the lives of anyone interacting with contracts, from freelancers to small business owners, easier. 

The pair created Kaveat as part of the Cornell Tech Startup Studio program, a critical component of the Cornell Tech master’s experience. The Startup Studio course is a chance for students to combine program disciplines, from computer science to urban tech to law, and develop ideas and prototypes for their startup in an academic setting. In doing so, they paired with software engineer Christine Shen, who is working full-time as Chief Technology Officer and a founding member at Kaveat. 

The Kaveat app is currently in product development. Prospective users can join the waitlist here. 

The post Cornell Tech Model and Influencer Create Startup to Help Others Understand and Navigate Legal Contracts appeared first on Cornell Tech.

NEW YORK, NY – The 2022 spring semester has been quite a busy time for Cornell Tech. Indeed, this academic year represented our campus’ 10th anniversary — marking a full decade since Cornell University and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology were selected as the winners of the City of New York’s global competition to build an engineering campus on Roosevelt Island.

In just 10 years, Cornell Tech has gone from an on-paper concept to a living, breathing, fast-growing institution. We have graduated over 1,500 alumni, launched more than 80 startups employing roughly 400 employees, and helped to improve the NYC community through initiatives like Break Through Tech, K-12, Public Interest Tech (PiTech), and Runway, as well as through the groundbreaking research our students and faculty publish.

Here are some of the highlights from the spring semester…

The Urban Tech Hub’s Rebooting NYC report

The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute’s Urban Tech Hub released its final Rebooting NYC report at the end of January. The report contains suggestions for the city’s new administration to consider when it comes to tackling some of NYC’s biggest challenges. The suggestions were broken into five broad categories:

• Foundations: Privacy and administration
• Technology equity: Include everyone in the digital economy
• Optimized systems: Use technology to improve the management of our built environment
• Always open: Make it easier to engage with the city
• Futureproofing: Position NYC to shape the urban technology of the future

Break Through Tech’s new AI initiative

Break Through Tech, an initiative to increase the number of women and underrepresented communities holding technology degrees and careers, launched Break Through Tech AI this April. The program’s goal is to help students gain the skills they need to work in the data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence spaces specifically.

“We are incredibly proud of our Break Through Tech initiative and its crucial impact in closing the inexcusable gender and diversity gap in tech today,” said Dean Greg Morrisett. “Tackling the artificial intelligence sector in tech is crucial for creating equitable products, economies, and policy, and we’re excited to support the massive contribution Break Through Tech AI will have on both academia and industry.”

Security efforts to prevent tech abuse

Survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) often have trouble getting the long-term support they need. Akin to healthcare, researchers from Cornell Tech’s Clinic to End Tech Abuse (CETA) created a new approach to provide survivors of tech-enabled abuse with “continuity of care.” The paper, “Care Infrastructure for Digital Security in Intimate Partner Violence,” won Best Paper at the 2022 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

arXiv’s 2 million submissions

Stewarded by Cornell Tech, the free open-access scholarly archive arXiv.org passed the milestone of two million hosted articles this January.

“These two million submissions represent two million opportunities for humanity to push forward the frontiers of our understanding,” said Tara Holm, professor of mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences and arXiv advisory board member.

$500,000 given out at the 2022 Startup Awards

Cornell Tech held its first in-person Open Studio event since spring 2019, which includes a special alumni panel commemorating our 10th anniversary as an institution. The 2022 Startup Award Winners were:

• Kaveat, which helps people understand their contracts by translating the legal jargon into simple plain English
• Abstractive Health, which helps doctors read and write clinical notes faster with an automated summary
• Canary Privacy, which helps businesses test, monitor, and fix privacy issues on their websites and apps to protect user data and ensure compliance
• Nobul, which empowers patients to take control over their medical care by providing patients tools to understand their medical bills, as well as identify and resolve errors
• MyLÚA Health, a digital maternal care platform that predicts risk of pregnancy complications via a patient app and clinician dashboard; thereby reducing mortality and ensuring equitable outcomes

MyLÚA Health won a special new award, the Siegel Family Endowment PiTech Startup Award, which is for the startup that is creating the most positive societal impact with their efforts.

Tools to make the NFT art market work better for creators

In the past year, there’s been a huge boom in the art world when it comes to the market for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). With it, there’s also been a massive growth in the number of NFT-buying bots that make this revenue model less valuable for creators.

But this year a new tool was developed by Cornell Tech researchers that aims to help reduce the impact of bots in NFT auctions, by systematically enforcing a one-NFT-per-person policy.

Analyzing YouTube demonetization

In recent years, YouTube has focused their safety policies on demonetizing creators that participate in off-platform behaviors or create content that may be considered harmful, even if they do not explicitly violate the platform’s rules.

However, a team from Cornell Tech reviewed 71 million videos on YouTube that were published by more than 136,000 popular content creators with more than 10,000 subscribers to understand how creators, including channels that distribute problematic content, employ alternative monetization strategies that could allow them to circumvent the effects of any “demonetization” by YouTube.

The research was covered by Protocol, The Verge, Fast Company, Engadget, and more.

Dean Morrisett backing the U.S. Innovation & Competition Act of 2021

Dean Greg Morrisett joined Senator Chuck Schumer in early April to offer his support for a new act that would invest $110 billion into science and technology research.

Among other provisions, the bill establishes a Directorate for Technology and Innovation in the National Science Foundation and includes initiatives related to elementary and secondary schools to increase computer science education programs.

Closing out the academic year with Recognition

This year, Cornell Tech recognized 346 accomplished graduates in the Class of 2022 — the school’s largest class to date!

“Seeing you, another community of people building something different, is wildly uplifting; a new generation of people attuned to technology and the common good,” said Recognition Ceremony keynote speaker Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla Corporation. “I am so moved and buoyed by the choice you made to come here, and by what you will do as you go forward.”

2022 also brought about our first 14 graduates to have received Jacobs Technion-Cornell Dual MS Degrees with a Concentration in Urban Tech.

The post Highlights From Spring 2022! appeared first on Cornell Tech.

NEW YORK, NY – Cornell Tech awarded five student startup companies with pre-seed funding worth up to $100,000 in its ninth annual Startup Awards competition. The awards were announced at Cornell Tech’s Open Studio, the campus’ end-of-year celebration of startups and presentation of cutting-edge research, projects, and companies founded at Cornell Tech. A panel of tech industry leaders and executives, along with members of the Cornell and Cornell Tech faculty and staff, selected the winning student teams.

“This year’s Startup Awards finalists have all made major strides in solving problems in healthcare, data privacy, housing, and other fields, and I am incredibly proud of all that they have accomplished in their time at Cornell Tech,” said Greg Morrisett, the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech. “It has been a wonderful experience watching these students rise above the challenges of the past year to build some truly impressive companies.” 

2022 Startup Award Winners are:

MyLÚA Health won a special new award, the Siegel Family Endowment PiTech Startup Award, which is for the startup that is creating the most positive societal impact with their efforts. This award is made possible by the generosity of Siegel Family Endowment, the foundation of Cornell Tech Council Chair, David Siegel.

This year’s 10th-anniversary Open Studio also included a special alumni panel moderated by Aaron Holiday MBA ’12.

Since January, yet another alumni company has been acquired: Pilota, acquired by Hopper — becoming the ninth acquisition since the inception of Startup Studio. The previous eight companies include: Otari acquired by Peloton; Datalogue acquired by Nike; Auggi acquired by Seed Health; Uru, acquired by Adobe; Trigger Finance, acquired by Circle; Gitlinks, acquired by Infor; Bowtie, acquired by MINDBODY; and Thread Learning, acquired by CentralReach. In total, startups that have been founded and spun out on campus — including Startup Studio and the Runway Startup Postdocs at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute — have raised more than $215 million in funding and employ more than 400 people.

Cornell Tech’s Startup Studio program is run by Kevin Yien along with Chief Practice Officer Josh Hartmann; Lyel Resner, Head of PiTech Studio; and Leandra Elberger, Studio Director. The Startup Awards are a capstone of the Studio curriculum, a critical component of the master’s experience at Cornell Tech which brings together multi-disciplinary teams to solve real-world problems. In their final semester, students can choose to form teams and enroll in Startup Studio, where they combine their diverse program disciplines — computer science, operations research and information engineering, business, health tech, urban tech, connective media, electrical and computer engineering, and law — to develop ideas and prototypes for their startup in an academic setting.

Students who don’t enroll in Startup Studio could choose to take the BigCo Studio or PiTech Studio tracks. In BigCo Studio students learn to innovate within larger companies, including navigating complex cultures, pitching to the people who control budgets, and building projects to scale. In PiTech Studio, or Public Interest Tech Studio, students focus specifically on product development and business models that accelerate positive change in public, non-profit, for-profit, and hybrid sectors.

Startup Award winners also receive coworking space at the Tata Innovation Center, as part of the $100,000 investment. Designed by Weiss/Manfredi architects, the first-of-its-kind building houses an extraordinary mix of cutting-edge companies working alongside groundbreaking Cornell academic teams: from recent Cornell Tech graduates hustling to commercialize a new idea, to start-ups on the verge of explosive growth, and established companies developing leading-edge technologies and products. Tenants include tech and investment firm Two Sigma, Sapienza, Ferrero International, Tata Consultancy Services, and NYC FIRST.

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About Cornell Tech

Cornell Tech is Cornell University’s groundbreaking campus for technology research and education on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Our faculty, students, and industry partners work together in an ultra-collaborative environment, pushing inquiry further and developing meaningful technologies for a digital society. Founded in partnership with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and the City of New York, Cornell Tech achieves global reach and local impact, extending Cornell University’s long history of leading innovation in computer science and engineering.

The post Cornell Tech Announces Winners of its 2022 Startup Awards appeared first on Cornell Tech.

For a city that never sleeps, New York City became eerily quiet when the COVID-19 pandemic hit last year. The city’s unemployment rate jumped from 3.8% to 20% between April and May 2020, leaving more than 570,000 New Yorkers without work. While the unemployment rate has decreased since the pandemic’s peak, at approximately 9.4% it is still nearly three times higher than pre-COVID 19 and nearly twice the national average. Further, employment cuts and new hiring have not been evenly felt across industries; while the tech industry boomed throughout the pandemic, the lights on Broadway remained dark for months and small businesses across the city continued to struggle to stay afloat. New York City needed help.

In the spring of 2021, as New York City was just beginning to vaccinate large segments of its population, Google for Startups, Tech:NYC and my team at Cornell Tech discussed ways to help the city’s economy bounce back. How could we bring our tools to the industries that were struggling the most?

Together, we launched the NYC Recovery Challenge, a new program designed to showcase how we can use tech to help support job creation for New York’s small business and job seeker community. Laser-focused on job creation and retention in New York City, only startups from across the five boroughs were eligible, with a preference for companies building solutions for industries and New Yorkers hit hard by the pandemic. We formed a community advisory committee from across the city to help evaluate the finalists.

More than 170 New York-based startups applied for the NYC Recovery Challenge. Please join me in congratulating the ten companies selected to be NYC Recovery Challenge Fellows:

• Kobina Ansah, Coverr (Queens)
• Byran Dai & Rahul Mahida, Daivergent (Manhattan)
• Su Sanni & Chris Coles, Dollaride (Brooklyn)
• Kelly Ifill, Guava (Manhattan)
• Karen Schoellkopf, Leap Fund (Brooklyn)
• Jason Greenwald & Daniel Langus, Live XYZ (Brooklyn)
• Amina Yamusah, Sector (The Bronx)
• Tracey Hobbs, Shifterr (Brooklyn)
• Tomas Uribe & Kristian Diaz, Stereotheque (Manhattan)
• Tanvir Islam, David Jiang and Bassit Malam, TYCA tech. (Brooklyn)

In addition to mentorship and one-on-one support, the top three finalists also receive up to $100,000 in no-strings-attached funding to accelerate their business. Manhattan-based first-prize winner, Guava, is a banking hub for Black small business owners that connects founders to equitable financial products and a digital community. Runners-up include Long Island City-based startup Coverr, a financial services tool for independent contractors, and Brooklyn-based Shifterr, a digital marketplace connecting hospitality industry employers to independent shift workers seeking gigs.

In addition to the three cash prize winners, the other seven companies selected reflect the distinct opportunities digital technology provides to better connect workers, employers and communities across the city. These startups range from companies that focus on supporting workers with autism and a mobility company dedicated to eliminating transit deserts, to an AI-powered online community marketplace connecting people to bodegas and novel solutions to identify, bridge and ease access to social services and government resources.

All 10 fellows’ companies use digital technology to strengthen a diverse range of formal and informal networks in the city. Strong, dense and diverse networks are the foundation of urban living, constantly fueling creativity, invention and innovation. It’s inspiring to see founders using the power of technology, the strength of our networks and the resiliency of our communities to supercharge New York City’s continued recovery.

This story originally appeared in The Keyword.

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The top three founders and their teams will be recognized as “NYC Recovery Fellows” and will receive cash awards from a prize fund totaling $150,000. The first-place founder and their team will receive a non-dilutive cash award of $100,000, and two runners-up will each receive non-dilutive cash awards of $25,000. Seven other entrants will be recognized as “Founders to Watch” and will participate, along with the three cash award recipients, in a month-long, equity-free mentorship program led by Cornell Tech, Google for Startups, and Tech:NYC advisers.

“The pandemic has given us a once in a lifetime opportunity to reimagine how our city works,” said Michael Samuelian, Founding Director of the Jacobs Urban Tech Hub. “Cornell Tech’s mission is to build a deep bench of NYC-based tech talent, so today we are calling on our homegrown innovators to demonstrate the resilience and ingenuity of New Yorkers, break some eggs, and tell us how to make their block, borough, and city better through tech.”

The challenge is open to any New York City-based startups currently in the pre-seed and seed funding stages that have not yet raised over $5 million. Competitive applicants will showcase how their startup specifically can assist New York’s economic recovery and foster job creation. Founders from underrepresented backgrounds reflecting the diversity of New York City are especially encouraged to apply.

“New York’s tech sector has stood by our city throughout the pandemic, from manufacturing ventilators and PPE to building vaccine and testing websites,” said Julie Samuels, Executive Director of Tech:NYC. “This challenge is another example of tech’s continued commitment to New York and its future. Thank you to Cornell Tech and Google for Startups for making this happen, and to the chambers, the NYCEDC, and the NYCETC for lending support. We are all very excited to see what our local entrepreneurs come up with.”

“New York City has a long track record of resilience and continues to attract and develop some of the world’s most promising tech talent,” said Jason Leder, Head of VC and Startups Partnerships at Google. “With help from Cornell Tech, Tech:NYC, and many local business and political leaders, we are proud to provide the next generation of New York innovators with resources and guidance to advance their business and make a lasting impact on their city.”

A Community Advisory Panel of business and government leaders has been appointed to assist selecting award recipients and to provide insights on the economic and workforce development challenges facing the city. Members will include:

• Jessica Walker, President & CEO, Manhattan Chamber of Commerce
• Randy Peers, President & CEO, Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce
• Thomas Grech, President & CEO, Queens Chamber of Commerce
• Linda Baran, President & CEO, Staten Island Chamber of Commerce
• Lisa Sorin, President & CEO, Bronx Chamber of Commerce
• Karen Bhatia, Senior Vice President, NYC Economic Development Corporation
• Sander Dolder, Senior Vice President, NYC Economic Development Corporation
• Jose Ortiz, Jr., President & CEO, NYC Employment and Training Coalition
• Eustacio (Andy) Saldaña, Executive Director, NY Tech Alliance

To apply and learn more, founders can visit the challenge’s website. Applications will be accepted until October 29, 2021 at 11:59 PM ET. Application results will be shared on November 29, 2021, and the mentorship program for the ten recognized founders and their teams will start in December.

ABOUT THE CORNELL TECH URBAN TECH HUB

The Jacobs Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech addresses pressing urban challenges and discovers new ways that digital technology can drive solutions and engage thought-leaders and communities to realize the positive impact of urban technologies. The Hub is a center of activity and experimentation that bridges the gap between academic resources and public needs. At Cornell, the Urban Tech Hub has a threefold mandate; to undertake applied research on urban challenges, to leverage the convening power of a university campus to bring people together and to educate the next generation of home-grown NYC tech talent.

ABOUT GOOGLE FOR STARTUPS

Google for Startups is on a mission to to level the playing field for startup success by bringing founders the best of Google’s products, connections, and best practices. Paired with a deep commitment to create diverse startup communities, many Google for Startups offerings are designed specifically to provide underrepresented founders with access to resources and opportunities.

ABOUT TECH:NYC

Tech:NYC is an engaged network of tech leaders working to foster a dynamic, diverse, and creative New York. It brings together New Yorkers to support a successful technology ecosystem, attract and retain top-tier talent, and celebrate New York and the companies that call it home. Tech:NYC mobilizes the expertise and resources of the tech sector to work with city and state government on policies that ensure New York’s innovation economy thrives.

The post Cornell Tech Launches $150K Start-up Competition with Google & Tech:NYC appeared first on Cornell Tech.

By enabling scientists to test their treatments on human cells rather than actual humans, cell lines have become the foundation for virtually all modern biomedical research and drug discovery. The roughly twenty tons of cell lines that have been developed in the last few decades have made advances possible in cancer research, stem-cell therapy and even CRISPR gene-editing.

However, along the way scientists haven’t been especially tidy in terms of properly labeling cell lines: by some measures, upwards of a third of them are misidentified.

This issue has major implications for clinical trials: if a researcher is testing a new chemo treatment on a liver-cancer cell line and mistakenly uses a pancreatic cell line, that trial is completely useless. If the researcher doesn’t recognize that it’s the wrong cell line, it could also result in them publishing incorrect data that leads future scientists even further astray.

Molecular biologist Sophie Zaaijer, a former postdoc at Cornell Tech in New York City, is perplexed that cell lines aren’t catalogued with the same level of detail as a flat-screen TV from a big-box store.

“Amazon meticulously follows your package every step of the way,” says Zaaijer. “Why don’t we do the same for cells?”

That question was the inspiration for FIND Genomics, Zaaijer’s start-up with computational biologist Tyler Joseph. Zaaijer just co-authored a paper in Nature Biotechnology demonstrating a tool for researchers to easily digitize, organize and verify information about their cell lines.

“It’s heartbreaking when you hear the individual stories of researchers who had to throw away years of work because they unknowingly received an incorrect cell line from a collaborating lab a decade earlier,” says Joseph.

User studies showed that the new tool saves researchers time, while also reducing the risk of experimental failure. It’s now used by scientists at more than a dozen different universities.

In the paper the authors argue that there should be a more universal method for maintaining and documenting the use of cell lines.

“Although it’s generally accepted that cell lines in culture can become dissimilar to their tissue of origin, it would be a major benefit to biomedical research to establish a comprehensive system to make cell line management more similar between labs,” says Sandra Vogt, a cancer researcher and PhD candidate at New York University who was part of the beta-tester team.

Zaaijer spun the company out of Cornell Tech last year through the Runway Startup Postdocs program, and has since raised capital to develop the technical product that was recently launched. The team collaborated on the platform with scientists from both academic and industry, including the New York Genome Center.

“Cornell Tech really was the main incubator for FIND Genomics and its whole business model,” Zaaijer says. “It’s what gave us the momentum and resources to realize the feasibility of our big idea.”

The team’s tool is available on their website for academic laboratories to use.

The post Many Cell Lines in Pharma Research Are Mislabeled. This Tool Aims To Help. appeared first on Cornell Tech.

NEW YORK, NY – Cornell Tech awarded four student startup companies with pre-seed funding worth up to $100,000 in its eighth annual Startup Awards competition. The awards were announced at Cornell Tech’s virtual Open Studio, the campus’ end-of-year celebration of startups and presentation of cutting-edge research, projects, and companies founded at Cornell Tech. A panel of tech industry leaders and executives, along with members of the Cornell and Cornell Tech faculty and staff, selected the winning student teams.

“After over a year of working from home, these students have still found a way to build sustainable, tangible solutions to problems New Yorkers and the general public experience daily. I’m so proud of this year’s group of Startup Awards finalists; they’ve been able to create these amazing projects all while working virtually during quite a tumultuous year. I’m confident that the Startup Award winners this year will all go on to make a meaningful contribution to New York City and beyond,” said Greg Morrisett, the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech.

2021 Startup Award Winners are:

• Adiona is an in-cabin medical emergency detection and response system for semi and fully autonomous vehicles.

• BioBeat helps athletes avoid injury by monitoring their performance in real-time through sensors fitted into their athletic gear.

• Oilo uses data-driven processes to increase the value of SMBs’ fleets by reducing their operational costs, risks, and inefficiencies.

• Theia ML is developing machine learning based clinical decision support tools for ENT care. In the US there are shortages of ENTs and major geographic disparities in access to care. Our products enable ENTs to focus on patient care and overcome geographic boundaries.

“There was no shortage of fantastic ideas during this year’s Open Studio, even through a difficult year for both our students and the education sector at large. The pandemic accelerated certain trends and pushed us to rethink how we look at common problems. This year’s winners have proven that with their creativity and perseverance,” said Kevin Yien, Head of Startup Studio at Cornell Tech. 

Since January, three alumni companies have been acquired, joining five others since the inception of Startup Studio: Otari acquired by Peloton; Datalogue acquired by Nike; Auggi acquired by Seed Health. The other five companies that have been acquired include: Uru, acquired by Adobe; Trigger Finance, acquired by Circle; Gitlinks, acquired by Infor; Bowtie, acquired by MINDBODY; and Thread Learning, acquired by CentralReach. In total, startups that have been founded and spun out on campus — including Startup Studio and the Runway Startup Postdocs at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute — have raised more than $132 million in funding and employ more than 370 people.

Cornell Tech’s Startup Studio program is run by Yien along with Chief Practice Officer Josh Hartmann; Chad Dickerson, Head of BigCo Studio; Lyel Resner, Head of PiTech Studio; and Leandra Elberger, Studio Director. The Startup Awards are a capstone of the Studio curriculum, a critical component of the master’s experience at Cornell Tech which brings together multi-disciplinary teams to solve real-world problems. In their final semester, students can choose to form teams and enroll in Startup Studio, where they combine their diverse program disciplines — computer science, operations research and information engineering, business, health tech, urban tech, connective media, electrical and computer engineering, and law — to develop ideas and prototypes for their startup in an academic setting.

This year, students who didn’t enroll in Startup Studio chose to take the BigCo Studio or PiTech Studio tracks. In BigCo Studio students learn to innovate within larger companies, including navigating complex cultures, pitching to the people who control budgets, and building projects to scale. In PiTech Studio, or Public Interest Tech Studio, students focus specifically on product development and business models that accelerate positive change in public, non-profit, for-profit, and hybrid sectors.

Startup Award winners also receive coworking space at the Tata Innovation Center, as part of the $100,000 investment. Designed by Weiss/Manfredi architects, the first-of-its-kind building houses an extraordinary mix of cutting-edge companies working alongside groundbreaking Cornell academic teams: from recent Cornell Tech graduates hustling to commercialize a new idea, to start-ups on the verge of explosive growth, and established companies developing leading-edge technologies and products. Tenants include tech and investment firm Two Sigma, Citigroup, Ferrero International, Tata Consultancy Services, and NYC FIRST.

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About Cornell Tech

Cornell Tech is Cornell University’s groundbreaking campus for technology research and education on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Our faculty, students and industry partners work together in an ultra-collaborative environment, pushing inquiry further and developing meaningful technologies for a digital society. Founded in partnership with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and the City of New York, Cornell Tech achieves global reach and local impact, extending Cornell University’s long history of leading innovation in computer science and engineering.

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