Velocity $5K fall 2022 semi-finalists announced
Twenty-three student teams contend for four $5,000 prizes — but first they must present the perfect pitch
The time is here for University of Waterloo’s ambitious student startups to compete at the Velocity $5K pitch competition. The competition will see early-stage student ventures battle it out onstage for a chance at one of four $5,000 awards.
The first round of competition kicks off on November 9th and 10th and features 23 aspiring teams. These 23 semi-finalist teams were selected by an experienced panel of entrepreneurs, following a difficult adjudication process that saw 72 applications from 160 students.
Each semi-finalist will have just three minutes to present their idea and convince a new panel of judges that it has potential and viability to succeed. Only then will they move on to the final round.
The top eight teams from the two rounds will return to the stage for the finals on November 23rd. After the pitching magic happens, four teams and their innovative business ideas will take home $5,000 in grant funding to help grow their ambitions.
Join us on November 9th and 10th at South Campus Hall to see who will win the judges over and cheer on your UWaterloo peers.
See the pitches live and meet the teams
Learn more and register to attend
Witness 12 early-stage startups featuring 19 UWaterloo students from within the faculties of Engineering, Mathematics, Environment, Health and Arts pitch to win in night one of the Velocity $5K semi-finals.
Pitching Wednesday, November 9
Coastal Carbon is launching the world’s first remote data platform for blue carbon. They are developing the technology to bring confidence in the offsets generated by any blue carbon project.
Submitted by: Thomas Storwick (Engineering, MASc Chemical Engineering (Nanotechnology))
Electric Boats & Regenerative Fertilizers makes electric boats that clean up all kinds of floating debris. The debris then gets mixed with used coffee grounds to make regenerative fertilizers.
Submitted by: Chanakya Ramdev (Environment, Post Degree Undergrad)
Hexa is an ecosystem of EdTech platforms that offer services for students to ace their board exams, get into their dream university, and gain mentorship at every stage of their life.
Submitted by: ASM Taseen (Mathematics, Computer Science), Hamza Yusuff (Mathematics, Computer Science), Abrar Rakin, (Mathematics, Computer Science), Ahmed Irteja and Mokaddas Shafkat
LandscapeDirect is an online garden centre that is revolutionizing the garden industry by bring plants to the online shopping consumer.
Submitted by: Blake Patterson (Arts, Accounting and Financial Management), Evan Patterson and Conner Krofchick
Liquitronix is a portable benchtop probe station that will enable rapid electrical characterization of materials.
Submitted by: Mahmoud Almadhoun (Engineering, Chemical Engineering) and Michael Pope
PedalRoutes is tech infrastructure for cycling. It is a mobile & web app that can automatically generate custom cycling routes adhering to the users’ specific preferences.
Submitted by: Vikram Nachiappan Subramanian (Engineering, Software Engineering)
Penspyre helps you never get stuck while writing through contextualized writing prompts.
Submitted by: Kha Nguyen (Engineering, Systems Design Engineering), Annie Zou (Engineering, Systems Design Engineering), Roman Semin (Engineering, Systems Design Engineering) and David Olive Jr. (Engineering, Systems Design Engineering)
Serv2U is an online C2C marketplace for home-cooks to sell food to consumers, where we provide delivery and a platform for such cooks to grow their business.
Submitted by: Abhinav Gupta (Mathematics, Honours Computer Science), Srijan Chaudhuri (Mathematics, Statistics), Sarvesh Wanzare, Aryan Sanyal, Hannabeth Marchant and Shambhavi Mathur
ShootFree is an auto-rotating device that mounts to the phone, providing a hands-free solution for athletes to capture footage of their games.
Submitted by: Young-Vin Cho (Health, Recreation and Leisure, Sports Business)
Totazi is the Glassdoor for content creators and businesses. Creators can verify businesses, and businesses can vet creators through an authentic review platform. The platform will create transparency and increase successful partnerships by allowing both brands and creators to gain insights ahead of time. Beyond the review system, the platform will also allow for brands to post their campaigns (like Glassdoor job postings) allowing creators to search and match with the right fit based on their audience, location, rates and content.
Submitted by: Eric Sheen (Engineering, Software Engineering), Sohil Athare, Lindsey Alger and Carling Cobham
TrainPro has a goal of helping people get harder, better and stronger faster. This is done by providing them with real-time guidance on technique, exercise routine and optimal muscle loading in the gym using smart wearable clothing.
Submitted by: Shreshth Mehra (Engineering, Mechanical Engineering), Anna Liebenberg (Engineering, Mechanical Engineering) and Armaan Malik
Werkspat is a subscription based, on-demand co-working platform that connects entrepreneurs, workers and freelancers with hot desks across a network of hospitality locations such as restaurants, cafes, bars, & hotels.
Submitted by: Ndubuaku Chijioke-Ugwu (Engineering, Master of Business, Entrepreneurship, and Technology) and Taiwo Oyewole
Night two of the Velocity $5K semi-finals showcases 10 teams with 17 UWaterloo students from the faculties of Engineering, Mathematics and Arts.
Pitching Thursday, November 10
AFAIK uses natural language processing techniques to extract concepts from textbooks and to generate prerequisite relationships among them. They then scrape learning resources from major learning platforms and attach these resources to each concept. AFAIK recommends personalized learning paths based on the concepts that learners have marked as mastered.
Submitted by: Zhiying Jiang (Mathematics, PhD), Orianna Min (Engineering, Mechanical Engineering) and Yiqin Dai
Chariot Mobility will design and manufacture bespoke mobility products for those with physical disabilities. The company would work closely with the customers to determine their main requirements as well as the difficulties they face. Our products would be manual or motorized depending on the customer’s needs and would utilize custom-designed parts/assemblies that could be interchanged between devices (i.e., motorized wheels, frame components, etc.) to provide ease of maintenance and repair.
Submitted by: Renzo Villanoy (Engineering, Mechanical Engineering)
Goose is a personalized notification-based app for housing. Instead of actively searching through Facebook, Goose passively finds listings that match your preferences, & makes sure you're the first to know.
Submitted by: Jerry Qu (Engineering, Software Engineering) and Jaemin Han (Mathematics, Honours)
HydroMag is a group of five engineering students who are looking into creating a solution for onboard hydrogen fuel storage for vehicles using magnesium hydride.
Submitted by: Jason Buskell (Engineering, Chemical Engineering), Yun Choi (Engineering, Chemical Engineering), Jarrell Yau (Engineering, Chemical Engineering), Sunho Bae (Engineering, Chemical Engineering) and Alexander Tse (Engineering, Chemical Engineering)
IDEAL is a venture to become the benchmark for recruiting programming professionals through long term evaluation, assessment and development. IDEAL provides detailed reports in minor and major skills that are essential for a programmer.
Submitted by: Seyed Aryan Vahabpour (Mathematics)
MedInclude knows that understanding medical information is essential to improving patient engagement and involvement in their own care. MedInclude is a platform that aims to help patients better understand medical information.
Submitted by: Seun Adetunji (Engineering, Master of Business, Entrepreneurship, and Technology)
Outseek is a financial research and analysis terminal that provides investors with the freedom to view the data they need in the way they want. Focused on advanced data visualization and analytics.
Submitted by: Nathan Dopko (Arts, Honours Arts and Business, Honours Economics, Co-op), Paul Walsh and Joshua Bell
Pegasus is a web3 application that generates an NFT for each digitally verifiable task (or set of) that an individual successfully completes.
Submitted by: Rohit Kaushik (Mathematics, Computer Science)
RelayMD is an online platform that lets family doctors find information on medical specialists (wait times, subspecialty etc.) and make and manage outbound referrals more efficiently.
Submitted by: Dhvani Patel (Engineering, Software Engineering) and Ali Qamar
Skipwash is taking laundry online, we are uber for laundry, we pickup, wash dry and deliver folded clothes door to door. One click laundry service available from your couch.
Submitted by: Skand Mittal (Arts, Accounting and Financial Management) and Abhishek Sharma (Arts, Accounting and Financial Management)
List subject to changes.
Meet the judges
Moazam Khan, Co-founder of Curiato and Velocity Business Advisor
Khan is a mentor and advisor for Velocity’s med tech and digital health companies. A staunch believer in the impact of data driven technologies in healthcare, Moazam
co-founded Curiato in 2015, a digital healthcare platform that analyses and predicts hospital acquired conditions directly from the surface of the bed with a smart bed cover. Learn more.
More information on judges to be updated in the coming days.
Akash Vaswani
Danielle Rose, Co-Founder and CEO
Danielle is the Co-founder and CEO of Ceragen, a startup developing probiotics for plants that help farmers increase crop yields. She is a second time founder and has her Bachelor's degree in Microbiology from the University of Guelph.
Ceragen is a biotechnology company focused on helping farmers increase their crop yields through plant microbiome engineering. Backed by decades of scientific research, our company is pioneering the field of precision microbiome engineering through inoculant products that are tailor-made for controlled environment agriculture.
