SCET Announces Collider Cup X Winners and Celebrates Outstanding Faculty, Students, and Staff
Contributions by Michelle Lee, photography by Daniel Rozenblit & video editing by Vicky Liu
SCET’s all-star showcase, the Collider Cup, held its tenth pitch competition on Friday May 6, 2022 in Berkeley’s brand new innovation center, the Bakar BioEnginuity Hub. The top student teams from twelve SCET classes presented their venture projects to an esteemed panel of judges in order to compete for SCET’s top prize, the Collider Cup. Team Red Box, a delivery service that leverages algorithms and artificial intelligence to help women have their “most comfortable period, period” won the 1st place and People’s Choice award. Second place went to Iflur, an ingenious flooring system that leverages human walking to generate energy, and third place went to SolTix, an NFT ticketing platform designed to be a safe, secure marketplace for buying and selling tickets to entertainment events. SCET also recognized outstanding faculty and student assistants with its teaching awards, and gave a special acknowledgment to outgoing director, Ikhlaq Sidhu, and staff member Melissa Glass.
Red Box – 1st place and People’s Choice
Team: Riya Kumar, CEO; Jiwon Shin, UI/UX; Jeremy Smith, Operations
Course: Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship Bootcamp
Team Red Box, founded in the Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship course, was the 1st place team and People’s Choice Award winner for the Spring 2022 Collider Cup. The team developed a subscription service and algorithm to reduce the challenges women face with periods, such as pain, discomfort, irregularity, and leaking.
“It is time for periods to come out of the shadows and finally be a curated experience.”
Riya Kumar, CEO, Red Box
Iflur – 2nd place
Team: David Cayuela, CEO; Javier Monleón, CMO; Rafael Pérez, CTO
Course: Street Smart Startup: How to Understand and Influence People from Day 1 through IPO
What if you could generate energy just by walking around? That is the vision of Iflur, a team founded in SCET’s Street Smart Startup course, that has built an innovative flooring prototype using widely available materials to generate energy from human walking. Because the system is easy to install, the team envisions it being used at large music festivals such as Coachella or in airports worldwide as another system of renewable energy.
“We want to turn people into power plants.”
David Cayuela Penalva
SolTix – 3rd place
Team: Vrushank Varia, Priyam Mohanty, Abdul Karim, Heet Kotak, Matheus Drummond, Shuyang Yu
Course: Product Management
Have you ever felt like buying or selling tickets online is a hostile environment? Team SolTix, from SCET’s Product Management course, is seeking to make a marketplace where users can safely and securely buy and sell tickets to their favorite entertainment, without the fear of being scammed. Additionally, by leveraging the power of blockchain and NFTs, sellers can control secondary sales and earn royalties when their tickets are resold.
“Our goal is to empower people to do more with their tickets while also making the ticketing experience better for everyone. This idea came from personal experiences we had with buying tickets online and we hope SolTix can alleviate these problems, such as creating a safer experience for secondary market ticket transactions. We also hope to make the experience for ticket sellers too, so that incentives are aligned for both parties. We’re super grateful to have been able to pitch at the Collider Cup and are excited for what’s next.”
Team SolTIx
Hardly Boiled – Most Innovative Technology
Team: Spencer Hutchins, Melika Rahbar, Isha Ukani, James Wang
Course: Challenge Lab | AltMeat: Product Design of Plant-Based Foods
The winner of the Most Innovative Technology award was Hardly Boiled from SCET’s Challenge Lab | AltMeat: Product Design of Plant-Based Foods course. The team built a plant-based hard boiled egg with texture and taste that closely match the egg from the hen. The nutritional label is also very similar to a hen’s egg, minus the cholesterol.
Collider Cup Competitors
In addition to the winning teams, top projects from other SCET courses presented innovative projects, including:
- Grove
- Team: Allisia Sandoval, Sudeshna Naik, Akash Mahajan, Mia Thomas, Thibaud Huriez
- Course: Deplastify the Planet
- This team is working on the plastic problem by developing a 100% plastic free spray bottle that is durable, works as well as a traditional bottle, and has a circular lifecycle
- Health Change
- Team: Antonin Bertrand, Rishabh Thakur, Melissa Desde, Jakob Kraiger
- Course: Build a Blockchain Startup: Decentralized Application (dApp) Development and Entrepreneurship
- This team is seeking to help with expensive out-of-pocket medical costs by developing a digital-first Blockchain platform for medical crowdfunding
- Hibearnate
- Team: Javier Silva Garcia, Kristie Diep, Luis Fernando Ayala Cardona, Jianhua Lim, Richard Ruan
- Course: Challenge Lab | Unleashing Innovation to Solve Global Health Challenges
- Getting a good night’s sleep has never been more difficult, and team Hibearnate has created the first device that connects to sleep actuators that help you stay asleep.
- FitBet
- Team: Lucas Coelho, Kevin Li, Mayank Gupta, Manoj Bandreddi, John Matthew Garcia, Nicholas Helgeson
- Course: Challenge Lab | Metaverses, NFTs and Creator Economies with Blockchain
- Motivation for exercise is a constant challenge that still hasn’t been solved, even in the days with more ways to track and analyze our fitness activity. FitBet seeks to make exercise social and asks users to put skin in the game by creating a social betting market for fitness on the blockchain.
- ReU
- Team: Qingyue “Cecilia” Zhan, Clemence Billiemaz, Kartiki Gaur, Minyue Xia, Varsha Vaidyanath
- Course: Applied Data Science with Venture Applications: Data-X
- ReU is an AI-powered clothing resale marketplace aimed at university students to help them buy and sell clothing safely and securely.
- FEAT
- Team: Alice Duly, Juliette Tourre
- Course: Technology Entrepreneurship
- Targeted at athletes and fitness enthusiasts, FEAT is an arm patch that uses a painless microneedle to track nutrient levels with a paired application that provides nutritional advice to users.
- Equiverse
- Team: Chenghao Meng, Jake Lamb, Jonas Ong, Malik Powell, Misha Lubich, and Yuvaraj Tankala
- Course: Challenge Lab | OpportunityTech and the Future of Work Lab
- Equiverse seeks to ease the pain of applying to jobs by leveling the playing field between job seekers and hiring managers by giving applicants powerful tools and a platform to organize, analyze, and optimize their job search.
- Bloom
- Team: Abanob Bostouro, Katia Pokotylo
- Course: Challenge Lab | Facebooked: Clickbait and Customer Manipulation in the era of Social Internet
- Bloom is a platform that “provides a sense of allyship for anxious explorers” so that shy or anxious people can meet like-minded people and participate in social events together.
Interested in taking an SCET class? Check out our courses page for details!
SCET Teaching Awards
In addition to watching innovative pitches from the top student teams from SCET classes this semester, SCET also presented its teaching awards to highlight outstanding effort by faculty and student course assistants. The backbone of SCET’s ability to guide students in creating new innovations is its hard working teaching team that represents a wide variety of industry and academic experience. Cheers to the instructors and student assistants who worked tirelessly this semester to give students in SCET courses a one-of-kind experience.
Best Instructor Award
This semester’s Best Instructor Award went to Mathieu Aguesse, who was the instructor for SCET’s Deplastify the Planet course. Mathieu was selected for the award by his students for providing great resources and connecting students with influential experts in the field, for his personal investment into the students’ projects and encouragement of out-of-the-box thinking, and for his overall instruction and development of the course where students had the unique opportunity to solve real world problems.
Interested in helping to solve the plastic problem? Check out Deplastify the Planet with Mathieu this fall.
Best Course Assistant Award
The winner of the Best Course Assistant Award for Spring 2022 was Manan Bhargava who was an SCET course coordinator for Build a Blockchain Startup: Decentralized Application (dApp) Development and Entrepreneurship. Manan was awarded best course assistant for his dedication and efforts to make the class as smooth as possible and for his encouragement and friendly demeanor towards everyone in the class.
Celebrating Ikhlaq Sidhu and Melissa Glass
Collider Cup X was also the last Collider Cup with Ikhlaq Sidhu as SCET’s dynamic director, as he will soon move to a new role as dean and professor at IE School of Technology. (Learn more about the impact Ikhlaq had while he was at Berkeley.) Ikhlaq will always be SCET’s founding director, and SCET and Berkeley will see new collaborations with him in his new role.
Additionally, it was the last Collider Cup for Melissa Glass, SCET’s manager of new initiatives. Melissa has been the emcee and organizer of SCET’s Collider Cup events, and she will be very missed as part of the SCET community. Melissa will be moving to Texas to work on an internship as part of finishing her Psy.D. in clinical psychology.
Cheers to Melissa and Ikhlaq for all they have done for SCET and Berkeley, and we look forward to working with them both again in the future.
Cheers to SCET’s Venue Partner, Bakar BioEnginuity Hub
Collider Cup X was even more special this semester, as for the first time the event was held at the newly renovated, Bakar BioEnginuity Hub, Berkeley’s newly renovated 40,000 square foot home for science-based startups. The new state-of-the-art innovation hub will soon host nearly 80 startups to work on problems that will have a huge impact at the nexus of life and physical sciences and other disciplines. SCET was honored to be able to hold its flagship event at this beautiful new space that will be home for many innovators in the future.
Thanks to our Judges and Angel Partners
Finally, Collider Cup X would not be the same without participation from our esteemed panel of industry judges and participation from our angel network partners. Thank you to our judges:
- Kal Deutsch, Berkeley Angel Network;
- Cathy Farmer, Berkeley Angel Network;
- Jeff Wallace, Berkeley Angel Network;
- Jay Onda, Head of Strategy at the Extreme Tech Challenge;
- Akash Malhotra, The House Fund;
- Yuvia Mendoza, Erupture