Collider Cup XVIII

Winner: Blue Chip Biosystems

• Website: https://www.bcbsys.com/
• Members: Cameron Kato , Declan Farriday, Andreas Stahl
• Lack of access to menstrual products isn’t just inconvenient—it affects confidence, productivity, and dignity. We are EquiPad and we’re making sustainable, accessible period care the norm in every restroom. Our novel, cost-effective dispensers and biobased products make it easy for institutions to stock and manage menstrual products—just like toilet paper.

Other Participating teams:

Hope AI

• Website: https://www.theimpactventure.com/
• Members: Vanessa He, Akhil Pendyala 
• Hope AI Disclosure is a transaction-level & sector-specialized AI solution for IPO and M&A data-room due diligence. Customers already use our MVP—law firms, investors, and IPO applicants—to verify IPO disclosures against source documents in the data room. Demand is growing, so we’re raising to deliver the enterprise-ready platform with a global customer pipeline.

Health-Pilots

• Website: https://health-pilots.com/
• Members: Derek Carver, Abhijith Mudunuri, Atharva Patel 
• The Health-Pilots team blends deep business insight with strong technical expertise. Derek brings experience in early-stage startups, growth, and product management, while CTO AVM leverages a background at BlackRock, BAIR, and UCSF’s CTML. Founding engineers Atharva and Fengyi contribute technical depth from roles at Roblox, BILL, Juniper Networks, and Amazon. Collectively, the team spans Berkeley Haas, Data Science, Statistics, Applied Math, Computer Science, and AI/ML Research Labs at UC Berkeley—bridging business, AI, and healthcare innovation.

AI Scouts

• Website: http://aiscouts.org/
• Members: Sepehr Khosravi

• AI Scouts is program to teach teens the real-world skills to succeed today starting with AI. We currently have run a 5 week camp AI camp that has a 3,000 member waitlist.

Wit

• Website: https://wit-8b6c83.webflow.io/
• Members: Aarya Harkare, Isabella Wang, Katherin Velazquez 
• Our team formed at the XR Stanford Hackathon in November 2024, where we were first introduced to Snap Spectacles. In December 2024, we recruited Aarya and entered the SnapChat Accelerator Program, and since then we’ve been actively developing our product. Katherine leads product marketing, Aarya focuses on software, and Isabella drives the design.

Winner: Equipad

Other participating teams:

BitForge

• Website: BitForge
• Members: Rohil Khare, Tamzid Razzaque

• BitForge is building an AI assistant for hardware engineers that automates the most time-consuming parts of chip design. From auto-generating Verilog and testbenches to debugging and annotation, BitForge helps hardware teams move 5x faster with high accuracy.

BioJect

• Website: https://bioject.weebly.com/
• Members: Mahitha Gollapudi, Claire Fang
• BioJect is developing the world's first fully biodegradable injection needle that completely breaks down within nine months after disposal, addressing the 16 billion injections administered worldwide that generate 75 million pounds of persistent waste annually. Our proprietary PHA/CNC composite needles achieve 80-85% of stainless steel's mechanical properties while maintaining clinical performance with tensile strength of 380-420 MPa and puncture force comparable to metal needles. Recently accepted into Berkeley SkyDeck's prestigious Pad 13 incubator program (with a 4% acceptance rate), our team uniquely combines business strategy, advanced biomaterials science, and medical device expertise to create sustainable alternatives for healthcare.

Blue Chip Bio  

• Members: Cameron Kato,  Andreas Stahl
• The Blue Chip Bio team consists of a graduating Bioengineering PhD candidate and two esteemed UC Berkeley professors, Irina Conboy and Andreas Stahl. Cameron Kato and Irina Conboy combine extensive experience in longevity research with a background in startup development. Andreas Stahl contributes deep expertise in microphysiological systems. Together, the team is poised to revolutionize the longevity and obesity industries and redefine how drugs are tested for efficacy.

Satsurance

• Website: satsurance.xyz
• Members: Anchit Jain(CEO), Miguel Cano (CBO)
• Satsurance is a decentralized marketplace for specialty insurance. It enables peer-to-peer underwriting of specialty insurance, using smart contracts, making insurance 20-25% cheaper and more efficient.

SomeIdea AI

• Members: Chi-Feng Ho, Chi-Hong Ho, Qiran Dong,Hao Wang
• Our team brings together financial domain expertise and cutting-edge AI research. Chi-Feng and Chi-Hong gained hands-on experience in banking and capital markets, while Hao and Qiran are PhD candidates at Berkeley IEOR specializing in optimization, machine learning systems, and intelligent agents. We chose to work together because we share a deep conviction that AI, thoughtfully applied, can transform financial decision-making to be faster, more transparent, and more intelligent.

Winner: Code Blue AI

• Website: https://code-blue.ai
• Members: Ashmita Kumar, Ericka Corral
• 1 in 4 people are expected to experience a stroke in their lifetimes, yet over 60% of people can't identify the major signs. Partnered with UCSF Health and backed by Big Ideas at Berkeley, UC LAUNCH, SkyDeck Pad-13, and Berkeley Haas, our solution integrates into any device equipped with a microphone and camera, passively monitoring for signs of stroke. On detection, we automatically notify EMS to get people help before the damage becomes long-term or fatal.

Other participating teams:

PAIP

• Website: paip.me
• Members: Isabel Moreno, Frederik Stihler
• Our team combines a unique multidisciplinary background, with expertise in law, business, mathematics, and data science. Having worked in hyper-growth startups, consulting, and insurance, we have a deep understanding of the challenges and pain points involved in PowerPoint slide creation. Equipped to scale AI solutions, we’re building the technology to seamlessly turn sketches into professional presentations, saving time and unlocking creativity for individuals and teams alike.

Common AR

• Website: commonar.com
• Members: Rohan Vaidya， Akhil Sachdev
• CommonAR is building AR-powered networking tools that allow you to see who's around you and what you have in common. We offer general-purpose tools for conference attendees and specialized tools for sales agents at booths trying to generate leads. The team, Rohan (CEO) and Akhil (CTO), are best friends who met in high school, studied CS at Berkeley together, and interned at Rivian together (where they were also roommates).

Theta Wave AI

• Website: https://thetawave.ai
• Members: Wenxuan Li, Ziqiu Zhong
• Peter (Wenxuan) started as a CS student at UC Berkeley but dropped out after his freshman year to chase a bigger dream: building ThetaWave with Elena (Ziqiu). His track record speaks for itself—Gold in the Physics Olympiad, conducting AI research at Tencent at just 17, and having his project spotlighted by China’s largest newspaper. At ThetaWave AI, we’re tackling a problem every student can relate to: boring, overwhelming academic materials. Our solution? Transforming what you hate to study into content you’ll love. ThetaWave turns dry textbooks and lecture recordings into beautiful notes, engaging podcasts, interactive quizzes, flashcards, and mind maps—all designed to help college students learn faster and better. We’ve already raised $300,000 in pre-seed funding from Y Combinator China, and our traction speaks volumes. With 200% weekly growth and over 2,000 active users, we’re proving that students are hungry for smarter, more enjoyable ways to learn. Now, we’re ready to scale and take this revolution to the next level. Will you join us?

PlayVision

• Website: playvision.io
• Members: Anish Gupta, Marc Zoghby, Greg Kopanezos, Pulak Dugar
• PlayVision is an automated game-film analysis tool that leverages computer vision to produce advanced analytics in sports. With our backgrounds as scouts for both Cal Football and Cal Basketball, we’ve seen firsthand the inconsistencies and tediousness of scouting and recruiting, and our tracking tools will help pave the way for a better, more efficient future. Our goal is simple: to create a platform that enhances player recruiting and draft profiles, and helps coaches and scouts take their teams and themselves to the highest level.

Winner: Optigenix

• Website: https://www.optigenix.co/
• Team: Jai Williams and Gabe Abbes
• OptiGenix is a service that offers athletes monthly supplement packages tailored to their unique biological needs and athletic goals.

Other participating teams:

Uncracked

• Website: www.eatuncracked.com
• Team: Jai Williams and Gabe Abbes
• OptiGenix is a service that offers athletes monthly supplement packages tailored to their unique biological needs and athletic goals.

Koi

• Website:
• Team: Prem Sivakumar, Mariano Bueno, Pavan Murugesh, Shivanshu Mishra, Jack Kumashiro
• Koi aims to address the growing concern of voice phishing scams, particularly targeting seniors. With AI-enhanced capabilities, Koi offers real-time detection of voice scams, ensuring safer communication for seniors and peace of mind for their families. The projected increase in scam calls by 300% by 2030 highlights an urgent need for solutions like Koi. Targeting a multi-billion dollar market, Koi positions itself as a necessary defense against the sophistication of scam calls.Our product is a mobile cybersecurity app that focuses on voice phishing. We are able to detect malicious calls with an accuracy of >90% and integrate advanced ML into our software that begins processing once a call is made. If it is a scam, the user and their guardian would receive a real-time alert along with a follow-up notif with red flags and best practices. Market research reveals that individuals over 50 often receive and answer numerous scam calls daily, leading to distress and distrust in communication. Koi addresses this by prioritizing safety, education, and maintaining family connections, reassuring users that it's possible to counteract these scams effectively.

Poliwatch

• Website:
• Team: Matthew Dodd
• Our startup came out of a masters capstone course for berkeley's masters in data science. Our project started out looking to build a classifier identifying insider trading with traditional machine learning approaches. We struggled given the pretty low incidence of actual insider trading investigations, let alone convictions. With our pivot to building a research tool that can supplement investigations, our focus moved to data engineering and data validation. We evaluated multiple sources tracking congressional activity, often comparing results to ensure validity. This was a significant task and involved joining messy data from multiple sources, often requiring manual inspections and corrections. For example, we had to manually correct over 100 misspellings or abbreviations in congressperson names from official congressional documentation. Ultimately, we built a diverse, gold-standard corpus of congressional activity that had never before been assembled. This left us with only a few weeks to experiment with and optimize the final transformer model we used to surface relevant congressional activity to trades.

Berkeley Algae: Cal-Milk

• Team: Nouf Alhazmiand Natalia Shamoon
• We are building a precision fermentation system that produces Lactoferrin, a highly valuable milk protein, more sustainably and efficiently for an algae based vegan milk. By using biotechnology and genetic engineering, we can reduce the production costs of lactoferrin while also remaining carbon negative. Our goal is to make this innovative product accessible to various industries that currently rely on costly and resource-intensive methods for harvesting lactoferrin.We are solving the issue of costly and inefficient production of lactoferrin, the most important milk protein that clears the skin ,and helps runners avoid muscle pain, especially the anemic ones.Lactoferrin protein costs about $2,000 USD per kg. Traditional production requires filtration of 1 million liters of whey for only 20 kg of lactoferrin.