Click on the picture above or the link below to find out more about the 2022 InVenture Prize competition! Relive all the exciting moments by watching the recorded broadcast. Click on each team name to learn more about the competitors and their inventions.

Competing Teams

The Foambuster

Team Foambuster
2nd Place
Edward Diller
Mechanical Engineering
Los Angeles, CA
Davis Waln
Mechanical Engineering
Atlanta, GA
Christophe Senghor
Mechanical Engineering
Peachtree City, GA
Katelyn Sand
Mechanical Engineering
Westlake Village, CA
Jaime Paris Meseguer
Mechanical Engineering
Spain

The Foambuster is a unique handheld tool that allows construction contractors to drastically cut down on the mess, hassle, and money spent that comes with installing exterior insulation.

Winning the inventure prize would allow us to manufacture our tool on a larger scale, to ship tools to more contractors across the country, and to improve our tool with more research and development.

Magic Crop

Team Magic Crop
Megan Dass
Computer Science
Woodbridge, VA

An application that uses the power of Artificial Intelligence and the rule of thirds to format any number of inputted pictures into the perfect headshot within seconds and without ever sending any images to the cloud or to a third-party server.

Winning the InVenture Prize would mean being able to grow Magic Crop into a product that is ready to be licensed and sold to corporations, as well as individuals, to save us hours to days worth of time formatting pictures into uniform headshot.

Reflex

Team Reflex
People's Choice
Nevin Gilbert
Computer Science
Boulder, CO
Usman Jamal
Computer Science
Tucker, GA

Emergency Medical Drone Response System to deliver life-saving medical equipment.

Winning the Inventure Prize would help us complete prototyping of our solution, begin testing with our users, and scale our operations, ultimately taking us one step closer to saving thousands of lives and marking the beginning of a much needed transformation in the Emergency Response space.

Sola

Team Sola
1st Place
Brayden Drury
Mechanical Engineering
Park City, Utah
Wesley Pergament
Mechanical Engineering
Old Westbury, NY

Sola provides a data-driven supplemental insurance plan which covers immediate out-of-pocket expenses for US homeowners following losses from tornadoes.

Winning the InVenture Prize would mean showing the world that large antiquated industries can be disrupted while raising awareness for building startups that increase societal resilience. This competition will help fund our product development roadmap as we aim to launch with home insurance carriers in the next few months. 

StrideLink

Team StrideLink
Marzeah (Zea) Khorramabadi
Computer Engineering
Birmingham, AL
Cassandra (Cassie) McIltrot
Biomedical Engineering
Sykesville, MD
Neel Narvekar
Computer Engineering
Arcadia, CA
Tony Wineman
Electrical Engineering
Woodstock, GA

Accessible gait analysis wearable for remote monitoring of walking asymmetry.

We envision the StrideLink device becoming a key tool used both inside and outside every physical therapist’s office, as a technology capable of unlocking never before seen insights on gait while being at the forefront of remote healthcare. Winning Inventure Prize would allow us to bring our device through final stages of technical development and validation testing bringing us closer to achieving this vision.

Tabnam

Team Tabnam
SooHoon Choi
Computer Science
South Korea
Daksh Gupta
Computer Science
Noida, India
Robert (Davis) Liddell
Computer Science
Lutherville, MD
Ethan Perry
Computer Science
Wellesley, MA

AI-powered shopping assistant that leverages the knowledge of user experience data.

All four of us came to Georgia Tech because we like building things with technology. We love the process of identifying a problem, designing a solution, making it really, realy good, and sharing it with everyone. Winning the Inventure Prize would mean we get keep doing this thing that we love so much.

Judges

David Bridges
Vice president of the Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2)

David Bridges is vice president of the Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. EI2 is the largest, oldest, and most successful university-based economic development organization in the country. It is home to more than a dozen economic development programs which (1) build and scale startups, (2) grow existing small and medium-sized enterprises, including manufacturing firms, and (3) energize ecosystem builders (communities, governments, universities, and non-profits). These programs serve the State of Georgia, the Southeast, the United States, and globally.

 

Prior to his appointment as vice president, Bridges was director of EI2’s Economic Development Lab. That group works with communities in Georgia and globally on projects including workforce development, fiscal and economic impact analyses.

 

Since joining Georgia Tech in 1994, Bridges has worked in various practice areas. He has been a Principal or Co-Principal Investigator on $20M+ in grants and authored, co-authored, or significantly contributed to $40M+ in winning proposals. Bridges has won 100+ proposals from U.S. federal agencies, plus universities, governments, and non-profits from around the world. He is a frequent lecturer and speaker in China, South Africa, and across Latin America on nascent, innovation ecosystem building.

 

Prior to joining EI², he was a management consultant and a brand manager at three consumer package goods companies. Bridges earned his Bachelor of Business Administration from Emory University and Master of Science in Marketing from Georgia State University.

Duriya Farooqui headshot
Board Director of Intercontinental Hotels Group (NYSE: IHG) and Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE: ICE)

Duriya Farooqui is a board member and former C-suite leader with a proven track record of business transformation and innovation, and extensive experience guiding Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 global public companies. Farooqui has served in a variety of leadership roles, including COO for the City of Atlanta and President of Supply Chain Innovation at Georgia Pacific. Farooqui currently serves as a Board Director of Intercontinental Hotels Group (NYSE: IHG) and Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE: ICE). She also serves on the boards of the New York Stock Exchange. In addition, she co-chairs the NYSE Board Advisory Council that is committed to advancing diversity on corporate boards.

 

Farooqui is the 2021 recipient of OnBoard’s 19th annual Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans award in recognition of her transformative endeavors serving on public boards and championing diversity.

 

Most recently, Farooqui was President of Supply Chain Innovation at Georgia Pacific. In this role, Farooqui drove supply chain transformation and led a center for innovation where over 40 companies collaborated to solve supply chain challenges.

 

She earned a Bachelor of Art’s degree in Economics and Mathematics from Hampshire College and a Master of Public Administration in International Development from Harvard University.

Kolby Hanley
Founder and CEO of UltraView Archery

In 2017, as an undergraduate student at Georgia Tech, Kolby founded ULTRAVIEW Archery. In just five years, ULTRAVIEW has become a brand known worldwide for providing best in class products trusted by world champion archers. Since inception, ULTRAVIEW has experienced over 300% year-over-year revenue growth, has been featured in Newsweek, and most recently was recognized as one of Regional Inc. 5000’s fastest growing private companies. 

 

Before founding ULTRAVIEW, Kolby was a world renowned compound archer. He started archery when he was 10 years old and was on the Junior USA Archery Team by the time he was 16. From a young age, Kolby displayed an entrepreneurial spirit. To fund his archery career he would make and sell paracord bracelets at school, and sell water bottles at events. When he became frustrated with the inadequate archery equipment on the market, he utilized the Georgia Tech Invention Studio to design his own. His archery competitors took notice and began inquiring where they could purchase his custom equipment. Seeing the opportunity, he launched the Starlight scope system, the product that won the 2018 Georgia Tech InVenture Prize.

 

Outside of ULTRAVIEW, Kolby is a mentor in the ALC Hornet Archery program, a member of the CREATE-X Council, and a pet foster for local Georgia animal rescues.

Hosts

Ashley Mengwasser profile picture

Lifestyle Host, Writer, and Executive Producer Ashley Mengwasser is an eight-time Emmy-winning media talent. She began her 13-year career in television hosting GPB’s popular series Georgia Traveler. Travel highlights include skydiving with grandma, boxing with an Olympian, ballroom dancing, and a ghoulish zombie transformation.

This high-school Valedictorian is as brainy as she is brazen. Ashley hosts GPB Education’s ongoing Emmy-winning Live Exploration series, and creative sparks fly when she co-hosts the annual InVenture Prize at Georgia Tech.

In 2018, Ashley was handpicked for Lowe’s explosive YouTube competition “DIY-No-Mite.” She then packed a duffel bag of dog treats to film the syndicated pet travel special Pets Welcome Here with her late basset hound Rosie “co-hosting.”

Ashley even goes “audio only” hosting the Classroom Conversations podcast series for Georgia educators, now in its third season.

Apart from hosting, her magnum opus as a writer-producer is PBS cultural documentary Chinese Tea: Elixir of the Orient. This artistic international project swept six Emmys in 2017, including Ashley’s solo Emmy for writing.

In the Atlanta community, Ashley emcees non-profit galas and has helped raise more than $300,000 to benefit women and children. Ashley graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude from Agnes Scott College in 2009 with a B.A. in English Literature.

Ashley spends non-work hours training her basset hound puppy, Starla. Starla enjoys peanut butter and sticks…but this isn’t about her.

Faith Salie headshot

Faith Salie is an Emmy-winning contributor to CBS Sunday Morning and a regular on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!   

She starred Off-Broadway in 2021 in her solo show, Approval Junkie, based on her memoir of the same name, after a world premiere at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre. Approval Junkie won Audible’s Best Theatre of 2022 award and can be heard worldwide on Audible.  She hosted five seasons of PBS’s Science Goes to the Movies and is a storyteller for The Moth, with her story viewed 6 million times and included in The Moth’s New York Times bestseller, Occasional Magic

Faith hosts the podcast Real Good, amplifying the voices of people making a difference in the world.  She’s grateful she grew up in Atlanta and received her B.A. from Harvard, aka “The Georgia Tech of the North.” 

She’s a Rhodes scholar who received her MPhil in Literature from Oxford University, after which her cohort became things like 2020 presidential candidates and Pulitzer Prize winners, while she went to Hollywood and landed on a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine collectible trading card worth hundreds of cents. Faith lives in Manhattan and is raising kids who say “y’all.”