Congratulations to the six teams of students who presented their business concepts to the Darwin College Entrepreneurs Club last week. The annual pitching day provides an opportunity for students to bid for funding to develop their ideas.
The competition was generously sponsored by Origin Sciences, while entries were judged by alumni Dr Alex Smeets (PhD Materials Science, 1985) and Dr Daniel Wise (PhD Pathology, 2014), Chief Scientific Officer of Origin Sciences, as well as Hugo Lywood, CEO and co-founder of Origin Sciences.
Michael Beavitt (PhD Plant Sciences), secured the First Prize of £2,000 for his proposal, GridFire Genomics. His plan is to build specialised hardware and algorithms that dramatically speed up the analysis of DNA sequencing data, with the long-term aim of licensing these designs across the industry.
“Winning the business competition is worth more than the prize money,” Michael explains. “These endorsements are an essential currency for convincing investors and collaborators that our idea has merit, and for that I can’t thank the College, organisers and judges enough.”
Second Prize of £500 was awarded to Lokr, pitched by Henrik Rumpf (MPhil Industrial Systems, Manufacturing and Management) and Felix Burton (MPhil Scientific Computing).
