The Ansary Entrepreneurship Competition features student teams in a high-stakes contest to persuade prospective investors to help them turn their Senior Design Projects into effective businesses. Students deliver elevator pitches as they compete for the Ansary Prizes for Entrepreneurship, totaling $17,500.

Ansary Foundation

Prizes for the competition are provided by the Cy and Jan Ansary Foundation, which supports education, entrepreneurship and other philanthropic causes. The foundation was established by Cy and Jan Ansary in 1983 to support educational opportunities for promising economically disadvantaged students and to promote interest and teaching of entrepreneurship and business concepts. The Ansary family are prominent international lawyers, financiers, entrepreneurs, educators, authors and philanthropists. The Cy and Jan Ansary Foundation has supported the Ansary Entrepreneurship Competition and Prizes at the Stevens Innovation Expo since 2016, establishing an endowed fund to support the competition and prizes in 2018.

The Competition

An elevator pitch is a short presentation made by an entrepreneur raising money for a venture. The term describes a pitch that is short enough to be given during an elevator ride during which an entrepreneur has his or her only chance to talk with a potential investor. In the Ansary Entrepreneurship Competition, senior students take their design projects and pitch them to judges as potential businesses.

The competition consists of three rounds:

• A live quarter-final that takes place within each participating academic department. Course instructors choose top teams, which then advance to the next round.

• A semi-final in which 45 teams compete and are scored by a panel of judges, with the top six advancing to the finals.

• A final round the week of the Expo, in which judges evaluate the six selected teams' live pitch based on presentation, business plan, value proposition, viability and the quality of their request.

The top three teams are announced and celebrated on Innovation Expo day.

2024 Competition

Winners

First Prize ($10,000)
Knee-sy Does It — Jalen Bailey, Grace Fukazawa, Maggie Gibson, Brandon Sems

These students developed and built an automated and heated knee cuff/physical therapy device.

Second Prize ($5,000)
TinnX — Nicholas DiMeglio, Rohit Jayas, Shady Kamel

The team created digital technology that gives relief to those who hear chronic ringing noises in their ears.

Third Prize ($2,500)
Pulse PairIt — Nina Burden, Alicia Cardoso, Stephanie Deren, Arianna Gehan, Julia Zatyko

Pulse PairIt is a neonatal vital-sign monitor that can be placed non-invasively atop an infant’s chest.

Finalists

These teams competed for prizes on April 26.

Personal Guide Belt (Computer Engineering)
Matthew Bairstow, Philip Mascaro, Aidan Rudd, Jeffrey Tharakan, Jett Tinik

OpenTogetherTube Load Balancer (Software Engineering)
Victor Giraldo, Carson McManus, Michael Moreno, Christopher Roddy

Knee-sy Does It (Biomedical Engineering)
Jalen Bailey, Grace Fukazawa, Maggie Gibson, Brandon Sems

PulsePairIt (Biomedical Engineering)
Nina Burden, Alicia Cardoso, Stephanie Deren, Arianna Gehan, Julia Zatyko

Soft Exosuit for Patients with Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SESMA) 2.0 (Mechanical Engineering)
Kevin Castner, Jr., Sara Deuidicibus, Steven Sack, Jack Santoro

TinnX (Interdisciplinary – Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Mechanical Engineering)
Nicholas DiMeglio, Rohit Jayas, Shady Kamel