School Of Business Announces Winners Of 2026 High School Entrepreneurship And Artificial Intelligence Pitch Competition
The Stevens School of Business conducted its second High School Entrepreneurship and Artificial Intelligence Video Pitch Competition, continuing its commitment to empowering students to use the latest technology to create innovative solutions to real-world problems.
The program offers high school students an opportunity to showcase their entrepreneurial spirit through artificial intelligence. Each entrant is tasked with creating a two-minute video pitch for their business idea, including the problem it solves, their solution and the role AI plays, a market analysis and the potential business impact.
“This competition challenges high school students with an entrepreneurial spirit to solve real-world problems using AI tools,” said Joelle Saad-Lessler, the Associate Dean of Undergraduates at the School of Business. “The competition perfectly reflects our mission to use technology for innovation that improves the world. The many clever, forward-thinking submissions we received highlight exactly the kind of creative, ambitious thinkers who thrive at Stevens and graduate ready to build, lead and shape the future of business through AI.”
Each submission was judged on five criteria: innovation and creativity, application of AI, feasibility, presentation skills and business impact. A panel of judges consisting of Stevens faculty, staff and alumni determined the top three finishers, who won $500, $250 and $100, respectively.
“Before this competition, I mostly thought of Stevens as just a top engineering school,” said second-place winner Claire Guo. “But now, this experience has shown me that Stevens is a college that combines the usage of technology with finance and marketing, teaching students how to actually apply those tools to real-world problems.”
This year's winner was Aryan Saksena from the Pingry School in New Jersey. The project, GradeLift, addresses a growing global challenge around the misuse of generative AI in schools. Many students use AI tools to produce polished essays quickly, but the result can bypass the learning process and fail to develop stronger writing skills. At the same time, writing independently can feel difficult and time-consuming, leading students to rely on tools that complete the work for them.
GradeLift fills the gap between those two points. It is an AI-powered, rubric-aligned revision coach that analyzes a student's draft and provides structured feedback aligned with the teacher's grading standards. Rather than generating new text, GradeLift helps students improve their own work, supporting authorized, integrity-safe use that benefits both students and schools.
“Building GradeLift and pitching it to Stevens made me realize that I genuinely enjoy business,” Aryan said. “Coming up with the idea and actually executing it into something schools and students would pay for was rewarding and fun. The competition showed me that I can pursue this kind of work in a more serious, professional setting in college, and I am now actively interested in doing so.”
2026 Results
FIRST PLACE
Aryan Saksena
10th Grade | Pingry School (New Jersey)
GradeLift
SECOND PLACE
Claire Guo
10th Grade | High Technology High School (New Jersey)
UniValue
THIRD PLACE
Scott Beiter
10th Grade | Charles W. Baker High School (New York)
Voomi
Honorable Mention
Minna Klemettinen | Yew Chung International School of Shanghai (Puxi) (China) | WattWise
Reeyan Thakrar | Lenape High School (New Jersey) | Ressy
Sohil Parekh | Edision High School (New Jersey) | Crowdguard AI
