Cornell Tech Announces Winners of its 2022 Startup Awards
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Five student companies receive co-working space and $100,000 in pre-seed funding to pursue their startups after graduation
NEW YORK, NY – Cornell Tech awarded five student startup companies with pre-seed funding worth up to $100,000 in its ninth annual Startup Awards competition. The awards were announced at Cornell Tech’s Open Studio, the campus’ end-of-year celebration of startups and presentation of cutting-edge research, projects, and companies founded at Cornell Tech. A panel of tech industry leaders and executives, along with members of the Cornell and Cornell Tech faculty and staff, selected the winning student teams.
“This year’s Startup Awards finalists have all made major strides in solving problems in healthcare, data privacy, housing, and other fields, and I am incredibly proud of all that they have accomplished in their time at Cornell Tech,” said Greg Morrisett, the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech. “It has been a wonderful experience watching these students rise above the challenges of the past year to build some truly impressive companies.”
2022 Startup Award Winners are:
- Kaveat, which helps people understand their contracts by translating the legal jargon into simple plain English
- Abstractive Health, which helps doctors read and write clinical notes faster with an automated summary
- Canary Privacy, which helps businesses test, monitor, and fix privacy issues on their websites and apps to protect user data and ensure compliance
- Nobul, which empowers patients to take control over their medical care by providing patients tools to understand their medical bills, as well as identify and resolve errors
- MyLÚA Health, a digital maternal care platform that predicts risk of pregnancy complications via a patient app and clinician dashboard; thereby reducing mortality and ensuring equitable outcomes
MyLÚA Health won a special new award, the Siegel Family Endowment PiTech Startup Award, which is for the startup that is creating the most positive societal impact with their efforts. This award is made possible by the generosity of Siegel Family Endowment, the foundation of Cornell Tech Council Chair, David Siegel.
This year’s 10th-anniversary Open Studio also included a special alumni panel moderated by Aaron Holiday MBA ’12.
Since January, yet another alumni company has been acquired: Pilota, acquired by Hopper — becoming the ninth acquisition since the inception of Startup Studio. The previous eight companies include: Otari acquired by Peloton; Datalogue acquired by Nike; Auggi acquired by Seed Health; Uru, acquired by Adobe; Trigger Finance, acquired by Circle; Gitlinks, acquired by Infor; Bowtie, acquired by MINDBODY; and Thread Learning, acquired by CentralReach. In total, startups that have been founded and spun out on campus — including Startup Studio and the Runway Startup Postdocs at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute — have raised more than $215 million in funding and employ more than 400 people.
Cornell Tech’s Startup Studio program is run by Kevin Yien along with Chief Practice Officer Josh Hartmann; Lyel Resner, Head of PiTech Studio; and Leandra Elberger, Studio Director. The Startup Awards are a capstone of the Studio curriculum, a critical component of the master’s experience at Cornell Tech which brings together multi-disciplinary teams to solve real-world problems. In their final semester, students can choose to form teams and enroll in Startup Studio, where they combine their diverse program disciplines — computer science, operations research and information engineering, business, health tech, urban tech, connective media, electrical and computer engineering, and law — to develop ideas and prototypes for their startup in an academic setting.
Students who don’t enroll in Startup Studio could choose to take the BigCo Studio or PiTech Studio tracks. In BigCo Studio students learn to innovate within larger companies, including navigating complex cultures, pitching to the people who control budgets, and building projects to scale. In PiTech Studio, or Public Interest Tech Studio, students focus specifically on product development and business models that accelerate positive change in public, non-profit, for-profit, and hybrid sectors.
Startup Award winners also receive coworking space at the Tata Innovation Center, as part of the $100,000 investment. Designed by Weiss/Manfredi architects, the first-of-its-kind building houses an extraordinary mix of cutting-edge companies working alongside groundbreaking Cornell academic teams: from recent Cornell Tech graduates hustling to commercialize a new idea, to start-ups on the verge of explosive growth, and established companies developing leading-edge technologies and products. Tenants include tech and investment firm Two Sigma, Sapienza, Ferrero International, Tata Consultancy Services, and NYC FIRST.
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About Cornell Tech
Cornell Tech is Cornell University’s groundbreaking campus for technology research and education on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Our faculty, students, and industry partners work together in an ultra-collaborative environment, pushing inquiry further and developing meaningful technologies for a digital society. Founded in partnership with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and the City of New York, Cornell Tech achieves global reach and local impact, extending Cornell University’s long history of leading innovation in computer science and engineering.
