Innovation Showcase winners unveiled
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The Venture Club of Indiana on Tuesday announced the winners of its annual Innovation Showcase. Twenty startups presented their ideas before a panel of judges, with winners being announced in three categories: Digital Tech, Life Sciences and Ag Tech/Hard Tech.
Each first place winner received $10,000 in funding.
West Lafayette-based Covert Defenses won the top prize in the Digital Tech category. Founder Arvind Sundaram, a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University, has developed a platform designed to ensure zero downtime for military drones and industrial systems, even during cyberattacks.
Amplified Sciences, also based in West Lafayette, won first place in the Life Sciences category. The company is developing diagnostic tests aimed at detecting diseases earlier, most notably pancreatic cancer. The win comes less than two months after the company secured $275,000 in funding from the National Science Foundation.
Insignium AgTech, based in the Hamilton County town of Atlanta, won in the Ag Tech/Hard Tech category for its seed gene editing technology that allows plants to change color to signal to farmers when certain stresses begin, such as disease or an insect attack.
This year’s judges were Indiana University Kelley School of Business Professor of Entrepreneurship Susan Batchelder, Elevate Ventures CEO Christopher Day, and BioCrossroads CEO Vince Wong.
“It was so inspiring to hear the startup leaders pitch their respective companies in such a compelling and passionate way,” Wong said in a news release. “One couldn’t help but walk away from the day being impressed with the innovative solutions these Indiana startups are developing to address significant unmet market needs, leveraging the latest technologies, including AI, gene editing, and multiomics. Indeed, the present and future of Indiana’s innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem is very bright.”