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From left, Christopher James Halabi 11, M.Eng. '12, MBA '13, fund manager for the BR Venture Fund; Brandon Wright, MBA '12, CEO of Cognical; and Chinedu Eleanya ’12, CTO of Cognical.

The judges knew they were in for a challenge before they heard the pitches at the 2013 Cornell Venture Challenge April 17-18.

Equipped only with each team’s executive summary anda slide presentation, they began debating the strong points of each company over dinner the night before the competition. The finalists’ pitches, delivered to an overcrowded room, amplified the debate. Judges pleaded the case for one company over another and reached consensus only after prolonged deliberations. All agreed that this was the strongest group of Cornell Venture Challenge finalists in the competition’s 10-year history.

Each year the BR Venture Fund (BRV), Cornell’s seed-stage venture capital fund run by the students of the Samuel C. Johnson Graduate School of Management, invites entrepreneurs to compete in the Cornell Venture Challenge by pitching their startup ideas and plans to judges. In addition to competing for a cash award, participants receive feedback from venture capital professionals – an opportunity that past participants call a performance-learning goldmine. Outside investors also attended the pitches.

The 2013 Cornell Venture Challenge saw a 13 percent increase in applications, receiving 75 entries from Cornell-related companies. BR Venture Fund managers selected five finalists:

First place: $25,000 prize: Cognical

Founded by Brandon Wright, MBA ’12, and Chinedu Eleanya ’12, Cognical uses sophisticated deep learning algorithms to find hidden and complex patterns in data that are predictive of successful outcomes. Their SaaS platform drives revenue and cost savings for industries that require recurring decisions based on imperfect data, including finance, insurance and marketing.

Second place: $5,000 prize and matching $5,000 from the Cornell Center for Technology, Enterprise and Commercialization: Empire Robotics.

Founded by Bill Culley ’06, M.Eng. ’07, MBA ’12, and John Amend, Ph.D. ’13, Empire Robotics is a Cornell technology spinoff. The company has an exclusive license tointellectual property developed at Cornell and is commercializing a platform robotics technology through its first product, a universal robot gripper. This gripper solves a fundamental problem in the $25 billion industrial automation market.

Third place: $1,000 prize: Oratel Diagnostics

Led by CEO John Tauzel, MBA’13, Oratel Diagnostics has developed the initial application of a technology platform that identifies the ideal period to inseminate dairy cattle, saving farms at least $100 per cow per year.

Runners-up:

HistoVision provides proprietary technology to improve cancer clinical pathology tests by enabling simultaneous detection of two cancer biomarkers.

Yorango is an online platform to post, browse, rent, lease and manage property.

Christopher James Halabi ’11, M.Eng. '12, MBA '13, is a BR Venture Fund manager and College of Engineering Lester B. Knight Scholar.