Cornell Tech awarded four student startup companies with pre-seed funding worth up to $100,000 in its ninth annual Startup Awards competition. A fifth company won a new startup award focused on public-interest technology.

The awards were announced at Cornell Tech’s Open Studio, the campus’s 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 Cornell and Cornell Tech faculty and staff, selected the winning student teams.

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“This year’s Startup Awards finalists have all made major strides in solving problems in health care, 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.”

Startup Award winners receive co-working space at the Tata Innovation Center as part of the $100,000 investment.

The 2022 Startup Award Winners are:

• Kaveat, which helps people understand their contracts by translating the legal jargon into 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; and
• Nobul, which empowers patients to take control over their medical care by providing patients tools to help them understand their medical bills, as well as identify and resolve errors.

In addition, MyLÚA Health – a digital maternal care platform that predicts risk of pregnancy complications via a patient app and clinician dashboard – won a new startup award, the Siegel Family Endowment PiTech (Public Interest Tech) Startup Award. The award is for the startup focused on creating the most positive societal impact with their efforts. This new award is made possible by the generosity of Cornell Tech Council Chair David Siegel and the Siegel Family Endowment.

The Startup Awards are a capstone of the Studio curriculum, a critical component of the master’s experience at Cornell Tech which brings together multidisciplinary 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.

Since the inception of Startup Studio in 2014, nine companies have been acquired; the latest is Pilota, which uses machine learning to help the commercial airline industry predict the risk of disruption associated with each flight. Pilota was acquired earlier this year by Hopper.

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.

Students who don’t enroll in Startup Studio can take either 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, students focus specifically on product development and business models that accelerate positive change in public, nonprofit, for-profit and hybrid sectors.

Jess Campitiello is the digital communications assistant at Cornell Tech.