By Josh Siatkowski | Staff Writer
The sharks were out in Waco Tuesday night, but they weren’t looking for fish. Instead, they were on the hunt for something much more elusive: the best student-founded AI-based company.
The Foster Campus for Business and Innovation was alive with presentations for the Baylor AI Venture Challenge, an AI-based startup competition put on by Baylor Business Dean David Szymanski and the entrepreneurship department. In just under a month-long application window, the competition received over 60 submissions from student teams. Ten were then selected to pitch to a judges’ panel of faculty and industry experts Tuesday night.
“We’re going to find out today what this means, how AI is transforming the world,” Szymanski said to the students ahead of the competition.
Presentations spanned the spectrum of industries — and even created industries of their own. From stock trading algorithms, to road-trip planning apps, to programs that calculate the best way to produce a chemical compound, students brought their best ideas in an attempt to secure a portion of the $5,000. Students of all majors, from neuroscience to aviation, made their way to the stage.
As creative as those ideas were, the judges — which included entrepreneurship professors Dr. Stephen Zhang and Bradley Norris, and executives Charley Donaldson and Jeremy Martin — had their work cut out for them. Ultimately, they gave the blue ribbon to Houston junior Ava Truan and Danville, Calif., junior Christopher Ratana-Kelley, the founders of ZoneIt AI.
After meeting each other during a study abroad in Singapore last summer, Ratana-Kelley and Truan put their heads together to solve a problem in the home-building process: the endless and convoluted regulations that homebuilders must navigate. Their solution? ZoneIt AI.
“ZoneIt AI streamlines the permitting and design process, making it easier for you to break ground on a build,” Truan, a professional selling and entrepreneurship major, said.
The pair will receive $3,000 to help finance their venture. Ratana-Kelley, a finance and management information systems major and a 3-year U.S. Army veteran, plans to immediately use that money to get the business up and running.
“The first thing I’m going to do is use some of that money to actually start our LLC … and then invest a little and make our website better,” Ratana-Kelley said.
It’s the first step in a long journey that requires not only more capital, but more work. But it’s one step closer to their ultimate goal of a successful enterprise.
“If we can get big enough, I would love to do this full-time,” Truan said.
While only one team received the first-place prize, three other applications received awards. AVA, an AI academic advisory, won the “Epsilon Award” for demonstrating excellence in AI application, while material science startup AtomOS won $500 with the third place prize.
Finishing in second place and receiving a $1,500 prize was Prism, founded by Las Vegas sophomore Casey McCabe and Kirkland, Wash., sophomore Zach Hayton. McCabe had the idea for Prism, an AI tool to test media bias on webpages, through his father, who is a journalist in Nevada. He worked alongside Hayton, a Business Fellow with finance and computer science majors, to help develop the product.
“[Prism] does real-time bias detection and rhetorical analysis,” McCabe said. “It’s got a large commercial application.”
Even though they didn’t win it all, McCabe said the impact of the prize is significant for Prism.
“We have been able to get this in front of cybersecurity experts, data scientists, journalists, and they all wanted to see a proof of concept, but it’s a paradox,” McCabe said. “You can’t get proof of concept done without funding. So $1,500 … sounds like a small amount, but that’s enough to purchase a substantial data set to build out our product and get to the level we need to get to.”
