With the CRV-backed Liftoff List competition and prize, student entrepreneurs get rewarded –
Summary
Those finalists: ChefMark, whose founders hailed from Wharton; Atomus, a company from the University of Southern California; IndieHub, from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business; and Arist, from Babson College, all pitched before a panel of judges. The veritable sharks who determined the winner included Dream Machine founder (and former TechCrunch editor) Alexia Bonatsos; Saar Gur, a managing partner at CRV; Hunter Walk, the co-founder of Homebrew; and ProductHunt co-founder and architect of the Weekend Fund Ryan Hoover. The company actually came together as part of a new initiative from the Defense Department that tries to use undergrads and graduate students at the country’s top schools to develop solutions to some of the military’s most intractable problems. However, they didn’t have access to the design files owned by original equipment manufacturers, because selling replacement parts is a huge revenue generator for military suppliers. “It’s a digital rights management for 3D printers, allowing them to get paid every time the military or an outside manufacturer 3D prints their design file.” Atomus may have been the ultimate winner of the first Liftoff List competition, but each company had a compelling pitch.