Although N.C. State’s men’s basketball team may have suffered a first round defeat in the NCAA tournament, the University will not desert the spirit of March Madness anytime soon.
Starting today, the Hunt Library plays host to Startup Madness, an ACC Tournament for Student Startups.
Startup Madness is a competition that seeks the best and brightest entrepreneurial minds at the university level, and seeks to expose them to new and exciting ventures in a tournament fashion.
In its third year, the competition will be at N.C. State for the first time, moving away from its base in Durham.
Students from all 14 constituent universities have been invited to participate, and similar to the NCAA tournament, these universities will face off in one-on-one match-ups, by which the winner will advance according to recommendations from a panel of judges. Each university may submit up to two teams for a total field of 22 different companies.
This year, the University selected one undergraduate and one graduate company to represent N.C. State at the competition.
Representing N.C. State’s undergraduate program is a company called Koyr. Founded by Mark Delgado, a senior in nuclear engineering, the KoyrGeiger is a device that could be used in nuclear and medical facilities to monitor radiation levels and transmit those measurements directly to a facility’s computer system, giving the facility real-time radiation data.
The beauty of Delgado’s Geiger is in its size. The device is no bigger than a smartphone and can be used with wireless devices such as Android smartphones.
“It could be used for advanced area monitoring, where the detector is stationary, or it could be part of a constantly moving network of monitors, with detectors clipped to the belts of employees,” Delgado said in an interview with the University.
Representing N.C. State at the graduate level is the team PlasmaGro, a company specializing in sustainable, onsite and on-demand production of nitrogen fertilizer for use in commercial agriculture. Team members are in the entrepreneurship and technology commercialization concentration in the N.C. State Poole College of Management’s Jenkins MBA program. The team members are: Kellet Atkinson, Wahyudi Gunawan, Eko Prasetaiwan and Ramin Shahriari.
Scott Kelly, the organizer of Startup Madness, said the judging process will be held to three criteria.
“The first is [the] ability to present [the idea],” Kelly said. “The second is how big your project is, what kind of impact you’re going to have on the world, and the last one is your ability to execute your idea successfully.”
The winner of the competition will travel to Silicon Valley to dine and network with corporate leaders at Facebook and Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm.
Teams will attend a welcoming event at HUB Raleigh the evening of March 26, and the bracket-style competition rounds will be held throughout the day on Wednesday, March 27. The public is invited to view the team presentations. Semi-finals will be held from 10 a.m. to noon, and 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. The Final Four teams will compete at 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
