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The CMU Swartz Center Holds It's Biggest McGinnis Venture Competition and Social Enterprise Prize at CMU!
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| The annual McGinnis Venture and Social Enterprise Prize Competition was held at Carnegie Mellon University and the Swartz Center on Tuesday, March 17, with startups competing for the largest prize pool ever at $375K.
The competition, which has been held since 2004 and was established by an endowment from the Swartz Center's long time friend and entrepreneur Gerald McGinnis, founder of Respironics, was the largest competition yet with over 400 in attendance. Held at CMU's McConomy Auditorium and the Swartz Center, the event was kicked off by Meredith Meyer Grelli, Swartz Center Managing Director, with opening remarks given by Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O'Conner, County Executive Sara Innamorato and U.S. Senator Dave McCormick. This year's event was the most competitive to date, with a 70% increase in student entries over last year.
Throughout the day, 22 student-led startups pitched to a panel of 17 investors, who then judged the competition. Pitches ranged from a variety of industries and concepts, including drug discovery, video game hardware and of course, artificial intelligence.
The $375K prize pool was backed in part by new support from the David and Lindsay Morgenthaler Entrepreneurship and Innovation Fund. In total, the competition awarded $125K in cash investments and $250K in Amazon Web Service credits.
Congratulations to the winning teams!
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|  | First place Morgenthaler Prize: Analogical Engines
($50,000 + $100,000 AWS Credits)
| |  | Second place McGinnis Prize: Hermes Vision ($25,000 + $25,000 AWS Credits)
| |  | Second place McGinnis Prize: RapidEye ($25,000 + $25,000 AWS Credits
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Undergraduate Track Winners
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|  | First place Morgenthaler Prize: BasicsOS ($5,000 + $25,000 AWS Credits)
| |  | Second place McGinnis Prize: OS Keyboard ($4,000 + $10,000 AWS Credits)
| |  | Third place McGinnis Prize: Caboodl ($2,500 + $10,000 AWS Credits)
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Social Enterprise Prize, Crowd Favorite & Gebhardt Sandbox Fund Prizes
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|  | Social Enterprise Prize Graduate Prize: Pulse ($10,000 + $25,000 AWS Credits)
| |  | Crowd Favorite: SpoilSafe ($1,000 + $5,000 AWS Credits)
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|  | Gebhardt Sandbox Fund Prize: Pierogi Therapeutics ($1,000)
| |  | Gebhardt Sandbox Fund Prize: HeartTech ($1,000)
| |  | Gebhardt Sandbox Fund Prize: MedQ AI ($1,000)
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| CORE SWARTZ CENTER ANNOUNCEMENTS, EVENTS & PROGRAM DEADLINES
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| Powering the Future of Sport:
A Draft WeekShowcase on April 22
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| The Swartz Center will host a $1.575M national pitch competition during the NFL Draft week in partnership with the NFL, Pittsburgh Steelers and AI Strike Team. “Powering the Future of Sport: A Draft Week Showcase,” will highlight startups at the intersection of sports and tech on Wednesday, April 22 at the new Carnegie Mellon Robotics Innovation Center.
A panel of high profile judges, including Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner and Shark Tank investor; Ed Stack, Chairman of Dick's Sporting Goods and Foot Locker; Will Allen, former Pittsburgh Steeler and Partner at Magarac Venture Partners; and Deap Ubhi of AWS Startups, will decide the top pitches from around the country and the world.
The prize pool is made possible through major investments including $1M in cloud compute credit from AWS for Startups and $250K in investment from Magarac Venture Partners.
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| CMU VentureBridge Applications Closing Soon!
Are you a CMU founder ready to scale a bold, technically differentiated company?
Apply to VentureBridge, CMU’s flagship pre-seed accelerator fund, and join a fast-growing portfolio of companies collectively valued at over $1B including Gather AI, Trainwell, Artyc, Refiberd, Mach9
and Zensors.
Each year, the VentureBridge program backs a small number of ambitious founders with early capital, high-touch mentorship and direct access to top-tier investors and operators.
Only a few days left to apply!
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| 2026-28 Undergraduate Innovation Scholars Program
*APPLICANTS MUST ACTIVELY BE WORKING ON A STARTUP TO BE CONSIDERED*
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| Corporate Startup Lab Hosts ROAI Event, April 16
CMU’s Corporate Startup Lab is excited to invite you to the next event, ROAI on April 16, 2026 at the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship. Sponsored by Deloitte, this in-person event will explore how companies are translating AI investments into meaningful business outcomes. ROAI brings together leaders from industry, venture and academia to share what’s working, what’s not and what’s next.
Find out more, including the upcoming speaker announcements.
Email Sean Mawhinney, smawhinn@andrew.cmu.edu with questions.
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The Swartz Center Hosts Fireside Chat with Tris Jahanian and Martha Harty, Founders of EdTech Startup Martris
Last Friday, the Swartz Center hosted a Fireside Chat over lunch with special guests Tris Jahanian and Martha Harty, founders of edtech startup, Martris. During the talk, entitled "It's Not a Business, It's an App: Lessons Learned", Tris and Martha shared how they came to launch Martris, an edtech startup that brings conflict management to mobile, what it really takes to turn research into product, build across disciplines, navigate the startup journey and learn (and relearn) as founders.
Martha built her career in conflict resolution, developing pioneering interactive tools at Carnegie Mellon and helping teams learn how to navigate hard conversations, and Tris spent 30+ years engineering secure financial systems, holding two patents in high-performance distributed transaction authorization and building technology used by financial institutions nationwide.
The conversation was moderated by Anika Halappanavar, CMU Human Computer Interaction/Business student and 2025-27 Undergraduate Innovation Scholar.
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RoboForce Raises $52M to Scale Physical
AI Robo-Labor
RoboForce ('24 VentureBridge), a pioneer in Physical AI-powered Robo-Labor, has announced it has secured a $52M oversubscribed funding round, bringing the total raised to $67M. The new capital will accelerate the company’s next-generation robot foundation model, scale general-purpose Physical AI robots, and drive manufacturing readiness for commercial deployment.
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Gecko Robotics Inks U.S. Navy Contract
with $71M Ceiling
Gecko Robotics has announced it has secured a five-year contract from the U.S. Navy with a ceiling of $71M. The company utilizes a suite of robotics and artificial intelligence to perform inspections of infrastructure that would be difficult or dangerous for a human to complete. Gecko, which has previously worked with the Navy, will now start working on 18 ships in the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
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| Atlys Raises $36M in Series C Funding
Atlys, a New Delhi, India-based developer of a digital visa processing platform, has raised $36M in Series C funding. The company, founded by CMU and Innovation Scholar alumnus and CEO Mohak Nahta, intends to use the funds to accelerate its international expansion, specifically targeting new markets in Europe and the Middle East, and to advance its AI roadmap for automated document verification, eligibility checks and real-time traveler support.
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Agilow Founder Shiv Panjwani Selected to Poets & Quants' 2025 Most Disruptive MBA Startups List
Shiv Panjwani, Tepper School of Business MBA, James R. Swartz Entrepreneurial Fellow and co-founder of Agilow, was selected to Poets & Quants' 2025 Most Disruptive MBA Startups list. Agilow reduces meeting and messaging overload for software development teams by creating conversational, voice-AI teammates who can literally call you, talk to you on the phone and carry information across the team.
Working out of the Swartz Center, Shiv and his Agilow teammates were finalists and pitched in this year's McGinnis Venture Competition.
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VentureBridge '25 Startup, Mesh Selected to Pitch
at SXSW 2026
After a combined decade of building accounting tools at Carta, Erin Kim and Nandini Ramakrishnan founded Mesh to eliminate the last 20% of accounting tasks stuck in spreadsheets. The two were invited to pitch at SXSW 2026, which was held March 12-18 in Austin, Texas.
Mesh sits between your ERP and operational systems as the finance data transformation layer, converting complex spreadsheet logic into structured, auditable, deterministic scripts that generate and post journal entries. The result? They enable mid market and enterprise accounting teams to close faster, maintain auditability, and make faster decisions -- without the risk of AI hallucinations.
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|  | Nandini Ramakrishnan and Erin Kim at SXSW
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OTHER APPLICATION DEADLINES
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| Apply by April 21!
Apply for this summer’s Patient Safety Fellowship, focused on advancing the blueprint for an Ambition Health System—an ideal yet feasible health system that prevents harm before it occurs.
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STARTUP JOB OPPORTUNITIES
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| Jackson Square Ventures Summer Launchpad Program's 'Provenance' Seeks to Hire Design Co-founder from
Carnegie Mellon University
Provenance is building the infrastructure layer for financial models. It automatically tracks, explains and verifies every change inside Excel, so teams can understand how models evolve and collaborate without version chaos. Provenance is currently working with early-design partners across investment banking and private equity.
The company is hiring a founding product designer with deep UX experience to help shape the product from the ground up. Interested candidates can send an email to uskudar@provenancexl.com.
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| CONNECTS/START SMART LEGAL SEMINARS
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| Can't make a CONNECTS? Watch on our YouTube channel.
See the full schedule and register for ALL of the seminars here!
The CONNECTS Seminars will resume in the Fall 2026 semester.
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**SPRING 2026 START SMART LEGAL SERIES (Virtual)**
ALL virtual sessions held at 5-6:15 PM | ET
March 24 & April 7
How to Structure Your Capital Raise | Part 2 Workshop
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CMU ENTREPRENEURSHIP CLUBS
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| Click the images to find out more about each of the Clubs!
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The CMU T&E has a jobs board, available for people across the community to share and seek new opportunities in the startup and entrepreneurship ecosystem. Find out more and visit the website here.
The CMU Tech & Entrepreneurship group aims to build a bridge between CMU students and alumni across the startup and tech continuum. With main chapters in NYC, Pittsburgh, and SF, we offer a range of in-person and online events and programming in the form of panels, workshops, founder/investor engagements, startup support, and socials to foster collaboration, innovation, and networking opportunities.
Join 7,000+ Tartans on our Slack workspace and mailing list for resources and updates on how you can engage in the community and CMU entrepreneurial ecosystem.
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The following companies help directly support our programming and entrepreneurs.
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Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP
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Legal Services Weekly Virtual Office Hours with Matt Kirmayer
Mondays 1:00-3:00 PM ET (10-12 PT)
Matt Kirmayer of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, is offering office hours for newly established startup and emerging companies. Matt specializes in representing technology startups and emerging growth companies, assisting with entity formation, fundraising and overall growth needs. Startup companies with a founder who is a CMU graduate, undergraduate or alumni is eligible to register for
an appointment. Complete the Signup Form for a 30 minute session by the Thursday prior to your
desired appointment.
Contact Daria Stokes or Sean Mawhinney for office hours outside of these regular hours.
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PwC
Our purpose—to build trust in society and solve important problems—is at the core of everything we do. It guides how we serve our clients, our people and the world. To help our clients build trust and deliver sustained outcomes, PwC provides professional services across two segments: Trust Solutions and Consulting Solutions. Within these segments we bring a range of capabilities to help organizations solve faster, solve more and realize more value. These capabilities include cloud and digital, deals, ESG, cybersecurity and privacy, governance/boards, risk, transformation, tax services and much more. Across our global network of more than 295,000 professionals in 156 countries, we are committed to advancing quality in everything we do.
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| HOW TO WORK OUT OF THE SWARTZ CENTER
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Swartz Center Education and Resources
No matter what phase of the entrepreneurship cycle you're in, there are programs and resources at the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship that will take your idea to the next level.
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COMMUNITY OPPORTUNITIES/RESOURCES
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FIND OUT WHAT OUR PARTNERS ARE DOING
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Have startup news or opportunities to share? Have questions about the Swartz Center Weekly Bulletin? Send news, opportunities or questions to Sonya Ford, Program Manager.
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Carnegie Mellon University Swartz Center For Entrepreneurship
5000 Forbes Avenue | Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890 |
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