Today, the Harvard Innovation Labs announced that more than 420 ventures are joining the 2021 Spring Venture Program.
“Last spring, soon after welcoming hundreds of students to the Harvard Innovation Labs at our in-person Venture Program orientation, we transitioned to entirely virtual programming,” said Matt Segneri, Bruce and Bridgitt Evans Executive Director of the Harvard Innovation Labs. “Since then, our team has worked tirelessly on enhancing both the quantity and quality of the virtual resources we provide to innovators and entrepreneurs.”
He added, “As we enter our third virtual Venture Program cohort, we look forward to offering the Harvard-founded teams a wide range of opportunities to interact and learn from industry experts from around the world, Harvard Innovation Labs staff advisors, and each other. Their time in the Venture Program will serve to guide and engage them as they work on turning their ideas into products and services with real world impact.”
The Harvard Innovation Labs has designed two tracks for the 2021 Spring Venture Program: The Build It track, designed for students at more advanced stages of building an organization around their products and services, and the Start It track, focused on helping students develop ideas at their earliest stages.
Of the 427 ventures accepted into the Harvard Innovation Labs Spring Venture Program, 121 were chosen as semi-finalists for the President’s Innovation Challenge, a call to action for students and select alumni pursuing ventures that push the boundaries of their fields. Throughout the spring, they’re challenged not only to better understand individual and community needs, but to become better leaders, colleagues, and human beings. In May, finalists compete for $510,000 in prizes, funded entirely by a generous gift from the Bertarelli Foundation.
Below is the list of 121 President’s Innovation Challenge semi-finalists.
- AcousticaBio: Advancing manufacturing for life.
- Adventus Robotics: Developing autonomous solutions for hospitals and airports.
- Afya Pamoja: A digital patient feedback service to provide performance management data for public healthcare managers in Tanzania.
- AI Bias Consulting: Providing auditing services to help identify and mitigate algorithmic bias for companies building machine learning-based applications.
- AKKO: Providing comprehensive, affordable, and simple protection for the everyday items you rely on.
- AllHere: Fostering student attendance, engagement, and success with mobile messaging powered by AI.
- All In: A companion app built for watching live sports on TV that uses prediction questions and breakout rooms to build intimate fan communities.
- Almond Finance: Providing people around the world with the tools they need to escape poverty and achieve economic growth through mobile financial inclusion.
- Altru Technologies, Inc.: A platform that curates a custom portfolio of nonprofits for your donation based on the causes and issues you care about in a local context.
- AppBuddy: A marketplace that connects prehealth students who need application help to “Helpers.”
- BamBoo Fund: Enabling businesses to provide their employees with pensions at almost no cost by leveraging a network of insurance companies and banks.
- Beacon Bio: Developing PhonoGraft, a novel device for repairing damaged eardrums with decreased procedure times and improved healing and hearing outcomes.
- BiomassTrust: Breakthrough IP able to validate the largest potential of eucalyptus biomass in the world, allowing it to comply with wood pellets fuel.
- BizBox: A mobile-first business tool for home services professionals on the go.
- BlockCarbon: Utilizing blockchain technology to solve the transparency issue of China's carbon emission market and increase its liquidity.
- Blossom: An app to connect neurodiverse families in the neighborhood.
- Bowlton: Partnering with quick-service restaurants to prepare and serve their food fresh in strategically placed robotic kiosks.
- Breaktime: A non-profit social enterprise that elevates young adults out of homelessness through transitional employment and empowerment.
- Burgers To Beasts: Helping individuals design ways of mindful living to help them live whole and feel amazing, while keeping their health and happiness at the forefront.
- Campaigners for Change International: Grooming and empowering entrepreneurs by providing them business development skills, as well as exposing corruption in public offices and demanding prosecution.
- Cancer Collective: Empowering cancer patients to access their own medical records, and developing a platform for them to donate their data for research.
- Cardinal: A user-friendly LCA tool for early design stages with comprehensive optimization strategies.
- CaribEd: Restoring hope to students left behind amidst a crisis by creating and distributing engaging learning materials.
- CassVita Inc.: Specializing in converting cassava into gluten-free flour that can be used to make African cuisine in significantly less time.
- Chaku Foods: Making better food for better outcomes.
- Clade Network: A phone app to make it easier for college students to help each other out by making it easier to know who can help, and providing rewards.
- Clingo: For parents who want their kids to build healthy habits, the Clingo app supports them with how tos, telehealth, and guided daily supervision.
- Colombia Tierra de Luz: Showing Colombian children the richness of Colombia through children's books and other didactic content.
- Condor Software: Helping life science finance teams scale clinical trial and R&D accounting.
- Conduct Science: A marketplace for revenue-based tech transfer of academic inventions.
- Critical Healthcare Information Integration Network, Inc.: A free-for-use SMS messaging system providing validated medical reference information to community health workers in rural settings.
- Cupid Health: Building healthcare technology solutions to improve human health.
- Cúram Neurotherapeutics: Protecting and regenerating neurons in neurodegenerative disorders to restore function to patients in urgent need of new treatments.
- Dear Loneliness: A crowdsourced art exhibit, research study, and COVID-19 archival effort collecting thousands of letters on loneliness from around the world.
- Debate Spaces: Creating and delivering a unique debate-centered curriculum to inspire middle school students to be active and engaged citizens.
- DemRep, LLC: An unbiased tool for holding our Congressional Representatives accountable.
- Eco Young Art Education: Providing the most eco-friendly K-12 arts education: teachers & learners enjoy solving urgent environmental problems like they enjoy creating art.
- Ethix.AI: Upskilling individuals in AI coding, while helping them think critically about issues of bias in AI development.
- Evera: Providing on-demand at-home lab testing.
- EverActive: Developing wearables to track and assess performance during strength training sessions, and provide customized training programs.
- Falcon Health: Revolutionizing maternal and fetal health through intelligent fetal monitoring to prevent stillbirths and save babies.
- FlashCash: Allowing consumers to pay with their phone camera’s QR code reader, rather than cash or credit.
- Genbiotics: Creating genetically engineered bacterial platforms to treat respiratory diseases.
- GenUnity: A civic ‘gym,’ GenUnity provides structured, immersive, part-time civic experiences to support adults to accelerate grassroots change in communities.
- GetUsPPE: Using equitable logistics algorithms to redistribute scarce PPE to those who need it most.
- Girls Code Chess: Inspiring and teaching girls the game of chess, CS, and AI through play, workshops, and multi-week programs.
- Grow Therapy: Enabling mental health professionals to launch and scale their own in-network teletherapy practice.
- Harvest: Providing a platform for students and/or parents to bundle together in order to collectively bargain for student loan rates.
- Heirloom: Moving oral history into the digital age by providing our users with the resources to create a digital legacy of a loved one.
- HeraldAPI: Building digital infrastructure that enables insurance companies to seamlessly connect to partners who sell their insurance online.
- Hibiscus Monkey: Pioneering “soil-to-skin” mass beauty, creating superior products that shatter stereotypes around beauty, personal care and menstrual needs in India.
- Hive Health: A business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) health insurer providing affordable, quality healthcare to Filipino employees through a data science-powered digital platform.
- Hope Storytelling Project: Creating poetry workshops and engagement to address feelings of collective grief and isolation and to help navigate through sudden loss and bereavement.
- KadaKareer: A one-stop-platform for low-income Filipino students on all things related to career exploration, navigation, and preparation.
- Karivez Bio: Developing a platform to enable oral delivery and amplified distribution of therapeutic peptides, proteins and oligonucleotides.
- KARL Inc.: Planning personalized dates for couples based on their interests, budget, and availability.
- Karma Health: Executing high-quality, affordable primary healthcare programs for local governments.
- LABHYA FOUNDATION: Enabling governments to create and implement Social-Emotional Learning programs for vulnerable children in India, at scale.
- LazyGenius: Cut costs. Get out of debt. Achieve your dreams. LazyGenius makes your dreams a reality through affordable, timely, actionable financial planning.
- Leading A(head) Collaborative: Co-creating with community to dismantle systemic, intergenerational trauma to support the whole child and create generational change.
- Limax Biosciences: A strong, stretchy, and flexible hydrogel adhesive inspired by nature to seal wounds and promote healing.
- Lioness: A storytelling firm whose mission is to democratize the voices heard in the media. Lioness helps everyday people bring untold stories to light.
- Metric: Analytics software that empowers companies and investors to measure and improve their environmental, social, and governance performance.
- Mixed Millennial: Community-based jewelry brand that services the mixed race and multiethnic community.
- More Than Colors: Taking old and unused makeup and turning it into paint, which is then given to underserved kids and communities to provide art education and therapy.
- Myanmar Legal Representation Project: Connecting a network of pro bono attorneys to those with evidence of human rights atrocities in Myanmar to support international accountability efforts.
- My Dental Key: An online dental education platform transforming the way students learn dentistry to foster success in class, clinic, and beyond.
- NeutroCheck Ltd: Developing a medical device to rapidly identify chemotherapy patients at risk of a life-threatening condition called neutropenic sepsis.
- New University: A digital first university serving to fill the physical school capacity, skills, and knowledge gaps in higher education in Myanmar.
- New Voters: A non-profit, student-run organization that seeks to register young voters and promote active citizenry.
- Night Inn: A direct-to-consumer platform that brings personalized and engaging hospitality experiences to the comfort of your own home.
- Nour: A line of tinted, mineral-based sunscreen developed for dark skin tones.
- Octopus AI: Otitis media infection diagnosis from home.
- ORIENTAMI: A digital career coaching program helping high school students craft a better future.
- PACare: A digital app to decrease post-operative complications for patients and reduce readmissions from these complications for hospitals.
- Paway: Smart Dog Walking: A free dog walking app with a community of dog walkers who share dog safety alerts and tips to keep their dogs fit, healthy, and safe.
- Planet Bee: Halting poverty-driven deforestation in the Amazon by making indigenous beekeeping a sizable source of income with our co-reimagined beehives design.
- PredictionStrike, Inc.: A fantasy sports stock exchange.
- Promakhos Therapeutics: Supporting the immune system to fight Crohn’s disease.
- Quetzales de Salud: Helping uninsured immigrants establish long-term access to comprehensive medical care.
- Reach Biotech: Developing an affordable AI-powered microscope for instant diagnosis of infectious diseases, such as malaria, from the smartphone of a patient.
- Rhymes with Reason: An e-learning app that helps students learn important English words by showcasing their existence in widely known music lyrics.
- Salvos Therapeutics: A T-cell therapy company on a mission to harness the immune system to cure cancer.
- SdreamStyle: A live-shopping platform that lets buyers shop new and used fashion from others' closets at a discount, contributing towards a more sustainable planet.
- Semitone: A platform for interactive music education and creation that removes the high-cost barrier preventing many from engaging with music.
- Shamiri Institute: A data-driven organization that develops and implements low cost and low stigma mental health interventions to help young people in Africa.
- Shelly Xu Design: The first fashion-tech startup to make beautiful, accessible, 100% zero waste designs.
- Sherohub LLC: Launched to affect positive global social transformation around the prevention of—and response to—domestic violence through video game technology.
- Shypyard: A serverless development platform similar to Amazon Lambda, with a focus on ecommerce developers.
- Sinogenes: An oncology platform embedded with a deep learning-based image classification framework for personalized cancer therapy.
- SIRIUS: A gamified e-learning platform, targeted to the teaching and learning of Latin in Italian high schools.
- Sparks Within Reach: Providing supplementary education for students facing housing insecurity, with a focus on online services during COVID-19.
- STEAMid: Curating and recommending academic resources to high school and higher-ed students.
- StepUp: A digital solution for patients with Peripheral Artery Disease that uses AI to predict risk, intervene in real time, and alert care teams.
- Stratagen Bio: Developing a suite of quantitative tissue oxygen sensors to improve patient care and outcomes in oncology, trauma, and tissue health.
- Students vs. Pandemics: An interdisciplinary group of graduate and undergraduate students committed to promoting education, advocacy, and service.
- Suadela: Increasing young women and girls’ power by building their negotiation skills.
- Synses Designs: Providing synthesized models perceptible by the sense of touch to improve access to STEM education for students with disabilities.
- syrup.tech: A machine learning-powered enterprise SaaS solution for inventory optimization for apparel and fashion.
- The Apprentice Project: Enabling underprivileged children to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty through 21st-century skill development, exposure, and opportunities.
- The Career Games: Offering fun ways for kids to explore different careers by playing games that recreate key aspects of jobs like law and medicine.
- The Concordium: An e-support network matching socially isolated seniors with youth volunteers via video-chat, with the aim of combatting the loneliness epidemic.
- The Dive: Harvard and other prominent university members explaining news topics of their expertise in a very conversational, snappy, and easy-to-digest way.
- The Equity Network: A three-sided marketplace connecting Black, Latinx and Native American talent with mentors from top b-schools and employers committed to diverse hiring.
- The FIX: Empowering residency applicants with information about a hospital's gender equity culture, thereby holding programs accountable through transparency.
- Third Room: A predictive social network to connect K12 with industry professionals in biotech/life sciences.
- Thrive!: Helping local governments break cycles of poverty in communities of color and break the systems that create them.
- Tree-Plenish: Partnering with high schools across the United States to plan tree-planting events that offset each school's paper usage.
- Troav: Using machine learning to predict demand of convenience items, stock them in gig cars, and deliver them in only five minutes.
- TruChainz: Discovering new disease therapies using a proprietary library of antibody fragments that accurately replicates the human immune system.
- TuneBio: Developing best-in-class gene therapies by leveraging a high throughput screening platform for novel capsids and gene regulatory elements.
- Visionairy Health (VH): Developing an automated chest x-ray screening solution to reduce radiologists’ workload and increase their efficiency.
- Vixemble: Computer vision-powered video analytics software-as-a-service (SaaS) for manual discrete manufacturing processes.
- VizCode: Automating the visualization of any given codebase to optimize onboarding, GitHub pull requests, debugging, and testing.
- Vocal Justice: Teaching undervalued high schoolers how to communicate confidently, authentically, and persuasively about social justice—wherever they aim to lead.
- Wave Learning Festival: Combatting long-standing educational inequities exacerbated by COVID-19 with free and engaging live seminars, tutoring, and college and career support.
- Welfie: A digital health company equipping schools to more effectively address student health needs— physical, mental, and social-emotional.
- Your Space: An NGO focused on the elderly’s physical, social & emotional well-being—to empower and prepare them for an enriching post-retirement life.
- Youth Justice Alliance: Establishing high school legal aid clinics to provide free legal services to lower income communities and create a pipeline into the legal field.
- Zipmo: Making it easy to gift thoughtful and memorable experiences to your loved ones.
- ZircoPlant: Developing innovative technologies enabling clinicians to predictably perform autogenous therapies for dental tissue regeneration.
