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LBNL Pitch Competition

Berkeley Lab hosts an annual pitch competition for scientist-entrepreneurs who participate in the Lab I-Corps Lite program, providing them with the opportunity to practice pitching their ideas. The first place winner advances to a DOE-wide pitch competition to compete for cash prizes supporting market research.

LBNL Pitch Competition 2021

On September 9, 2021, a handful of Berkeley Lab scientists participated in an annual pitch competition hosted by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), making their business cases for their inventions in front of a panel of judges.

Left to right: Winners Lukas Hackl, Bishoy Kamel, Nick Buraglio, and Peter Grant

The winners of the pitch competition are:

  • First Place: Lukas Hackl (ETA) for “Aepnus Technology, an Electrochemical Platform Technology for the Refinement of Battery Minerals”
  • Second Place: Bishoy Kamel (JGI) for “Rapid Development of COVID Precise Diagnostics”
  • Third Place (tied):
    • Nick Buraglio (ESnet) for “Hecate: Directing happiness to internet service provider customer” (artificial intelligence/machine learning-driven traffic engineering for high profile networks
    • Peter Grant (ETA) for “SmartRecirc—Near Zero Waste Hot Water Distribution”

Read the full story.

LBNL Pitch Competition 2020

The LBNL Pitch Competition 2020 was held on October 8 from 1:30-3:30 pm. The winners received cash prizes to be applied towards customer discovery:

  • First Place: Andrew Haddad (Energy Technologies Area)
  • Second Place: Dilip Vasudevan (Computing Sciences Area)
  • Third Place: Reshma Singh (Energy Technologies Area)

Contestants/Technologies:

Sam Birenbaum, A Sustainable, Affordable, Transportable HUD-compliant Home

Spencer Dutton, Packaged HVAC and Energy Storage

Christoph Gehbauer, Comfortable Buildings that Reduce Cost – The Revolution with Dynamic Facades

Andrew Z. Haddad, Providing Economic Value from Produced Oil and Gas Waters

George Michelogiannakis, Reconfigurable HPC Networks With Emerging Photonics

Reshma Singh, I-SPACE Workstation Hub

Dilip Vasudevan, Superchips: Energy Efficient Superconducting Electronic Chips

 

LBNL Pitch Competition 2019

Eight IPO I-Corps Lite graduates pitched their technology commercialization plans to a panel of industry judges at LBNL’s 2019 Pitch Competition. August 1.

The most compelling business cases were awarded funds to continue customer discovery efforts.

  • 1st place: Erika Suzuki — radioactivity mapping
  • 2nd place: Andrew Voyles — radionuclide production for nuclear medicine
  • 3rd place: Arun Persaud — soil health system

 

 

Other entrepreneurial researcher participants included

  • Pete Christensen – recyclable polymer for circular plastics economy
  • Nicholas DeForest – investing energy resources for buildings or microgrids
  • Ernst Oberortner – DNA, RNA, and protein sequence design
  • Maren Wehrs and Yuzhong Liu – natural dyes for safer, sustainable textiles
  • Ning Sun – renewable ionic liquids

The judging panel questioned each participant to identify top features and next steps for business planning. The panel included

  • Thomas Schenkel, LBNL physicist/senior administrator and 2017 pitch competition winner
  • Kevin Rodondi, I-Corps instructor and UCSF pharmacy professor
  • Rhonda Shrader, Haas School of Business executive director of entrepreneurship
  • Virginia Rath, Quotient Design Research consultant and Haas faculty member
  • Mike Biddle, Evok Innovations managing director

Interested in a future pitch event and entrepreneurial training? Contact Gregg Scharfstein, GAScharfstein@lbl.gov at 510.486.7586.