Two startups founded by UMaine students—one that’s developed a medical-education device and another that’s deploying agricultural technology to help farmers better monitor their crop storage—took home the top prizes at the 7th annual UMaine Business Challenge, the largest business-plan competition for college students in the state.
The UMaine Business Challenge received 27 applications from student entrepreneurs this year and named five finalists in mid March. Despite its name, the competition is open to students enrolled in any Maine college or university, though this year all the finalists were UMaine students.
Zephyrus Simulation took home the first-place prize of $5,000, provided by the competition’s sponsor, Business Lending Solutions. The company, which spun out of a biomedical engineering class at UMaine, has developed a mannequin with a diaphragm that mimics natural breathing patterns, as well as hyperventilation and obstructed breathing patterns, to help train medical professionals to diagnose and respond to critical respiratory situations.
“I’ve been at the University of Maine for five years,” said Patrick Breeding, a UMaine graduate student in biomedical engineering and Zephyrus’ CEO. “This is where everything started for me and my team, so competing in the UMaine Business Challenge is something that’s always been in our sights. Today is a special day.”
Due to a significant shortage of medical professionals, especially in Maine, Breeding said Zephyrus’ plan is to make the simulators available at low cost, enabling students across a wide range of disciplines to remotely obtain the medical training they’ll need to enter the workforce.
“Our mission is to make medical education available to everyone,” Breeding said. “Winning this competition gets us one step closer to accomplishing that goal.”
In December, Zephyrus received a $5,000 grant from VentureWell, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit that supports science and technology entrepreneurs, and before that it won a $500 prize at the Bangor region’s BigGig business pitch contest.
The competition’s technology prize went to IoTato, a company developing a technology platform to help potato farmers remotely monitor their storage facilities. The prize, provided by the Fournier Family Foundation, comes with a $5,000 award and the potential to receive another $5,000 if certain milestones are reached.
Nicholas Lajoie, who grew up on a multi-generational potato farm in northern Maine, founded IoTato to address a very real problem potato farmers face.
“Potatoes are stored in climate-controlled facilities during the winter months,” Lajoie explained to the judges. “If the temperature and humidity start to fluctuate outside of optimal range, a farmer will start to see rot.”
IoTato (the name is a play on the IoT acronym, which stands for internet-of-things) plans to provide a platform using affordable sensors that would provide feedback to the farmers and alert them immediately if the temperature or humidity are out of whack.
“The current solution to this problem is my dad’s Ford F350 pickup truck,” he said, implying that his father currently drives from storage facility to storage facility to check on the harvested potatoes. “IoTato plans to provide a better solution.”
207 Backpacks, which is planning to create a fully functional hiking backpack that also provides a safe and secure storage system for camera equipment, won the competition’s second-place prize and $1,000.
“Businesses come in and pitch to us every day, seeking out a loan,” said Don Smith with Business Lending Solutions. “These young students could stand toe-to-toe with the most confident entrepreneurs who walk through our doors.”
